Harry Potter finale creates literary frenzy

Molly Finkelstein Backpage Editor

I guess I should warn you that this will have spoilers, but seriously, if you really cared you would have read the book already. The best way to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is as part of the Harry Potter Challenge: re-reading all of the books in a week (full disclosure: It took me a week and a half). Ideally, this should have been done in the week leading up to the July 21 release and culminated in a triumphant midnight trip to Barnes & Noble, complete with an embarrassing outfit and a lightning bolt press-on tattoo.

For anyone who’s been living under a very large rock and/or been abroad all year in some country without any media, this final installment of the Harry Potter series follows Harry and friends through what should have been their seventh year at Hogwarts. But instead of returning to school, Harry, Ron and Hermione pull a Thoreau and go off into the woods for about 400 pages on a quest to destroy all of the horcruxes, the pieces of Voldemort’s (OMG I said it!) soul, and ultimately save the wizarding community and the world from the Dark Lord. If you want a more complete plot summary, read that traitor Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review that came out two days before the book did and totally revealed important plot points.

Do you want to hear my Harry Potter theories? Probably not, but whatever, here are my deep literary thoughts. The epilogue was completely cheesy and semi-anti-climatic, but necessary. Harry spends the whole series wanting nothing more than a normal loving family life, and in the end, that’s exactly what he gets (with Ginny!). Sure, he could have died, and in reality, he probably should have. It’s like in the movie, Stranger than Fiction, when Emma Thompson (Professor Trelawny in the HP movies!) is writing a book about Will Ferrell’s life, and she has to kill him in the end so that Dustin Hoffman will think it’s the most amazing novel of the century, but then she feels bad and doesn’t want to kill Will Ferrell, so she just writes a mediocre book instead.

Undoubtedly the Harry Potter books are classics, but if Harry had died they would have been inducted into the Official Important Literary Canon. But really, no one wanted Harry to die. We knew he had to, but we didn’t really want it to happen. I think J. K. Rowling just couldn’t bring herself to kill him. That scene where Harry walks willingly to his death in order to save the world, with his dead parents and friends and relatives whispering to him, is perfect. The book should have ended there. It still can if you just close the book after page 704.

I was and still am utterly and completely relieved that he didn’t die. When Tonks and Lupin named Harry as godfather of their newborn son and they were killed in the Battle of Hogwarts, I knew that Harry couldn’t die because he had to raise little Teddy as his own, like Sirius tried to do for Harry. Although in the epilogue Teddy is off snogging Victoire and isn’t living with Harry, so I have no idea what’s up with that. I guess Teddy could live with his grandparents, which I guess might make sense.

But what’s most important about this Harry Potter book is that on the night of July 22, people sloshed at parties, people on the subway, and people holed up in chat rooms were frantically searching for other people to discuss character deaths, where they cried, what they were disappointed about, and how all of their theories were wrong.

I ended up reading the book in one thrilling day locked inside my friend’s apartment on Wall Street. We weren’t allowed to go outside in case someone yelled out spoilers. My friend also made me read the ending in the bathroom so she couldn’t see my reactions when I finished before her.

I finished the book by 7 p.m., went to a Vassar party in, where else, Williamsburg, and ended up excitedly exchanging literary insights with some drunk boys. But then, this is what I normally do at parties.