J.K. Rowling—Chapter Two
J.K. Rowling—Chapter Two
My local bookstore, like bookstores across the country, now has plenty of copies of J. K. Rowling’s The Cuckoo’s Calling, the mystery novel previously attributed to a new author, Robert Galbraith. Rowling’s publisher, Little Brown, has rushed an estimated 300,000 copies of the book and taken out a full page New York Times ad. That should be the end of the story. All of us can now see what we missed when the novel went flying off bookstore shelves after Rowling was identified as the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling. For my money, though, we are on to a new chapter.
As a number of critics have pointed out, J. K. (Joanne) Rowling has been playing with identity and gender issues since she broke into print, just like George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans). What’s interesting this time around is Rowling’s desire to avoid celebrity. Here, too, she has rich English roots. T. E. Lawrence, Britain’s famous “Lawrence of Arabia,” adopted the names of John Hume Ross and T. E. Shaw at the height of his greatest fame. He wanted his independence back.
I applaud Rowling’s wish to be judged like any other writer rather than exist as a brand. “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name,” she said recently. Equally commendable is her recent decision to donate the damage payments made to her by the law firm responsible for revealing that she was the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling to The Soldiers Charity, along with three years of royalties from the book’s sales.
But I find it troubling that the book had disastrous sales (around 500 copies in the United States) when its author was an unknown but has had huge sales since its author was found to be a celebrity. The money issue doesn’t worry me, but as a writing and literature teacher, I wonder what I should tell my students about being judged by their talent? Should they spend more time honing their celebrity skills than their craft?
A similar reputation vs. merit issue occurred last year when the New Yorker published an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, “Thank You for the Light,” which it had rejected in 1936. The same story the editors had dismissed by observing, “It seems so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic,” was now fit for publication. An obscure work by an author who in 1936 was considered washed up by many but who now ranks as an American master was worthy of attention after all. Reputation trumped all else.
A truly happy ending would be if The Cuckoo’s Calling got a sales bump because reviewers and readers gained a new appreciation of it. That happened years ago to James Agee’s Let us Now Praise Famous Men. It sold just 600 copies in 1941, but it has come to be seen as an important account of the Great Depression, selling an estimated 500,000 copies since its reissue in 1960.
My hope is that in the coming weeks Rowling will address explicitly, as she has implicitly, the state of book publishing in an era when giant companies, such as Penguin and Random House, are merging and in doing so crowding out smaller companies that don’t require blockbusters to stay in business.
In the meantime I’ll continue to tell any of my students who ask that getting published remains a worthy endeavor— even if it requires bucking the celebrity tide.
Nicolaus Mills teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. His most recent book is Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.
