Reading Harry Potter , I often found myself wondering when the characters used the bathroom. Reading J. Those reading The Casual Vacancy are not spared the private and often disgusting details of the characters lives. The descriptions are not only physically repulsive, but metaphorically gross as well. She needs to vary her sentence structure. Metaphors are occasionally overwrought. After a few chunky sections in the beginning, Rowling hits her stride. Slinging hard-hitting lines like Bludgers sorry she carefully dissects the small English village of Pagford and its inhabitants.
She pushes you into mundane goings-on, sometimes heavy-handedly showing readers into the characters bedrooms, schoolrooms, and boardrooms. But some bits, when the book gets away from examining and just starts telling, border on punch-in-the-gut venomous veracity. When she can walk the balance between frankness and poetic metaphor is when I turned the pages the quickest. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort.
Why had humans ever learned to talk? Some of it, though, is, frankly, fucked up. I was always, I think, completely honest. There are no pulled punches. It was like looking down at a close friend from a great height, and their words and actions were distorted. And to have the woman who wrote your own diary suddenly tell a tale that is suddenly too harshly real feels dissonant.
My fingers are crossed that Rowling, with a little more time, is able to produce the adult work of fiction that she clearly wants so dearly to write. I still read The Casual Vacancy gladly, with a pang of bittersweet nostalgia. The true question for once-children like myself, who have spent most of their lives under the spell of Potter, is whether or not we ourselves can move on.
This article originally appeared in the Princeton University newspaper the Nassau Weekly.
