I’m not surprised to hear that Harry Potter has failed to turn our kids into readers. I wrote a dissent on the series for the AP after the first three or so volumes. I’m not sure if it’s still online so here it is if you’re interested:

My eyes have glazed over from seven days of Syltherins and Gryffindors, of Filch and Flitwick and Flint and Fang and Fuzzy and Fudge and the Fat Lady. I’ve had enough of the ghost in the toilet, the Potions class, the spiders in the Forbidden Forest, and the Quidditch matches, and I was utterly stupefied by the time Professor Lupin turned into a howling werewolf. After reading the first three books in the Harry Potter series by the now renowned J.K. Rowling, I recoil at the very thought of the latest entry, the 750-page fourth volume that emerged to much fanfare two Fridays ago at the stroke of midnight. Yes, I am a dissenter on Harry Potter. Oh, I know how dangerous that can be. I’ve seen Potterite fanatics chewing off the heads of anyone so much as breathing fault with the series. And one distraught mother exclaimed during that hyped-up Friday night hysteria that her child would “crucify” her should she fail to come home with the new book. Such is the fierceness that Harry inspires.

So why do I dissent? Well, to begin with, there’s the flatness of the writing, the prosaic periodic sentences, the lazy clichés. When confronted with the harsh judgment of Harold Bloom on the books, i.e., “slop,” even Potter enthusiast Janet Maslin backed down and admitted that the series isn’t “great literature.” What is it then, Charlie Rose begged to know, perhaps wondering momentarily why he had troubled to assemble one of his portentous roundtables on the subject. “A mass phenomenon,” Maslin reassured him, “a Star Wars between covers.” Maybe this is why Potter fans are so touchy: a little push from a word like “slop,” and they’re forced to yield major territory.

But then, if that’s all the series is, can it truly be awakening our children to the world of the imagination, drawing them into the written word, and rescuing them from trashy video games and movies? I don’t think so, because in my view the Potter books are trashy movies, so to speak, full of junk and gizmos and “stuff,” such as the souped up flying broomsticks with names like Nimbus 2000 and Firebolt that are used in the hockey-type game of Quidditch. The students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which Harry enters at age 11, get their supplies at Daigon Alley and on weekends visit the town of Hogsmeade, both glorified malls with dozens of crowded shops selling all kinds of cool things. Even Harry’s adventures involve all manner of gimmicks such as interactive diaries, moving maps, and trees that whack whatever comes near them. The kinetic shape of the action in the books is also reminiscent of movies today, marked by episodic outbursts of frenetic activity and bruising violence. Something or someone always seems to be crashing, splashing, cracking, spraying, spitting, flying, or passing out.

The overcomplicated plots turn on breathless suspense and sudden surprise, one trick out of the hat after another. The characters are often clichés too — the nasty teacher, the blowhard professor, the caretaker jealous of his charges. The occasional word of wisdom from the great wizard Dumbledore is a sop to what is otherwise sense-saturation. So far from returning kids to literacy, I’m afraid it will spoil many of them for deeper, quieter, more classic fare like The Wind in the Willows. And by the way, am I the only one who thinks it’s kind of creepy for pre-teens to wear robes and pointed hats, wave wands, cast spells, stir cauldrons, mix potions containing rat spleen and crocodile heart, and perform something called Transfiguration?

And then there are the Dursleys — Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia and their hideous son Dudley — the utterly vile family that took in the year-old wizard Harry Potter after his parents had been killed by the evil Lord Voldemort. The Dursleys are Muggles, non-magic people, and they go way beyond typical fairy tale villainy; they are real monsters, despite Rowling’s attempt to make them funny, and their abuse of Harry is prosecutable. It can set up in the average reader a discomforting streak of resentment at ordinary life and an unhealthy need to feel superior by becoming a co-denizen with Harry of an alternative world of special powers. Thus even the presumably uplifting theme of Harry’s finding his destiny seems undergirded by our present cultural pattern of victimization, survivorship, and “self-esteem.” (The horrible Aunt Petunia is actually Harry’s mother’s sister, and as a member of the aunt community, I am offended. Time was in children’s literature that the obnoxious persecutors in a family were stepmothers or stepsisters, but now that everybody and her sister is a step-something, I guess, blood relatives must be made the villains.)

Rowling has said that her chief model is C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and she plans to match his seven volumes with seven of her own, but she doesn’t have his sweetness of vision. While Lewis works within a Christian framework, Rowling lacks an overall structure and purpose, even granting that her series is not yet finished. Here and there she throws in some current preoccupation — the greatness of diversity, the need for understanding the mentally ill (the werewolves), and there is of course the typical Lucas-like simplified pop vision of good and evil and light and dark and all that, but it feels artificial, insubstantial, and derivative. Lewis’s characters learn from Narnia and go back to lives in the real world; Rowling’s Muggle and wizard worlds are intertwined, and yet the magical sphere seems to serve nothing except itself, in a continuous unfolding of jokes, pranks, stunts, capers, stratagems, and contrivances. People are worried about the commodification of the Harry Potter books but I fear that the Harry Potter books come already commodified.