Harry Potter and the Ignominious Two weekends ago, I found myself accidentally proving the old theory that Harry Potter is a gateway drug to the larger world of literature serious. Standing at the back of a giant horde in my local bookstore at midnight, stuck in a knot of teenagers reading People magazine through enormous black plastic glasses, I picked up and nearly finished a great American superclassic that I had somehow managed to avoid all my life: Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck. Under normal circumstances I would have been perfectly happy to ignore it (the paperback had an unmistakable whiff of high school curriculum) but I was bored out of my mind and the corridors were clogged with pot-bellied wizards and it was the only readable book. at hand. After a few pages, I found myself hooked. By the time I got to the checkout, I was three-quarters of the way through (right after - spoiler alert! - Lennie the manchild mangles bully Curley's hand) and all I wanted to do was finish it. But all the employees were cheering because I was the last customer, so I closed Steinbeck right on the brink of what seemed like an imminent tragic climax, took my Potter, and left. Ironically, this meant that Of Mice and Men was now suspended at much the same point in its dramatic arc that Rowling had suspended the Potter series before the Deathly Hallows. So I went home and conducted a curious experiment in parallel reading: a two-day blitz of 860 pages, with a pair of climaxes nested in: one hot off the press, the other 70 years old. I started with Potter. Not since 1841, when New Yorkers swarmed the pier to ask arriving Englishmen whether Little Nell had died in the final installment of The Old Curiosity Shop (spoiler alert! She totally did), had readers been so simultaneously poised on the brink of a collective climax. My instincts, along with the new book's scary epigraphs, kept telling me that, like little Nell, Harry had to go. For a children's series, Potter has been unusually obsessed with death—Harry's heroism, remember, stemmed from the gruesome murder of his parents—and in recent books, the body count has risen rapidly: in the previous book, even Harry's untouchable mentor, Dumbledore, is dead. . Furthermore, in a larger narrative sense, Rowling owed us a debt. Harry has been outrageously lucky for too long: he has lived for six books in a great bland protective bubble of innocence, nobility and love..