JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy: review roundup

via Glooce

 

Highly readable; dull; funnier than expected – from the Telegraph to the New York Times, reviewers of JK Rowling's first post-Potter literary outing, The Casual Vacancy, are far from reaching a consensus

 

"No doubt there will be reviewers who have already decided to pour vitriol upon [The Casual Vacancy] no matter its merits," said Jonathan Ruppin, of Foyles, yesterday, and it appears he might have had a point. Reviews have been pouring in for JK Rowling's first adult novel this morning, and they are nothing if not mixed.

"A solid, traditional and determinedly unadventurous English novel,"wrote Theo Tait for the Guardian, while the famously vituperative Michiko Kakutani, reviewing The Casual Vacancy for the New York Times, was unimpressed. "It's as though writing about the real world inhibited Ms Rowling's miraculously inventive imagination, and in depriving her of the tension between the mundane and the marvellous constrained her ability to create a two-, never mind three-dimensional tale," she wrote.

"The real-life world she has limned in these pages is so wilfully banal, so depressingly cliched that The Casual Vacancy is not only disappointing – it's dull. The novel … reads like an odd mashup of a dark soap opera like Peyton Place with one of those very British Barbara Pym novels, depicting small-town, circumscribed lives."

Jan Moir in the Daily Mail, meanwhile, took umbrage at what she saw as Rowling's attack on the middle classes. "More than 500 pages of relentless socialist manifesto masquerading as literature crammed down your throat," found Moir. She went on to call Rowling "the kind of blinkered, left-leaning demagogue quick to lambast what she perceives to be risible middle-class values, while failing to see that her own lush thickets of dearly held emotions and prejudices are riddled with the same narrow-mindedness she is so quick to detect in others".

Author Christopher Brookmyre, in the Telegraph, was far more positive, giving The Casual Vacancy four out of five stars, saying that it "reveals in unflinching detail the fractures beneath the surface of modern Britain".

"One marvels at the skill with which Rowling weaves such vivid characters in and out of each other's lives, rendering them so complex and viscerally believable that one finds oneself caring for the worst of them. However, upon hearing the cries of so many souls in pain, the more sensitive reader might begin to crave a leavening of hope, or to fear that Rowling's own cry is one of despair," writes Brookmyre. "That leavening is there, but the novel's lesson is that it won't simply be gifted to us. Quite unmistakably Barry Fairbrother [the parish councillor who dies at the start of the novel] represents liberal aspirations towards a fairer and more integrated society, whereby we don't lecture the disadvantaged about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps: instead we have to wade in to help in ways that may be messy, unsatisfying and barely effective, but without which we abandon hope. Ultimately, The Casual Vacancy is a book that understands there are no magic wands."

The Scotsman was also positive: "It is far grittier, bleaker (and, occasionally, funnier) than I had expected, and – the acid test – I suspect it would do well even if its author's name weren't JK Rowling." The Mirror gave The Casual Vacancy five stars, and the Express found that "some readers will be shocked at Rowling's departure from wizardry and magic but The Casual Vacancy is a highly readable morality tale for our times".

A second Telegraph review, from Allison Pearson, awarded three stars and found the novel "sometimes funny, often startlingly well observed, and full of cruelty and despair", and "as for the ending, dear God, it is so howlingly bleak that it makes Thomas Hardy look like PG Wodehouse".

"Invariably, the author is best when she is back on home ground, dealing with the teenage characters, their inchoate yearnings and lonely friendships," says Pearson. "The book is at its weakest when it is most angrily political, satirising what JK's friend, Gordon Brown, calls 'bigots'. And the novel pretty much explodes towards the end, losing shape in its fury at the dirty, unfair England that we Muggles have made for ourselves. It's like The Archers on amyl nitrate."

In the Evening Standard, David Sexton said that "what the book has in common with Harry Potter is the ability to marshall an extraordinary number of characters into a coherent narrative, and a prose style so clunkily over-descriptive and repetitiously structured that it presents quite a barrier to the reader with any interest in language, until you are able to forget it, like reading a ropey translation, and concentrate on the story instead".

"The problem for Rowling's legions of fans will be that she has forgotten to include any basic likability in her characters here, or any real suspense as to what will happen – or deliberately chosen not to supply it, now she no longer needs to do anything other than what she wants," finds Sexton. "The book is quite punishing to read and the view of human nature it takes is more fundamentally lowering than that of the most cynical French aphorist … Rowling has said pre-emptively: 'There is no part of me that feels like I represented myself as your children's babysitter or their teacher. I'm a writer and I will write what I want to write.' So that's what she has done and it is not nice."

Source 2

Why Do Female Authors Dominate Young-Adult Fiction?

J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, Harper Lee, and more: The genre is full of women storytellers.


Summer is a time for taking stock, for relaxing and recharging, and for intense Internet debate about whether Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, or Holden Caulfield reign supreme in the universe of teen fiction. NPR Books just released the results of its reader poll of the 100 Best-Ever Teen novels, with new classics Harry Potter and The Hunger Games topping the list. After painstakingly considering my own nominees, I was struck by the dominance of female authors on my short list, including: Harper Lee, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Suzanne Collins, J.K. Rowling, S.E. Hinton, Betty Smith, and Madeleine L'Engle.


I'm not alone in my regard for the great female storytellers of teen fiction. Nearly all of these authors appear on the NPR list. More than 75,000 votes were cast to cull the list of 235 finalists to the top 100. Also notable: Of those 235 titles, 147 (or 63 percent) were written by women—a parity that would seem like a minor miracle in some other genres. Female authors took the top three slots, and an approximately equal share of the top 100. As a comparison, you'd have to scroll all the way to number 20 on last summer's Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy list to find a woman's name (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley).

Although NPR Books called on an expert panel to weigh in on tricky questions of young-adult eligibility, the demographic breakdown of the finalist list was almost entirely driven by reader votes, according to Joe Matazzoni, NPR's senior supervising producer for Arts & Life.

"I think it speaks to readers' interests and it speaks to the nature of this field that it happened to come out that way," said Matazzoni, who also noted that the choices seemed to represent both the target teen demographic, as well as the adult readers that have fervently embraced YA lit. "It's an impressive show of enthusiasm."

If the results of the NPR poll are a reflection of the reading populace, the YA world is a place of relative harmony compared to the battle of the sexes being waged in adult fiction. After chick-lit purveyors Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult raised the call about the disparity between books by male authors and books by female authors being reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, Ruth Franklin at The New Republic did her own analysis of the literary glass ceiling. The results are dismaying: after reviewing catalogs from 13 large and small publishing houses (and eliminating genre titles unlikely to be reviewed), she found that only one came close to gender parity, while the majority had 25 percent or fewer titles written by women.

Meanwhile, to the consternation of some men in the field, the YA genre tends to favor female authors and audiences. And at least commercially, teen fiction is crushing almost everyone else. Three of the biggest book-to-movie franchises of the last decade (Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games) are YA series penned by women. According to an annual report by the Association of American Publishers, Children's/YA ranked as the fastest growing category in publishing in 2011. While teen titles may never reach the upper echelons of critical adulation bestowed on the latest Jonathan Franzen novel, the phenomenal popularity makes it increasingly difficult to marginalize the genre.

Plenty of theories have been floated to explain YA's surge, particularly among adult readers. Some attribute it to ingenious marketing or to the childlike simplicity of the plots, suggesting that the craze is a distressing symptom of a reading public congenitally adverse to nuance. Matazzoni proposes that for adult readers, nostalgia plays an important role: "Readers have fond memories of being curled up with a book, in the summertime especially. Memories are what we believe people are tapping into, and the opportunity to share the books they love."

He has a point. Even as teen fiction has become increasingly complex (lol) and dystopian, the genre comfortingly harkens to a time when reading was an act of pure joy and escapism. I've read a lot of wonderful books in my lifetime, but I don't know that I've loved any of the novels I've read as an adult with the intensity that I loved the stories of adolescence--nor found such a wealth of female protagonists in their pages. YA lit offers heroines to suit every mercurial mood and developmental stage, from spunky, disaster-prone Anne Shirley to dreamy, bookish Francie Nolan and the modern ass-kicking incarnation of Katniss Everdeen.

And perhaps, therein lies the true appeal of young adult literature: The stories and the genre itself represent a world of limitless potential. As a young reader, I didn't comprehend that the opportunity to disappear into the lives and adventures of strong-willed young women represented a kind of feminist victory. I was blissfully unconcerned with the gender of my favorite authors, or what reviewers might think of my beloved fictional worlds. So profound was my naïveté, I didn't even realize that novels written by women were supposed to have hot pink covers bedazzled with shopping bags and high heels.

This isn't to suggest that teen fiction is a literary utopia. The preponderance of white, straight characters is certainly troubling. Judy Blume books have been banned over the years for tackling incendiary topics like menstruation. It hardly seems like an accident that some female authors including S.E. Hinton and J.K. Rowling write under the gender-neutral guise of their initials. But perhaps because of its current extreme trendiness, the genre seems to have transcended some of the critical and gender snobbery plaguing adult lit--as a frequent rider of public transportation, I can say anecdotally that you're far more likely to see an adult male reading The Hunger Games than any book with a teacup on its cover.

The best young-adult books provide a portal to characters and perspectives that simply aren't as readily available on the adult reading lists, and the passionate support for beloved titles and authors of both genders indicates that the need for these stories aren't going anywhere. Any grown-ups who haven't yet figured this out should get a clue. 


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