Matilda, Ma-Ma-Matilda

Am thinking of going to see Fantastic Mr. Fox this weekend, more out of cinephilia/Wes Anderson fandom than out of childhood nostalgia, because I don't recall ever reading that book when I was little. I read a lot of other Roald Dahl books, though, and my all-time favorite is definitely Matilda. Its title character might just be the first member of my pantheon of smart-girl heroines--how could I not love it?

Matilda is a five-year-old child prodigy, born into an awful family (used-car-salesman dad, television-obsessed mom) and attending a school where the principal is the sadistic, power-mad Miss Trunchbull. The story is about how Matilda gets revenge, first with a series of clever pranks on her family and then, after discovering that she has telekinetic powers, by mentally moving objects to impersonate the ghost of Miss Trunchbull's dead brother. Revenge/comeuppance is a frequent theme in Roald Dahl and I think children find it very satisfying. When I was a kid, I loved stories of horrifically nasty people getting their just deserts--not only Matilda, but also, say, the way the evil headmistress in A Little Princess is finally punished.

Matilda's parents, meanwhile, are the sort of characters that make you realize that the Dursley family, of Harry Potter, is directly descended from Roald Dahl's villains. But J.K. Rowling softens things by saying "it's OK, the Dursleys aren't Harry's real family; he had wonderful parents who loved him, but unfortunately they're dead"--which plays into the childhood fantasy of thinking that your parents aren't really your parents, that you must be adopted, a long-lost prince or princess, etc. Dahl is having none of that. Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood are Matilda's real parents, and that's what makes them even worse than the Dursleys.

As for Matilda's telekinetic powers, they arise because she is not being challenged in school (the Trunchbull forbids her to skip a grade) and thus has a lot of excess mental energy built up, which she learns how to channel to make small objects move. After the Trunchbull's defeat, when Matilda moves to the appropriate grade level, her powers fade away.

Now, I first read Matilda when I was probably five years old, and knew that I wasn't being appropriately challenged in kindergarten (I ended up skipping first grade)... and I admit that I wondered whether I, too, might not have developed telekinetic powers! I definitely had a few afternoons of imitating Matilda by sitting on the end of my bed and trying to move the objects on my bureau using my mind.

And then when I skipped from kindergarten to second grade, I ended up with a teacher who looked as sweet as Miss Honey (Matilda's kindhearted kindergarten teacher) but was really a Trunchbull in disguise... but that's a story for another day.

By the way, early in the novel, Roald Dahl includes a list of the books that Matilda's friendly librarian gives her to read after she finishes reading all of the children's books at her local library. They are:

• Great Expectations
• Nicholas Nickleby
• Oliver Twist
• Jane Eyre
• Pride and Prejudice
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• Gone to Earth
• Kim
• The Invisible Man
• The Old Man and the Sea
• The Sound and the Fury
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Good Companions
• Brighton Rock
• Animal Farm
• The Red Pony
  

I've read five of them... how about you?

A Delayed Thank-You

In the summers, I used to go to a day-camp at a local theater company. The day involved rotating between seven or eight teachers who each focused on a different theatrical skill. Improv. Juggling. Singing. Commedia.

We loved most of our teachers with genuine affection, but there was one whose class we dreaded, and that was Tony, the Comedy teacher. I know it's a stereotype that all comedians are depressed or mean or awful people in their day-to-day lives, but Tony was frankly sadistic. I didn't think he was all that funny, either: his class consisted of variations on two gags which he found endlessly, inexplicably hilarious. One was the word "D'oh!" said a la Homer Simpson (this was the mid-90s, after all), and the other was "Acting! Thank you!" from Jon Lovitz' tenure as the Master Thespian on SNL. (We were too young to know SNL, though, which explains why Tony and our parents found this amusing while we were merely bemused.)

The "Acting! Thank you!" bit involves intoning those words in an orotund manner, while sweeping your arm up in the air on "Acting!" and bringing it down to bow deeply on the "Thank you!" I suppose when you see a bunch of little kids doing it in unison, it's good for a laugh. But we never understood the importance that Tony placed on it.

And furthermore--this is what I mean about his sadistic side--most of the time, Tony was all "Acting" and no "Thank you." In other words, we would, as a group, shout "Acting!" while raising our right arms. But then, Tony wouldn't allow us to say "Thank you!" and finish the phrase. Instead, we had to stand there, our arms in the air in fourth position porte de bras...and stand, and stand, not moving a muscle, until Tony released us.

If you moved, Tony would yell at you, and if you squirmed too much, he'd make you do it for longer. Sometimes he'd turn it into a competition among us (not that there was any real prize). Your arm would ache until it felt like it would fall off, or else seem to grow heavier as though its weight could crush you to the ground. He could make us stand like statues with our arms raised for eight, nine, ten minutes.

We were eight, nine, ten years old.

Tony never explained the point of this exercise to us, which made me furious: "This is supposed to be comedy class! But it's not funny!" To this day I'm not sure what the point of it was, but at least now I can speculate. "Dying is easy, comedy is hard," right? Comedians need to have utter control over their bodies and their minds. They need the patience to practice something endlessly since that is the only way it will appear to be effortless. Physical comedians need to be inured to the pain that comes from pratfalls. If Tony had explained this, would it have made it any better? Possibly. Still, we were just children and had no concept of devotion to Thalia the Muse.

But why am I thinking about Tony now, all these years later?

Because my new commute on the ever-crowded N-Judah involves standing pressed up against a crowd of people and grabbing the a bar above my head, hanging on for stability's sake for eight, nine, ten minutes. If I'm lucky, there's enough room in the car for me to switch arms occasionally, or even to hold a book in my other hand and try to read. But sometimes there isn't.

So, all right, Tony, I concede: your class, though I never would have believed it at the time, actually ended up teaching me a valuable skill.

But it still isn't funny.

Clearly Cleary

Recently my family has been re-decorating a set of built-in shelves in our family room. We'd thought that the topmost shelf, which is reachable only if you stand on a stool, was empty except for a few old book jackets--my father has a weird thing about removing book jackets and leaving them where they won't get torn or crumpled. We hadn't dusted this shelf, or even looked at it, in at least twelve years. So when we took down the book jackets and dusted the shelf, we were amazed to discover something else up there:


It's the program and ticket from a 1994 theatrical adaptation of Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins...signed by Ms. Cleary herself!

I was not quite seven years old at the time. I vaguely remembered getting my program signed at intermission, calculating how many of Cleary's books I had read and proudly telling her the number--at least fifteen, I am sure. My mom was even more excited than I was, because she remembered reading Cleary's books when she herself was a little girl. But we thought we'd lost this autographed program forever. Who knew that it was up on some inaccessible shelf, all these years? (Another funny thing I discovered from this program: I ended up going to high school with the girl who played Ramona.)

Northwest Children's Theater was a new company in 1994, so it must've been a big deal for Cleary to attend Henry Huggins--then again, Cleary grew up in Portland and her beloved characters like Henry, Beezus, and Ramona are all Portland kids. She is now 92 years old and lives in Carmel, California.

As you can see, I read Cleary's books voraciously as a young girl--fifteen of them before the age of seven?! And a few years later, I just as voraciously read Cleary's two volumes of memoirs: A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet. I would recommend them to anyone who is curious about what life was like for a bright working-class girl/young woman in the 1920s, Great Depression, and World War II. Cleary's life is not full of extraordinary incidents, but her memoirs are a vivid and enjoyable way to take a trip back in time. I can even sense that these books had a hidden influence on my play The Rose of Youth, which takes place in 1934--Cleary belongs to the same generation as the girls I wrote about.

One thing I will always wonder: why is Cleary's boy-hero Henry Huggins just one letter off from Shaw's ill-tempered linguist, Henry Higgins? Click on the photo to get a high-res image and you'll see that even the person who designed the tickets for this Northwest Children's Theater production mixed up the two Henrys...

Queen for a day

Design for Queen Elizabeth's coronation gown. Image from nga.gov.au

I know it's silly, but I was secretly hoping something exciting would happen to me yesterday. You see, as a little girl, I invented an elaborate fantasy of a parallel world in which I was royal--and yesterday, i.e., the summer solstice two weeks before my 21st birthday, was the day I had set aside for my coronation. And a small part of me would still like to believe in my parallel world, which I called "Rabildia," derived from the word "ruby" (my birthstone). What's more, it would still be nice to believe in the persona I invented for myself.

Queen Marissa Guinevere was brave and strong and good at archery and had a beautiful gray horse and a pet owl named Mistwing. What's more, she was also extremely skilled at performing magic. And she was gorgeous (I spent a significant amount of time designing gowns for her to wear), but proudly independent, and would take no guff from anyone.

I suppose all this is fairly typical. I was an only child, I read too much, I was under-challenged in school, I had an unacknowledged loneliness and anger inside me... of course I'd escape into a fantasy world. Only later have I realized just how much of a coping mechanism Rabildia was. There is a suite of stories in which Princess Marissa is locked up in a tower for several years during her adolescence, due to a misinterpretation of an ancient prophecy. I wasn't merely copying old stories like "Rapunzel." I was making a metaphor about the alienation I felt during my own adolescence.

But at age 18 or so, Princess Marissa is freed from the tower, she attends the Rabildian College of Mantic Arts, and when she is 20, her father dies and she must be crowned Queen. Since many fantasy books ascribe great importance to the summer solstice, I made it a key date in my mythos as well. It's the Rabildian national holiday--the anniversary of a day when the forces of light overcame the forces of darkness and united the country. And Marissa chooses it for her coronation.

When I was 12 I seriously planned to write a novel about Rabildia, and managed about 60 pages of disconnected stories. Here is the coronation scene, with some present-day comments in italics.

Marissa was not quite twenty-one when her father died and she became ruler. Her mother had died some years before, so she had little help in setting out on the journey of ruling and righting a kingdom. (When I was 12, I loved phrases that sounded grandiose even if they don't make sense. Like "ruling and righting"--when Marissa inherits the kingdom, she doesn't really need to "right" it; her father was a good leader.)

On his deathbed, the king said to Marissa, “I know you can rule Rabildia well...”

Between her tears, Marissa said “Thank you, Daddy...this really means a lot to me...knowing you believe in me...”

“...but your destiny is not here!” finished the king as emphatically as his weak voice could speak.

The tears suddenly stopped flowing from Marissa's face. This was so shocking: she would be the queen. And how could a queen’s destiny not be in her land? After a little consideration, Marissa thought she figured out what her father meant. It was actually pretty obvious. All her life, she’d been groomed for finding a husband, and that destiny her dying father talked about would be where her husband lived. She’d marry some old king, join Rabildia to his lands, and stay in his country.

While Marissa was contemplating, her father had died. (Reflecting my level of self-obsession, I'm writing about a character, based on myself, who is so self-involved she isn't even paying attention at the moment of her own father's death! By the way, the king's deathbed prophecy was meant to foreshadow a later development in the story, which is that Queen Marissa travels to our world and meets me, the girl from the Portland suburbs--so her destiny lies elsewhere.)

The coronation took place on Midsummer’s Day, the most important day in all the land. Midsummer Day is the longest day of the year when the folk celebrate the sun, the anniversary of the unification of Rabildia, and the halfway-point of the Rabildian year (which begins on what we’d call December 21, the shortest day of the year). Incidentally, Midsummer’s Day that year was a fortnight before Marissa would be twenty-one. Many people thought she should be coronated on her birthday, as twenty-one is the customary coming-of-age, but she convinced them that Midsummer held so much more significance for the people of the land. (I now know that "coronated" is not a word. And I love that although this is supposed to take place on a totally different PLANET, the length of a year and the date of the solstice is the same as it is on Earth.)

Marissa's coronation dress was another sore point. All the old dukes wanted her to wear red silk in honor of Rabildia, but red is not the best color for a blonde. Finally, they settled on a purple silk with green silk trimmings and many rubies. She thought it was lovely. (See what I mean about being obsessed with my character's clothing? My tastes in coronation dresses have changed now, though. Maybe I'm unduly influenced by Queen Elizabeth's dress above, but I'd want a heavy ivory satin richly embroidered with gold threads and rubies. Purple is regal, yes, but the dress I designed looked too much like a ball gown, not ceremonial enough.)

With trembling hand and the appearance of a deer (noble but with an ever-present sad fear) Marissa walked up the throne room of the forest castle. The ermine robe of state trailed long behind her, but still she was cold. Her guts hurt and she had a sinking feeling that something bad would happen. Her magic gave her a strong front and stiff upper lip, but inside she was falling apart. She wanted to throw off the robe, race to the throne, and get it all over with. But she had to be-–etiquette demanded it--dignified. (Boo hoo, it's so hard to be Queen!)

The crown was placed on her head, and the worst part was over, or so she thought. Marissa was queen.

As she took the gold scepter into her hands, the ruby at the top kindled and emitted a spark, which drifted down the aisle, fell to the center of the room, and became a miniature version of the scepter’s ruby. In unison, the crowd gasped.

Some few superstitious folk fled, while the older people shook their heads. "Marissa is so young, poor girl, she doesn’t even know she’s possessed by a Nemwi’hymat,” they whispered, but loud enough for the worried new queen to hear. Yet the wisest person in the throne room did not shake his head: Vatewté, Marissa's second father. From his honored seat, he turned back down the aisle. Many assumed he would flee as well. His footsteps echoed from the marble floors and Gothic ceiling. (Explanations: A Nemwi'hymat is a kind of demon, and Vatewté is a wise old wizard who tutored Marissa--she loves him more than she loved her real father.)

As he reached the little ruby, Vatewté stopped, picked it up-–again the crowd gasped-–strolled leisurely to the throne, and presented it to Marissa.

“It’s not to worry,” he whispered in her ear. “Those fools out there don’t know it, but nothing bad can spark the ruby on a scepter that has only been touched by good hands. I want you to take the little stone it produced, and wear it as a charm, because it came from the scepter and will forever link you with it, and the magic of Rabildia.”

From the inside of the royal robe, Marissa ripped a silken thread, tied a sturdy knot, and hung the little jewel around her neck, where it fit in the hollow of her throat. Soon, everyone admired her new necklace and forgot about the gem’s “curse.”

Well, nothing exciting happened yesterday--no crowns or ermine or magically self-propagating rubies--and while I feel ready, I guess, to get a job and enter the "real world," I certainly can't imagine feeling ready to rule a country. But then, the point of Queen Marissa is that she's an idealized version of me, stronger and more capable. And I guess that's why I still want to believe she's out there, somewhere, sitting newly-crowned on her throne.

Idyllic Childhoods and Rude Awakenings

Today in the New York Times Online, Kurt Campbell blogs about how the Republicans are now trying to impugn Bill Clinton by saying he treated his presidency like a "holiday from history," ignoring global problems in favor of a "Gatsby-like...fun-filled and frolicking interwar period." I found this article interesting and thought-provoking. Although I am a Democrat, I guess I too had thought of the 1990s as a "holiday from history." Campbell makes a good case for Clinton's real foreign policy achievements, but you have to admit that these are not as well publicized or as flashy as other events of the Clinton years.

Perhaps I can be excused for not knowing this about Clinton--I was a child, aged 5 to 13, during his presidency. And though all parents try to give their children a carefree childhood, I think that growing up in the 1990s was especially idyllic. I never had to worry about "the Commies." I never thought of America as having any real enemies, and if we got involved in a war, I was sure it would only be to help an innocent little country that was threatened by a nasty dictator (like Kuwait or Kosovo). I thought there would never be an attack on American soil, nor would America ever become the aggressor in a war. And though part of this is just childish naivete, I doubt I was the only person who felt this way. After all, the 1990s were the decade when people talked seriously about Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" theory.

I was 14, beginning my sophomore year of high school, on September 11. The external, foreign world came crashing into America and all I could think of was that old cliché "This is the first day of the rest of your life." And usually that's a positive, optimistic sentiment, but I saw it as something darker. I knew that the 1990s tranquility had vanished--for the rest of my life. And of course I was saddened and angry with the terrorists. But I have also felt increasingly betrayed by the Republican administration, whose policies make peace and tranquility even more a relic of a bygone age.

And now that I'm writing a play set in 1934, I can't help imagining that the girls I'm writing about experienced emotions similar to mine. They were born circa 1913, so the first five years of their lives were taken up by the "Great War," which probably frightened them, but they were too young to really understand it. Then, from the time they were 5 to the time they were 16, they experienced that "Gatsby-like interwar frivolity" that Campbell mentions. It was the Roaring Twenties, business boomed, the international community was basically at peace, it was just as idyllic as the 1990s were for me. But when they were about 16, the stock markets crashed, and the rest of their high school and college years were an attempt to find their way back to normalcy in an increasingly unstable world.

You can even draw further parallels, saying that in both cases, the crisis (9/11/01 or 10/29/29) occurred on a Tuesday in autumn, when the president (Bush or Hoover) hadn't even been in office for a year. This reinforces the sense that something had shifted: a new decade, a new president, a new era. Though of course, the people of the 1930s at least gained hope when they kicked Hoover out of office in 1932 and elected Roosevelt. Me, I've had to resign myself to spending my formative years, ages 13 to 21, under George Bush's presidency...and I couldn't even cast a symbolic vote against him in 2004.

Though my play is set in the past, I want it to be relevant to the present, so I'm trying to bring out this theme of an idyllic childhood suddenly shocked into brutal reality. I think my peers ought to relate. It's interesting to note that in the "Generations" theory of history, which sees things as cyclical, my generation (the Millenials) and the generation of the girls born in 1913 (the G.I or Greatest Generation) are categorized as belonging to the same point in the cycle. We are born during an Unraveling and come of age during a Crisis. Sounds pretty accurate to me.

Book-to-Movie Anticipation, Part 1: The Golden Compass

Now that it's almost November, the prestige movie season is heating up. This year is special for me in that two movies are going to come out based on books that I, at one point or another, have called my Favorite Book of All Time. They'll even be released on the same day, December 7 (a date that will live in infamy?). The books/movies? The Golden Compass and Atonement.

From about the ages of eight to twelve, I was a fantasy-book junkie. But I now realize that much of my fantasy-book addiction was a quest to recapture the rush I felt when I first read The Golden Compass. I read a lot of kiddie-fantasy trash in those days, most of which I have forgotten. But I could never forget The Golden Compass--it, and its sequels, are just extraordinary works of literature.

My aunt gave me The Golden Compass for my ninth birthday, but when my mom saw on the book jacket that the plot involved "horrible experiments performed on children," she decided my dad had better read it first to make sure it wouldn't scare me to death. (The previous Christmas, this same aunt had given me A Wrinkle in Time, which my parents also took away immediately on the pretext it would scare me, until I wised up and checked the book out of the school library instead.) After four or five months, Dad handed it over--I don't know what took him so long, because once I started the book, I could not stop reading. I had always loved to read, but had also always been too dutiful a daughter to turn my lamp back on after lights-out and keep reading when I should have been asleep. The Golden Compass changed all that. I simply had to find out what was going to happen to Lyra and Pantalaimon. I had to immerse myself in that universe that, despite its lack of fairytale/Tolkien trappings like gnomes and swords and medievalesque society, was still so magical and fantastical. I was hooked!

Scared that my parents would catch on to my late-night reading sessions, the next day I would reread the section I had read the previous night, so as not to look like I was finishing the book too fast. (I don't know why I was so worried--that same year, I read all 1100 pages of Gone with the Wind in three days flat. Why have my speed-reading skills deserted me in college?!) Still, I didn't mind. I knew, even then, that The Golden Compass can withstand many rereadings. And now, if I want to feel old, I remind myself that I have loved this book for over half my life, and the Tenth Anniversary Edition came out last year!

Now, finally, a movie is coming out, written and directed by Chris Weitz. The initial screenwriter was Tom Stoppard--you can surely imagine how excited I was about that!--but Weitz ultimately rejected his draft. I have very high hopes for Nicole Kidman's portrayal of Mrs. Coulter--a character I'm rather attached to, villainous as she is, because she's the only Marisa or Marissa I've ever encountered in a great novel. Kidman is good at playing icy glamor-queens, and though the book describes Mrs. Coulter as having a Louise Brooks-type bob, I always found it easier to picture her as a blonde. Daniel Craig also looks like he will be a good Lord Asriel. And I'm not sure we need another child actress named "Dakota," but Miss Richards rather looks the part of Lyra. (At nine years old I dreamed of playing Lyra because I too have dark blonde hair, but I was never a scrawny little savage like her.)

I know that to appease American audiences, a lot of the anti-organized-religion messages in the books will be toned down for the movies. I can definitely see this becoming a problem when they film The Subtle Knife, but those themes are not as explicit in The Golden Compass, so the story should still make sense. I'm more worried at the recent news that the last three chapters of The Golden Compass are going to be part of the next movie, instead.

*SPOILERS* This means that the film will end with Iorek Byrnison's victory, and that just feels wrong. Too triumphant, too happy. One of the things I love most about His Dark Materials is that each book has a progressively more poignant ending: Book 1 is wrenching enough, Book 2 breaks your heart, and Book 3, well... And now the filmmakers will disrupt that wonderful pattern. *END SPOILERS*

Another concern: In all of the 19 production stills available on the IMDB, why does not a single one show a human being with their daemon? After all, the plot requires establishing the fact that in Lyra's world, humans can never travel very far from their daemons!

Part 2 of this post, on Atonement, will be up shortly. In the meantime, have you been more often happy or disappointed when your all-time favorite books are turned into movies? Share in the comments!

The curtain falls: Pavarotti

Pavarotti as Nemorino. Image: The New York Times

You may think it's odd when I tell you that Luciano Pavarotti was one of the first celebrities I learned to recognize as a little girl, but you probably didn't grow up with a half-Italian mother who listened to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts every wintertime Saturday. My mom, like her ancestors before her, is an opera fan. (My grandmother was even named after a famous mezzo.) She's not super-cultivated or super-refined--not the kind of fan who owns scores of CDs and debates various singers' merits at the dinner table--but she likes the great melodies, the great voices, the composers like Mozart, Bizet, and the Italians (Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini...). And for people like my mom, Pavarotti was ideal.

This was in the early 1990s--the era of the Three Tenors, when Pavarotti was the world's most famous and beloved opera singer. Our small but growing CD collection had at least eight discs of solo Pavarotti arias, as well as some of his "My Favorite Opera" compilations. And when my mother discovered (probably to her surprise) that her little girl didn't find this kind of music too complex or loud or strange, but really actually LIKED it, we became opera fans together. She'd get picture books from the library that narrated famous opera plots, and tell me the opera trivia she knew: "The tenor is always the good guy, except in Rigoletto."

We would tape the "Live from the Met" TV specials and I would watch them over and over. Mom would always point out Pavarotti (the star attraction) and his trademark handkerchief to me. At the age of 5, I became obsessed with The Elixir of Love starring Pavarotti and Kathleen Battle. I watched it so much I can still hum some of the music--granted, it is a wildly catchy opera.

(Tangent: Kathleen Battle was my introduction to the idea of the "diva". After the stories surfaced about her getting dismissed from the Met for "unprofessional behavior," I couldn't believe that the pretty lady from The Elixir of Love was throwing tantrums and abusing the people who worked with her. Though come to think of it, her character in Elixir was quite a scornful, proud woman herself!)

I even remember Mom, in the kitchen, showing me how to make salad dressing and pointing out the label on the balsamic vinegar: "It comes from Modena--that's where Pavarotti was born!"

And yet--and this is what makes the news of Pavarotti's death today so odd for me--because he was one of the first celebrities I learned to recognize, he also played a part in my understanding of mortality. I think it was because of the disconnect between his voice and his appearance. Here he had this stunning, ringing, powerful, young man's voice encased in a rotund late-middle-aged body that sweated profusely under the spotlights. I don't think I even noticed the dyed beard and eyebrows at the time, but I could sense that he did not have too many more years of performing ahead of him. (This, despite his ebullient personality and my own tender age.) Young children assume that everything is permanent. But watching the aging Pavarotti on television, I realized that that's not so. That there'd come a day (today) when this singer, whom I loved, would no longer be alive.

Ma la voce è immortale.

Pavarotti is still preserved forever young on all the recordings he made. I still recognize his voice more instantaneously than that of any other opera singer, and I still get chills when I listen to "Nessun dorma"--so I try not to do it too much, because I don't ever want to lose that feeling that comes when hearing sublime music sung by a sublime talent.

Bravo, Pavarotti!

UPDATE 9/9: This article from The Observer says a lot of what I was trying to say there about the mortal flesh and the immortal voice...or soul? Check it out, it's good.

Summer Reading: The Harry Potter Septet

In honor of the final Harry Potter book's publication, I reread the whole series as my big summer reading project. Actually, the project has a second component: I call it "Harry Potter and Frederica Potter," as I am also reading A.S. Byatt's Frederica Quartet. The combination becomes even funnier when you realize that A.S. Byatt can't stand Harry Potter.

Me, I'm one of those kids who grew up with Harry. I read the first book at age 11 1/2, when I was a fantasy-book nerd. (The previous Halloween, I'd even dressed in a homemade wizard's cape.) So I can't credit my love of reading to him, as some can, and I no longer read much fantasy, but I'll always have a soft spot for Harry. The end of the series is almost like the end of my childhood: will I ever read books like this again until I have children of my own?

What follows are my thoughts on each book, gleaned from my summer's reading. SPOILERS for all, naturally.

Books 1 and 2 are kids' books--smart, exciting and captivating kids' books, but no more than that. Nowadays it seems fashionable to call them the "worst" of the series. But to get so popular, they had to have done something right--and they did, creating a detailed and appealing world. Every kid wants to discover that he is special, that the people he lives with are not his true family, and his real parents were famous and heroic--every kid wants to go to wizard school! Rowling enhances the experience with a wealth of details--names of spells, shops, famous wizards. (In all this, I agree with A.S. Byatt, though unlike her, I can't see why it's so terrible.) As a precocious 11-year-old, I got a kick out of Rowling's witty allusions, such as an intelligent woman named "Minerva." The adventures are suspenseful, even if in Book 1 the words "Sorcerer's Stone" aren't mentioned till page 219 of a 309-page book, and Book 2 takes too long rehashing Harry's situation for people who haven't read the first book. I still think Book 2 is pretty weak, what with the unspeakably annoying house-elf Dobby, the lurid monster-movie tone, and Hermione out of order during the climax. Still, by this point, Rowling has begun to demonstrate her gift for characterization. Gilderoy Lockhart is a hoot, Dumbledore's nutty sense of humor subverts and humanizes the archetypal "wise old wizard," and we've become attached to Harry, Ron, Hermione, Hagrid...

Luckily, when I first read the series, I didn't have much time to reflect on how bad Book 2 was, since Book 3 came out a few months later, and everything became much more expansive, and much better. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is just a great novel: longer than the first two books but not over-stuffed, consistently suspenseful and well-plotted (the Time-Turner climax is smart and thrilling), darker in tone but still with good jokes. Most importantly, it adds a new note of ambivalence into the series. Books 1 and 2 end with unequivocal triumphs for Harry. In book 3, he triumphs in rescuing Sirius and Buckbeak, but fails to prevent Peter Pettigrew's escape. This event (and his earlier decision to save Peter's life rather than letting Sirius kill him) is literally the turning point of the series. Had Peter not escaped, Voldemort might never have risen again, and certainly not in the same way, at the same time.

For the first time in Prisoner of Azkaban, we meet Harry's parents' friends, which adds a multi-generational component to the saga. And the adult characters are more complex than ever before, which makes the climax so intriguing (despite the fact that Voldemort doesn't make a personal appearance, as he does in Books 1 and 2). Lupin is a genuinely kind and talented professor, but also a werewolf; Sirius is not a vicious murderer, but a persecuted innocent--and yet he is still vengeful and half-crazed from his time in Azkaban; Harry's dad and his friends were the coolest guys in school, but played vicious pranks on Snape; Snape's dislike of Harry now makes a little more sense, and he actually seems to have Harry's well-being in mind, trying to protect him from Sirius. And Ron's rat is actually an Animagus, Muggle-killer, Voldemort's most loyal servant, and a cringing coward! Even Voldemort becomes a bit more than a cartoonish Evil Guy: we see that he and his followers are capable of betraying old friends, killing Muggles cavalierly, blaming the innocent. And the dementors are scarier than the basilisk ever was. Byatt writes that "nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family," and maybe that was true in the first 2 books, but with Book 3, Harry's (and Rowling's) world starts to balloon out.

I read Book 4 (Goblet of Fire) when I was 13, at summer camp. I'll never forget being two chapters from the end when one of the counselors came into my room and told me to turn my light off, as it was way past bedtime! Nor will I forget being one of eight girls sprawled in one room as the sun set, all reading Harry Potter. Goblet of Fire is another great achievement. It provides some of my favorite set-pieces: the Quidditch World Cup, Triwizard Tournament, Rita Skeeter's interviews, the Yule Ball. (Soon I'm gonna do a post about Hermione Granger's finest moments, including the Ball and surrounding events. I have to--she's a smart-girl icon!) It is maybe a little long, and the explanation (Barty Crouch Jr. disguised as Moody) a little convoluted, but the shift to a darker tone is handled well (set up by Book 3), and you sense J.K. Rowling's grand design, as she brings back elements from earlier books. Who knew that Harry and Voldemort’s wands having the same core would be that important? Along with Book 3, Book 4 feels like the heart of the series.

Someone once told me that the way children's brains process books is very different from the way adults process them, and the dividing line comes at age 13. That's certainly true with me and Harry. By the time Order of the Phoenix came out, I was 16, I hadn't read a fantasy book in years, I was curious about Harry's fate but no longer consumed by it. And the first time I read Order of the Phoenix, I really didn't like it. So long (they made the margins smaller to fit more in, and it's still the longest book!), with Harry acting like a pissy adolescent for the duration. However, I've reread it twice, and each time I like it more. It makes sense for Harry to be moody--he's spent four books acting like an archetypal hero, well-adjusted and mature for his age, but anyone would snap after what he's been through. Moreover, I LOVE the continuation of the moral ambiguity: it's not just good vs. evil in this book, it's good vs. evil vs. fear and apathy (represented by the Ministry of Magic). The idea that bureaucratic incompetence, denial, and narrow-mindedness can be just as damaging as pure malicious evil is quite sophisticated. Umbridge is so deliciously loathsome, like something out of Dickens, and you cheer for Dumbledore’s Army against her.

As it stands now, Half-Blood Prince is my least favorite book. I don't have fond childhood memories of it, as I do of Books 1 and 2--and besides, those books at least work as children's literature, while I'm not sure Half-Blood Prince works at all. It has the weakest suspense plot of any book—the question of “What is Draco up to?” never gets significantly developed. In all of the other books, Harry finds clues that only make sense after the fact (e.g. he thinks Ginny’s behaving strangely in Book 2 because she has a crush on him, but really it’s because she’s possessed by Voldemort), but Half-Blood Prince doesn’t tie together so cleverly. Mainly, it's a conduit for information that will become important in the last book: Voldemort’s past, the Horcruxes, the budding romances, and whether Snape is good or evil. It’s a series of scenes rather than a complete plot. The last 100 pages are very fine, exciting, painful and sad, but the book takes too long getting there.

Fortunately, Deathly Hallows is one sustained burst of excitement. If the previous 6 books were school stories (and derive much of their appeal from that), this is a man-on-the-run story. It’s Harry Potter crossed with North by Northwest, very cinematic--Rowling's time dealing with the movie industry has been well spent. Book 6 suggests that she was getting a little sick of Hogwarts, so Book 7 solves that problem by taking place in Gringotts, the Ministry, Godric’s Hollow... And I was worried when Rowling introduced the important magical concept of Horcruxes halfway through the sixth book—such a big quest! So many to find and only one book left to do it!—but the pacing of Deathly Hallows is quite excellent. It also takes on the most mythic resonances of all the books, with its quest plot, three questers, three Hallows, retelling of a fairy tale, and the hero’s death and rebirth. And it’s great that Rowling found a way for Voldemort to get defeated, once again, by “Expelliarmus.” Rowling is obviously working hard to make her moral points—what with the Christian themes, Snape’s redemption, and the fact that Harry never kills—but it’s still satisfactory. She may be gunning for literary legitimacy by giving Deathly Hallows epigraphs from Aeschylus and William Penn, but the true epigraph of the whole series is that line from Oscar Wilde’s Salome: “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”

Finally, a word on Rowling’s style. No, she is no master of prose-–I don’t even want to count how many times she mentions Snape’s “curtains of greasy black hair”! (Then again, if we’re faulting her for this, shouldn’t we also fault Homer for “rosy-fingered dawn”?) But her jokes are consistently funny, she is very skilled at naming characters and objects, and she usually puts in just the right amount of detail. Most importantly, she is great at characterization and psychology. Her children talk and behave like real children at boarding school, and age believably as the story progresses. Though at first presenting us with seemingly uncomplicated, one-dimensional characters, she knows how to deepen them, reveal their flaws. Due to this, she stands head and shoulders above someone like Dan Brown, whose characters have bodies that rush around and minds that cogitate, but no souls, no backstories, no psychological motivation. Anyone who can keep us guessing for nearly 4000 pages as to whether Snape is good or evil knows how to tell a story! Unfortunately, Rowling's ear fails her in the last line, the hollow "All was well." I wish she'd stuck to her original idea, which she revealed on her Dateline interview: "Only those who Harry loved could see the lightning scar." It's a sentence that lingers in the mind far longer. But the series as a whole, it seems, will linger a long while yet.

If I Were A Book...

Which literature classic are you?

Oscar Wilde: The Portrait of Dorian Gray. You are a horror novel from the world of dandies, rich pretty boys, art and aesthetics, and intellectual debates between ethical people and decadent pleasure-seekers. You value beauty and pleasure but realize their dangers, as well. Take this quiz!

I don't want to indulge in this personality-quiz stuff too often on my blog... but I loved the result I got here. Four years ago I was trying to write a musical (!) of Dorian Gray... I still think it would be great source material, but for someone else!

It really is a fantastic book--as the quiz result suggests, it "has its cake and eats it too" with regard to ethics. You get to wallow in deliciously described decadence along with Dorian--then cheer when he gets his comeuppance at the end. I remember studying it and having a big class debate about what Oscar Wilde meant in his preface by "All art is quite useless." So there's a tension and complexity there. Also wit (how could there not be?), swooning rhapsodies, and an archetypal horror plot.

In fact, I knew the plot of Dorian Gray long before I read the actual novel... having read a plot summary in The Great American Bathroom Book (how embarrassing!) at the age of 9 or so. It scared the bejesus out of me! When all the other kids were getting goosebumps from Goosebumps, I was getting them from Dorian Gray. In sixth grade, standing in line for the haunted house at my school's Halloween Carnival, I told the story of Dorian Gray to the girl ahead of me--it was the scariest story I knew. And two years ago, when my godfather's kids (including little P.) were swapping ghost stories, I told it again. It got a good response. And all the adults in the other room fell quiet to listen.

I feel this might be one of those books that'll stick with me for my whole life, and pop up when I least expect it.

The other results in this quiz are equally fantastic works of literature--so go find out what book you are!

Side note on "Happy Feet"

It pained me a little to link to that image of Happy Feet in the post below, since I have an unreasonable prejudice against that movie.

I haven't seen it. I don't even want to, it makes me so annoyed. See, ever since I heard the premise of the story--young penguin can't sing like all the other penguins, so he tap-dances instead--I KNEW they ripped it off from one of my all-time favorite children's books, The Trumpet of the Swan. In which a young swan who can't sing like all the other swans (or even talk) learns to play the trumpet like Louis Armstrong instead. "Why is no one complaining about this?" I said to myself. "Stupid people don't know about E.B. White...."

This similarity (aka rip-off) now rates a mention on Happy Feet's wikipedia page, but I'm still dissatisfied. I grind my teeth to think that somewhere, at this very moment, there is a kid reading The Trumpet of the Swan for the first time and dismissing it as "Oh, this is just like Happy Feet."

I got obsessed with Trumpet of the Swan at the same time I was obsessed with ballet and Swan Lake, which started me on a collection of china and glass swans that now gathers dust on our living-room mantelpiece. It also gave me my first stirrings of ecological awareness, with the theme that the mighty Trumpeter Swan is endangered and needs protection. What's more, it's hilarious, in a way that doesn't just appeal to kids. I still enjoy rereading it.

Oh, and also? I'm so attached to my old copy of Trumpet of the Swan that I am ALSO unreasonably annoyed that they commissioned new illustrations for it a few years ago. What was wrong with the originals, which the author presumably approved?!

My 8-Year-Old Cousin Should Really Have His Own Blog

But since I doubt he does, he'll just have to make a guest appearance on mine.

P. is my godfather's youngest child. Actually, he is the youngest son of a youngest son of a youngest son. Maybe that's what makes him so magical?

He is eight years old and just discovering that life is unfair. We all have to realize this at some point, and he's doing it younger than most. (I think I was in junior high before I realized this. But that's what junior high will do to ya.) He's realized that the first two months of school are always "a waste, cause you're just going over what you did last year" and that learning cursive handwriting is also a waste. He rails against the practice of pricing an item $10.99 instead of $11. "They're tryin' to make you think it's cheaper so they can just get all your money! But it's not ten-ninety-nine, it's eleven, and everyone knows it's a trick! I know only one person who would fall for that--a BABY! Because they don't know any better!"

He hates the long lines at the amusement park, how you can give the carnie your ticket and he'll still make you wait for a few cycles of the Ferris wheel to go around. It's like, he has just realized that as an 8-year-old kid, he really is powerless, subject to the whims and rules of every adult. Even worse, most ADULTS are powerless at times, in the face of queues, bureaucracy, marketing gimmicks, etc... and he's not taking this lightly.

His philosophy: "I wish life was like a buffet. Or a soda machine. Cause you put in your money, and then you choose. Put in the money, and then choose. That way you can figure out what you want and you don't get choiced too early. But no, it's not like that. Life is never like a buffet." (I love the way he talks. "Get choiced"--maybe you've never heard it before but you know exactly what it means.)

Here on this earth, we have to make our choices blindly and then pay the price. And P. has just figured this out.

But yet, he is not cynical, he is not being pessimistic on purpose, and he is certainly not having spoiled, angry tantrums about the world's unfairness. He just sees things clearly and tells 'em like he sees 'em. Sometimes I think he has more integrity than most of the adults I know.

Other favorite comments:

"Nuns are kinda like vampires. With the black capes."

"Peach rings are my major weakness. If I left my peach rings out on my balcony overnight the birds would eat them and get high on the sugar and start tap-dancing."


This kid knows his movies! He talks with great authority about the plots of Transformers, Ratatouille, and Harry Potter 5 before he'd even seen them. He can analyze a movie preview like a very astute 21st-century kid. And then analyze life like an uncorrupted prophet. "He's been here before," says my dad to my uncle. I don't know if I believe in that stuff. But I'm certainly glad he's here now.