Isn't it obvious?

Children (and many of us who aren't) have been so anxious for the fourth installment of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series because they are caught up in a breathless adventure, because they have learned to ask the most vital and essential question any reader can: What happens next? "But," the still-puzzled persist, "aren't there other children's books that are just as good?" Perhaps. But for kids, "Harry Potter" is of their time, something that will always be theirs instead of a legacy left to them by a previous generation. "Children shudder at the scent of newness as a dog does when it scents a hare," the Russian writer Isaac Babel wrote, "expressing the madness which later, when we grow up, is called inspiration."

If "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" were to sell only five copies instead of -- potentially -- its first print run of 5 million plus, it wouldn't change the fact that we are dealing here with one of the pinnacles of children's literature. (And if you read books to be swept into a story, to make an emotional investment in its characters and to leave something of yourself behind in it, then the distinction made by calling it children's literature may be a meaningless one.) The present explosion is the beginning of something that's going to become a lasting part of culture. Harry is going to be one of those characters who, like Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan or Oliver Twist, stands for something even in the minds of people who have never read one of his adventures.

It would be easy to boil down the essence of Harry by calling him a good-hearted hero whose bravery overcomes his fear, who, through the lessons of experience, learns to balance his sense of what's right and his sense of what's necessary. But those qualities mean different things at different ages. We have followed Harry now from 11 (in the first book) to 14 (in the new one), and with each book the tests he faces have become more dangerous, the emotional and physical toll a little steeper, the stakes higher.

Some parents may be upset by the darker aspects of "Goblet of Fire" which, as in the previous book, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," burst forth with sometimes shocking power in the book's final 100 pages. But Rowling understands that refusing to spare the emotions of the reader is not the same thing as exploiting those emotions. Our experience of pain and loss sharpens and deepens as we get older (almost in proportion to our ability to bear more), and so does the pain and loss that Harry feels. And the same is no doubt true of many of Rowling's readers who are growing up with her hero. I don't think it's too much to say that J.K. Rowling is providing her readers with the gamut of what reading can be -- the narrative fascination that gets us reading and the emotional resonance that keeps us reading.

The longest of the books, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" is also the most relaxed and, ultimately, the most intense in the series so far. Like the previous three books, it follows the course of a school year at Hogwarts, a school for young wizards, with studies taking a back seat to the adventures of Harry and his best friends Ron and Hermione. We've had time to get used to the routine, and (up until the last 150 pages) the book proceeds with a warm and pleasant familiarity, along with a heightening sense of what Rowling is waiting to unleash.

This time around, Harry's challenge has to do with the revived tradition of the Triwizard Tournament, an international contest in which delegations from the French and German counterparts to Hogwarts come to visit and a student from each school is picked to compete in a demonstration of wizarding skills for the championship. Needless to say, Harry winds up in the competition and finds himself preoccupied both with its demands and with omens that suggest the Dark Lord Voldemort is drawing near to him. And that's all I'm going to tell you.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"