There’s nothing so wonderful in America that someone can’t create a kind of Calvary out of it, and so it is with the publication of the fourth Harry Potter book. It is called “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” but it could just as well have been called “Harry Potter and the Lingerie Sale at Saks” for all the difference a title would have made in its reception. Bookstores stayed open after midnight to accommodate the publisher’s embargo; children dressed up like Harry and the rest of the gang at the Hogwarts School. And this was characterized as the triumph of hype, and the legerdemain of marketing. But hype and marketing go only so far when a 12-year-old settles down on the sofa for the long haul with a book longer than “Crime and Punishment.” What remains is wonderfully retro: the beauty of reading for pleasure, and its enduring role in the life of the mind.
Yes, yes, of course you’ve heard that reading has gone out of fashion. It makes you wonder how the other three Harry Potter books have managed to sell more copies than there are people living in Greece and Hungary combined. It makes you wonder why Barnes & Noble stores spring up everywhere like mushrooms after a rainy spell. And how can it be that “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” a coming-of-age story set at the beginning of the 20th century and published in 1943, refuses to go out of print, that “Our Town” sold 70,000 paperback copies last year? That’s a whole lot of school plays.
The answer is that reports of the death of the book have been greatly exaggerated. It is indeed true that a recent study of a representative sample of Americans found that the number of people who read for more than 30 minutes a day had dropped from 51 to 45 percent. But a Gallup poll of Americans’ favorite leisure activities also showed that more than one in four still put reading at or near the top of the list.
Some librarians over the age of 70 might insist that that can’t compare to a half century ago, and although those are the wise human beings who introduced us to the Betsy-Tacy books and “A Girl of the Limberlost,” they would be wrong. In 1952, to the question “Do you happen to be reading any books or novels at the present time?” only 18 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup said yes. In 1963 fewer than half the Americans polled said they had read a book all the way through in the previous year; in 1999 that number was 84 percent.
There have always been Americans who did not care to read. Years ago they had to bring in the hay and make house calls, and in their spare time they wanted to play bridge and shoot pool. Today they slave over a hot computer or a hot stove, and in their spare time they want to talk online to strangers and watch Jennifer Aniston’s hair grow on television. Parents increasingly worry that their children are not reading enough. The most curious of these are parents who have shelves full of stereo equipment and not a single book in the house, whose children have seen them read only Car and Driver while waiting at the Quik Lube.
The spectacular success of the Harry Potter books might help create a new generation of inveterate readers. At the very least it provides a soothing reminder that well-written stories with interesting characters manage to find an audience. You would not conclude this from the keening of critics who insist the book is dead, the book is polluted by commerce, the book has been hijacked by Grisham and King and those novels in which darkly handsome men pretend not to be interested in spirited green-eyed heroines until the last 20 pages, when they take them in their arms and all kinds of stuff happens.
This dark view certainly offers the satisfaction of confirming our worst fears about human nature, but it does not have the advantage of being entirely accurate. Last year the collection “The Best American Short Stories” sold just as well as “Dilbert Gives You the Business.” Jacques Barzun, perhaps this country’s best-known humanities scholar, has a new book, “From Dawn to Decadence,” with the surefire buy-me subtitle “500 years of Western Cultural Life.” This great doorstop of a history became a best seller almost as soon as it was in stores. It is one of those “surprise” best sellers you hear about so often, since if it’s gospel that Americans don’t read, it’s got to be a surprise when they buy literary novels like “Cold Mountain” or “The God of Small Things” or serious nonfiction books like “Longitude” or “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Luckily there are such surprises every publishing season.
There will be no surprise at all when the newest Harry Potter book follows its older siblings to the top of the best-seller lists and, as important, into the hands and hearts of millions of readers. This has no more or less to do with hype than the success of a movie called “Gone With the Wind” did when the grandparents of these children were children themselves. It has a lot to do with characters who jump from a book as though they were grasshoppers trapped between the pages. “This is very weird, but quite possibly true,” says one of the kids in the Time Warp Trio book “Summer Reading Is Killing Me.” “What if story characters are real in some way?” In 50 years today’s children will not remember who survived “Survivor”–actually, in a few weeks none of us will remember who survived “Survivor”–but they will remember Harry. They will remember this week.
