Jeff Bercovici

Jeff Bercovici, Forbes Staff

I cover technology with an emphasis on social and digital media.

Business
|
9/27/2012 @ 11:45AM |3,708 views

Critics Not Charmed By J.K. Rowling's 'Casual Vacancy.' Will Readers Care?

A member of staff poses with a copy of 'The Ca...

 (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

“Dull.” “Mean.” “Two-dimensional.” “Contrived.”

These are the words critics are using to describe — okay, to pan — “The Casual Vacancy,” J.K. Rowling‘s first book since the “Harry Potter” saga and her first for adult readers. While it has received some nice write-ups — hey, People liked it! — the preponderance of critical opinion has been unfavorable.

Will readers still buy it? So far, they are: As of this writing, “The Casual Vacancy” is No. 1 on Amazon.com and No. 2 on Barnes & Noble. (“Admired: 21 Ways To Double Your Value” is currently No. 1 on B&N.) Rowling’s publisher, Little, Brown, has made a substantial bet that the book will be a hit, ordering 2 million copies printed for the U.S. market.

But it doesn’t necessarily need to be a “Harry Potter” sized hit to be profitable. Rowling is rumored to have received an advance in the neighborhood of $7 million, considerably less than top-selling genre authors like Stephen King and Janet Evanovich typically receive for new books. While her deal likely includes a larger-than-usual share of back-end royalties, the modest advance reflects a degree of realism about the difficulty of translating success in young-adult fiction to the literary fiction market. (A spokeswoman for Rowling didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry about the $7 million figure.)

Here’s a sampling of what critics have been saying.

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times:  ”There is no magic in this book — in terms of wizarding or in terms of narrative sorcery….Unfortunately, the real-life world she has limned in these pages is so willfully banal, so depressingly clichéd that ‘The Casual Vacancy’ is not only disappointing — it’s dull….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 marvelous constrained her ability to create a two-, never mind three-dimensional tale.

David Ulin, Los Angeles Times: “[T]he book aspires to be a satire of contemporary culture — complete with references to sex and drugs and the use of my favorite four-letter obscenity — but settles instead for broad caricature. That this is unsatisfying goes without saying; what’s surprising, given Rowling’s ability to spin a story, is just how unsatisfying it ultimately becomes…[I]f  ’The Casual Vacancy’ has a lesson to offer, it’s that there is not necessarily a correlation between writing for children and writing for adults

Theo Tait, The Guardian: “‘The Casual Vacancy’ is a solid, traditional and determinedly unadventurous English novel….[T]he novel is very much the prisoner of its conventions….The plot is often predictable; it requires a large helping of artificial contrivance; and it lurches into melodrama in the final act. The rules probably require this, and it all rattles along nicely enough, but it leaves a slight sense of disappointment.”

David Sexton, London Evening Standard: “The problem for Rowling’s legions of fans will be that she has forgotten to include any basic likeability in her characters here or any real suspense as to what will happen — or perhaps she has deliberately chosen not to supply it, now she no longer needs to do anything other than what she wants. 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.”

Post Your Comment

Please or sign up to comment.

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/09/27/critics-not-charmed-by-j-k-rowlings-casual-vacancy-will-readers-care/
www.forbes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-10
85850
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KVRCOMCHF5ARL5AAE5EPYUY2Z4BKRS23
<urn:uuid:3cb5cece-7655-4747-b75d-498a1202afd2>
2014-03-10T00:35:48Z
63.240.4.179
sha1:A524VEQZ63JZNHDDWKDB5VXESNFYRZPT
<urn:uuid:d2e10cdd-3be7-4ccb-b201-6fc35a046b37>
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/09/27/critics-not-charmed-by-j-k-rowlings-casual-vacancy-will-readers-care/
length
response
<urn:uuid:16616e87-d25d-43c1-9ecd-cbc6412c2b9d>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-10
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf