Semi-Colons & John Grisham

[coriolan at worldnet.att.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 1940

I'm sure we all know folks who - without having read any of the 
books - dismiss the Harry Potter series as children books. (A Muggles 
co-worker told me that she "knew" that Harry Potter was written at a 
first-grade level so American children can read the story without 
help). Meanwhile, my adult friends demonstrate their *gravitas* by 
reading the ouevre of John Grisham, Patricia Cornwall and Tom Clancy.

Now, I'm sure JK Rowling will never include a sex scene to equal the 
stunning prose of Grisham, but aside from that, Rowling is in every 
respect stylistically more complex than her best-selling compatriots. 
Just one example: I've skimmed through several volumes of Grisham, 
Cornwall in search of a semi-colon.  I've yet to find one.  Grisham 
and Cornwall write a tedious series of short, declarative sentences 
that might(ignoring content) fit right in to The Weekly Reader or The 
Berenstein Bears. Rowling OTOH rejoices in the beauty of the English 
language, and fully exploits its dramatic potential in her dialogue - 
take any page at random in any of her books, and we find an array 
ofhyphens, ellipses and semi-colons. That in itself does not make a 
writer superior, yet I  think anyone who compares Rowling with the 
aforementioned authors can only agree that she has created by far the 
more morally complex and ambiguous universe, as compared to the 
simplistic good guys/bad guys of The Firm (The protagonists in 
Grisham are forever evading their adult responsiblities, and the 
author clearly expects us to accordingly applaud them when they 
finally escape them - when has Harry given into doubt, and refused 
the duties Destiny has thrust upon him?)

 A cartoonist in The Washington Post recently had a child exclaim "Do 
you doubt the superiority of childhood to maturity? Kids are reading 
the dense, multi-volume Harry Potter adeventures. Adults are reading 
Who Moved My Cheese," a vapid fable of money-grubbing managerial 
mice!"

    - CMC
.