J. K. Rowling writes a realist novel for adults.

Mugglemarch

by Ian Parker October 1, 2012

Rowling says, “There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children’s babysitter or their teacher.”

The conifer hedges in front of J. K. Rowling’s seventeenth-century house, in Edinburgh, are about twenty feet tall. They reach higher than the street lamps in front of them, and evoke the entrance to the spiteful maze in the film adaptation of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” the fourth volume of her fantasy series. Rowling, who, at forty-seven, is about to publish her first novel for adults—it is set in a contemporary Britain familiar with Jay-Z and online pornography, but is shaded with memories of her own, quite cheerless upbringing—lives here with her second husband, Neil Murray, a doctor, and their children. She has a reputation for reserve: for being likable but shy and thin-skinned, and not at all comfortable with the personal impact of having created a modern myth, sold four hundred and fifty million books, and inspired more than six hundred thousand pieces of Harry Potter fan fiction, a total that increases by at least a thousand stories a week. 

Ian Rankin, the writer of Edinburgh-based crime novels, became friendly with Joanne Rowling when they were neighbors in another part of the city; he recently described her as “quite quiet, quite introspective.” He recalled urging Rowling to join him for an onstage interview at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, a few years ago. After Rowling watched Rankin being interviewed at a similar event, she told him, “I don’t think I can do that.” Rankin said, “I think she feels uncomfortable in a room full of adults. I’ve seen her in a room of kids, and she’s in her element.” Rankin noted that Rowling, in her writing, retains “the power of life and death over these characters.” She is wary “of situations you can’t always control—in the real world.”

In the spring, nearly five years after the appearance of the seventh, and final, Harry Potter novel, Little, Brown, Rowling’s publisher, announced “The Casual Vacancy,” and offered a glimpse of the plot: an idyllic English town named Pagford; the death of a man named Barry; a parish-council election. In response, a British publisher announced “The Vacant Casualty,” billed as a parody, if one can parody something whose contents are unknown. Commenters on the Guardian’s Web site guessed at Rowling’s likely models, with reference to Robertson Davies and “Desperate Housewives.” One reader, playing on Rowling’s word for non-wizard society, suggested an alternate title: “Mugglemarch.” And the hosts of Pottercast, a popular American fan podcast, picked over the press release, registering both delight at fresh data—Rowling has written ten tweets in three years—and a hint of worry that an extraordinary global bond between an author and her readers, and between two generations, was about to be severed. They were opening an invitation to a party where they might not be quite welcome. During the podcast, they looked up “parish council” on Wikipedia, and established that the term refers to the lowest rung of English local government. One of the hosts, Melissa Anelli—a thirty-two-year-old who runs a Potter Web site, stages an annual Potter convention, and has published a sharp-witted book about Potter enthusiasts—pondered the title, asking, “What’s casual, ever, about a vacancy?” She and her co-hosts wondered whether they’d go to a midnight party to celebrate the book’s launch, as many fans had for the later Potter novels.

In Britain, Ian Rankin typically publishes a new novel in October, and it tends to go to the top of the best-seller list. He said that, this year, his publisher moved the date to November, fearing that the late-September launch of “The Casual Vacancy” will, for weeks, render all other fiction invisible to readers and to the media. Rankin was taken aback but glad for the extra writing time. He wondered if “The Casual Vacancy” might have a whodunnit air; Rowling has talked to him of her admiration for British crime writing of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. “She loves Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers,” he said, adding that the Pagford setting had relieved him of his greatest fear: that Rowling had been working on a crime novel set in Edinburgh. He said, “I hope she’ll create an English village that she will know intimately—and it will be real to us.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/01/121001fa_fact_parker#ixzz27JR68iYm