The end of the affair

For almost a decade, Harry Potter and Tony Soprano have been my intimate companions. Now it's time to disentangle myself from their lives and say goodbye.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Rebecca Traister, Life

April 14, 2007 | I have never understood people who yammer on about wanting "closure"; they can't wait to have the mysteries of their relationships explained, their strings tied neatly into bows. To me, not knowing is the pulp of life -- the thing that keeps us getting out of bed, keeps us moving forward toward the conclusion. Getting there -- reaching the end, finis, kaput -- in life or in fantasy: to me, that is the deepest affront; it is an end to imagination, a limit on possibility; it is final. It is death.

And so this April feels particularly raw, as I look down the barrel of a season loaded with the saltiest sorrows. As of this week, only eight hours and 784 pages separate me from the ends of two stories that have sustained me and many others for the better part of a decade. This summer, fans of "The Sopranos" and of Harry Potter will get their closure.

Last Sunday night HBO aired the first of the nine episodes that will finish off "The Sopranos," a show that has beguiled and terrified us with its violence, passion and unnervingly good humor for eight years. The final installment is scheduled to air on June 10. Six weeks later, J.K. Rowling will publish "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and final book in her gripping bildungsroman saga about growing up Gryffindor.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that I am anything other than achingly, pantingly, pathetically anxious for these next and final chapters. Sunday was a holiday for me, and not because of the risen Christ; by the time the synth drum started beating over Tony's ninth-to-final ride away from Manhattan I was, quite literally, wiggling with pleasure. But 52 minutes later it was over, one hour of my final nine spent, the lonely chill of impending finality taking hold.

A shadow hung over the show from the opening scene, in which menacing knocking drives Tony and Carmela from bed, and Carm expresses her first half-conscious thought: "Is this it?" I'm sorry to say that it is. And knowing that this is it, it was hard not to read the tea leaves: Tony's Fredo-rific rowboat talks with Bobby, that creepy story about a kid drowning in a swimming pool, so like the swimming pool from which the Soprano family saga first took flight.

There is a similar process of reckoning happening for readers of the Harry Potter books. Two weeks ago, the unveiling of the book's wraparound cover art on the "Today" show sparked a speculative frenzy about what every scribble might mean. There were Harry and Voldemort, playing what looked like a particularly intense game of craps in front of a stadium full of people. There was a shadowy object around our hero's neck that looked very much like a Slytherin Horcrux, and the scene was framed by tattered brown curtains that seemed to recall the veil in the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry of Magic that separates the living and the dead.

Yes, it's another universe, but that's been part of the draw for both genre narratives. I have become fluent in the lingo and locations of these foreign worlds as I've been absorbed by them, from gobstones to goomahs, until they eventually mesh. During fitful nights, my mind teems with wizards and mobsters, playing out their last acts on Clue-board canvases: There's Christopher torturing Neville at the Bing with the Cruciatus Curse. The ghost of Adriana tells Harry where to find the final Horcrux that will enable him to destroy Tony.

The different natures of these fictions mean they should have little in common except the degree to which they have welcomed rapt visitors. But they are also tales of exotic worlds in which we find ourselves in the mundane. We have so identified with Tony's agita over Meadow's boyfriends that we forget to judge him for being a murderer and serial cheat. In the wizarding world, we have fretted about passing exams and hooking up with the right guy so easily that we don't notice the strangeness of our concerns over producing an Expecto Patronum spell to summon the smoky image of our dead father as a stag. Wait ... that didn't happen to us in high school?

In fact, the intimacies of stories that have gone on at such length for so many years with as much attention to detail mean that we do not need the steady thrill of murders and wand duels to keep us hooked. The smallest of gestures carry meaning; Ron's arm around Hermione's shoulder at a funeral is disconcertingly erotic; and while the sight of Tony receiving a blow job is a familiar one, the shocking frisson comes from the realization that it's his wife who's administering it.

People complain about mob-lite "Sopranos" episodes, or the Quidditch-larded chapters of Potter. But that is the kvetching of the spoiled viewer; the truth is we would watch these characters watch paint dry -- and we have, slogging through hundreds of pages on the housecleaning of Grimmauld Place and hours of Carmela's thoughts on plywood. But I haven't minded these quotidian concerns; there's always the chance that buried in them is a nugget of potential -- a locket or a spec house on which a crucial plot point will someday turn.

You've probably heard about how "The Sopranos" ushered in a golden age of television (or not television, HBO, yadda yadda) and how the Potter books revitalized the publishing industry. Put more broadly, these two franchises kicked off a golden age of serialized narrative, during which we have been held in suspense, gratified at semi-regular intervals by ministrations of more story, more story, more story, until, finally, there is no more story.

The pleasurable agony is not new; television did it in earlier "Who Shot JR?" iterations. In a time when there were only three channels, it was easier to chew endlessly on the question of who killed Laura Palmer for one sweaty summer, or to feel universally gratified by the site of "Moonlighting's" Maddie and David finally getting it on. It's the old Dickens story told over and over again: giant groups of people gripped by the same question -- what will happen next?

Next page: I can't imagine my life without Carmela in it