Why does Christopher Hitchens still have a writing career? Seriously -- why do otherwise respectable institutions pay him for his sotted thoughts? His latest offense is a meandering mess of a review of the latest Harry Potter book. As is most of his recent work, the piece is utterly self-indulgent, primarily a vehicle for Hitchens to talk about his favorite subject: Christopher Hitchens.
He carries on for 2000 words, but the first 1200 are spent addressing topics wholly unrelated to . . . the actual book. In fact, I think Hitch spends about as much time musing about his ontological hangups as he does examining the ostensible subject of the review. The prose for which he is bafflingly famous drips with condescension -- and perhaps middling Scotch -- and his pretentiousness oozes like a sweaty hangover.
Here's shorter Hitch, in case you don't want to spend your time struggling through the morass of vainglory:
It's all about Orwell -- everything is, don't you know . . . I got the book at a midnight party, goodness real people are vulgar and disgusting (also possibly fascists-in-training) . . . despite the fact that I just mentioned widely-read boarding school tales of yore, I'll now proclaim, in all seriousness, that the series' popularity is due to today's disgusting combination of omnipresent political correctness and "safety" . . . my daughter is smart because she read other books in addition to HP . . . Orwell again, quite obviously . . . thank God somebody these kids can fight evil without silly religion mucking up their minds . . . I refuse to suspend disbelief: if the bad guys are so powerful, why don't they just win? . . . I will now complain, with a straight face, that I feel this book contains too much exposition . . . thin and derivative, and subject to diminishing returns, and no I'm not being ironic . . . how dare Rowling suggest evil can be defeated -- it cannot! at least not while the disgusting, fifth-column leftists continue to oppose the glorious war in Iraq . . . maybe this will lead people to read more of other stuff, better stuff; that would be nice.
Hitch describing another writer as "thin and derivative . . . subject to diminishing returns . . . pedantic" is quite audacious, I'll grant him that, and I suppose he's been dining out for years on the bewildering appetite of Americans for supercilious British critics. (Especially narcissists, apparently -- the pronoun "I" turns up nine times, to help remind you where your attention really belongs.) Still, you mess with Harry and you get my attention.
I should note, even I found #7 a little heavy on the exposition. But the Hitchens treatment is totally undeserved; if he wants to unleash his apparently irrepressible ire upon authors more worthwhile than he, I'm sure there's a middle school English teacher position open somewhere.
