Book Critic Gets Email Threats For Panning Harry Potter

[matcom]

<snip>

I was wrong. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is a masterpiece of all-ages literature that ranks alongside "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Wind in the Willows." I mean it. Not only that, but Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

Kidding! Anybody out there who's seen "The Manchurian Candidate" will recognize that Shaw line as the classic remark of a person brainwashed to speak only the best of somebody, no matter how improbable it sounds. To be honest, I haven't really changed my mind about the mixed review of the new Potter book that ran under my byline nine days ago. But when it turns out that expressing reservations about the Potter phenomenon can buy you a death threat, it's worth asking: Is this degree of protective devotion some form of mass hysteria, or a hopeful development in otherwise unreaderly times?

Incidentally, not a death threat death threat. But when somebody e-mails to say, "Seriously bitch u need to watch what teh f -- you say," it certainly commandeers a critic's attention. Add to that the dozens of correspondents who took the trouble to call me dork, idiot, schmuck or worse, and it's all occasioned some serious soul-searching here on the literature desk.

Most of the responses to the column in question, it should be said, were neither as menacing nor as un-spell-checked as the one just quoted. Lots of them were smart, entertaining and well argued, and I apologize for excerpting only the most incendiary of them. But more than a few correspondents seemed to be operating at the mercy of some myths about what a critic does, and how he works. Since those are general questions that some of us already ask ourselves with compulsive regularity, I sincerely hope you'll stick around to hear them at least half answered.

Myth No. 1: Critics shouldn't reveal anything about a book's plot. No one should deny that the experience of being surprised ranks as one of fiction's greatest pleasures. As someone who's spent a lot of time griping that writing great climaxes is a lost art nowadays, I'm the last person anybody will ever catch blowing an ending -- or not without a prominent spoiler alert, anyway.

But disclosing that a major character dies isn't the same thing as disclosing who dies. A critic should be within his rights to talk in a general way about what happens late in a book, just so long as he doesn't say to whom. Without that prerogative, how can he or she possibly hope to make a book discussable to somebody who hasn't read it?

As for the new Potter installment, speculating about whom J.K. Rowling will kill off next has been a reliable parlor game since at least the third book. To refrain from addressing this rampant curiosity, at least in a roundabout, nonspecific way, would be to ignore the single most frequently asked question I got while reading the book.

Myth No. 2: Any critic who disagrees with you must not have read the book. On the contrary, any critic who disagrees with you has read the book for the simple reason that critics always read the book. If there are exceptions to this rule, I've never met one, and I've certainly never been one. In my experience, critics get into this business because they like to read, even if the book in question isn't any great shakes. Rather than bluff their way through an uninformed review, if they don't have enough time to finish a book, they're far likelier to kvetch to their editors about unrealistic deadlines.

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/26/DDGBKDSBJR1.DTL