One of my favorite books of all time is Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. And as much as I love it, the first 200 pages are a bit hard to stomach. We see the main character, Kvothe, stumbling homeless through the streets of Tarbean, orphaned after an attack on his parents, and we keep asking ourselves what the point is. And then, all of a sudden, we see it. And the book doesn’t let up after that moment. Part of me wonders if that process of realization is part of what cemented the book’s pedestal status in my mind.
There’s a moment, about one-fourth of the way through J.K. Rowling’s newest bestseller, The Casual Vacancy, when the story clicked for me. After reading loads of mixed reviews (mostly negative, actually), I cracked the book open for myself — and found the first 80 pages or so to be completely dull. OK, I said to myself, I get it. A local councilman has died, and the whole town of Pagford is reacting to it.
So what?
And the “so what” hits during a social worker’s visit to one of the book’s many families, the Weedons, in an impoverished neighborhood called the Fields, the sun around which all of Casual Vacancy orbits. In the midst of that glimpse into a heroin addict’s home, the point of the novel strikes like lightning.
Some people don’t like the spiritual language I use about Harry Potter, a series that I continually refer to as a sermon on death (I say the same thing about the video game, Shadow of the Colossus). And much the same way, Casual Vacancy is a sermon on poverty. More specifically, our response to it as a community, and our responsibility towards it as people.
What I find supremely interesting about the issues of social justice and class in this book is that Harry Potter was almost as much about class itself, in the midst of wizard battles and standardized tests. In Casual Vacancy, Rowling continues to handle this in a way that’s not preachy, and manages to leave no segment unturned when it comes to the scathing look at the people that make up Pagford. Her omniscient approach bounces around from heroin addicts to deli owners, from depressed teenagers to spineless womanizers. And seriously — homegirl can write the hell out of a teenage voice. But then again, she’s had plenty of practice, hasn’t she?
But back to this sermon thing. I’ve said before that the most powerful stories are the ones that tap into the human narrative, and the idea that one of our primary responsibilities as people is to care for the needy, the downtrodden, the widow and the orphan certainly falls in line with that. But that “moment” in Casual Vacancy that I spoke of earlier, the one where the point of the book hits home? That moment happens when social worker Kay, lonely and trying to come to grips with leaving London for a man that is not interested in her, is interviewing heroin addict Terri Weedon. Surrounded by filth and the signs of a neglectful parent, of a woman hopelessly lost in her own addiction, Kay realizes that in her drug addled state, Terri looks temporarily happy. And she gets jealous. The idea that despite class or race or social status, that our most base need, our default setting is that we will do or try anything (often futilely) to be happy?
I think that’ll preach.
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