Why J.K. Rowling is no authority on Dumbledore's sexual orientation

Contrary to her recent attention-grabbing revelation, J.K. Rowling doesn't know any more about the secret life of Professor Dumbledore than careful readers of her Harry Potter books do. Maybe you saw this AP article over the weekend:

Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall.

After reading briefly from the final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," she took questions from audience members.

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds "true love."

"Dumbledore is gay," the author responded to gasps and applause.

Nonsense. Unless she decides to write Book Eight, Ms. Rowling has missed her chance to impart any new information about any of the Harry Potter characters. If the series is truly at an end, then the author no longer possesses the authority to create new thoughts, feelings, and realities for those characters.

Sure, authors "know" many things about their characters that don't ever make it into their novels. J. K. Rowling may have had it in her mind that Dumbledore is gay, or that he eats Fruit Loops for breakfast every morning or that he secretly loves NASCAR and country music--but unless the reader sees or can logically assume those things are true, they aren't true, and they never can be. If something is not true inside a book--that is, in the world and time of the story--then the author can't make it so after the fact.

When a book is closed, its characters no longer exist. Oh, they might live in readers' memories and imaginations, but they can't do or say or be anything more or less than what they were seen to do and say and be inside the book. Which means J.K. Rowling is no more an authority on Dumbledore's sexual orientation than her readers are.

Has Harry Potter boosted novel reading?

Because I've been out of the country (read: vacationing in Texas) for two weeks, I just now got around to reading a July 15 Harry Potter piece in The Washington Post. No, don't yawn. The article makes several thought-provoking points. Check out this bit about adults reading Harry Potter books:

I'd like to think that this is a romantic return to youth, but it looks like a bad case of cultural infantilism. And when we're not horning in on our kids' favorite books, most of us aren't reading anything at all. More than half the adults in this country won't pick up a novel this year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade.

That statistic startles me, even though I hear it again and again. Whenever I confess to people who work for a living that I'm a book critic, I inevitably get the same response: "Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!" Then they turn to each other and shake their heads, amazed that anything so effete should pass for a profession. (I can see it in their eyes: the little tufted pillow, the box of bonbons nearby.) "I don't read fiction," they say, suddenly serious. "I have so little time nowadays that when I read, I like to learn something." But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"

Of course, it's not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it's an invitation to recite the loyalty oath.

Every time I tell someone I'm a writer, I get the Harry Potter question: What do I think of the books? My answer is invariably, "Nothing at all, because I've never read any of them." I'm a busy woman, and my novel-reading isn't determined by popular vote. I'm not very interested in juvenile literature and fantasy stories, so I've never been curious enough about the Harry Potter doorstops to pick up one and read the back-cover copy, let alone actually open the book.

We commonly hear that J.K. Rowling's work has motivated kids and even adults to read fiction. But where's the evidence for that? From what I can tell, nobody's been reading anything but Harry Potter books. If the series has truly whetted our culture's appetite for novel-reading, we should have already noticed an upswing in non-Harry fiction sales. After all, it's been ten years since the world first met the young wizard. And we should be hearing talk of other novels at kids' soccer games and at our office water coolers.

But that's not happening, is it?

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