Walking down Mercer Street in SoHo on Friday night, it was easy to tell when you were getting close to Harry Potter Place – all you had to do was follow the 11-year-olds with wands and painted faces. The whole block between Prince and Spring, ordinarily an adult playground, had been taken over by Scholastic, American publishers of the “Harry Potter” books, and transformed into a little slice of J.K. Rowling’s universe. There was a wand-decorating booth and an owl demonstration (owls, of course, being the preferred postal service for wizards), and even a row of Port-a-Potties where the voice of Moaning Myrtle, resident ghost of the Hogwarts W.C., was piped in. At the center of it all was the Scholastic store itself, where the twisting line to reserve a copy of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” looked like something out of Disneyland.

It was a sight to warm the hearts of parents and teachers, or the authors of last year’s grim NEA report, “Reading at Risk”: hundreds upon hundreds of children, a crowd as diverse as New York itself, ecstatically awaiting the chance to read a book (on their summer vacation, yet). The festival on Mercer Street was just a small sample of what was taking place all over the city, the country, and the world. Scholastic printed 10 million copies of this, the sixth book in the series, and expected to sell half of them on the first day. So far, the books have earned Ms. Rowling – who turns 40 on July 31, the birthday she shares with her wizard hero – a fortune estimated at $3.5 billion, and she has earned untold billions more for publishers, booksellers, and movie studios. When even the pope and Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer issue statements on the subject of Harry Potter, he is no longer just a fictional character – he has become a celebrity.

And there’s the trouble. For Harry Potter Place, despite its appealingly amateurish, relatively noncommercial spirit (nothing seemed to be for sale except the books), was not, in fact, a small-town fair or a librarians’ pep rally. It was a corporate marketing tool, designed to bring yet more media attention to what was already the best-publicized book launch of the year. This made it a perfect reflection of the queasiness at the heart of the Harry Potter phenomenon – the intrusion of money and celebrity into what, we instinctively feel, should be the pure domain of children’s literature. The very fact that “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” could not be sold anywhere until the stroke of midnight – making those long, photogenic lines necessary – was part of a Hollywood-style campaign to stir up consumer frenzy.

Indeed, when serious writers decry the Potter phenomenon, it usually seems their real objection is not to the books themselves, but rather to their calculated inflation into a cross-platform media event. But is the books’ popularity finally just a matter of relentless promotion? And if so, will the “Harry Potter” books eventually come to seem obsolete, embarrassing, corny – the fate, as Adorno insisted, of every kind of manufactured popularity?

That is certainly what A.S. Byatt suggested in an essay published in 2003, around the time the last “Potter” title was released. Ms. Byatt made the best statement yet of the case against the “Potter” books: that they replace the timelessness of myth, the primitive source of the best children’s literature from Grimm to C.S. Lewis, with twitchy, up-to-the-minute, Disney-style novelty. “Rowling’s magic world,” Ms. Byatt wrote ,”has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.” The marketing of Harry Potter, by this logic, is simply the natural extension of the books’ artificial, commercial spirit. Harry is a celebrity because he is the product of an ersatz celebrity culture.

But this ungenerous interpretation gives too little credit to Ms. Rowling, to her sincerity and ingenuity. For the “Potter “books are, in fact, deeply aware of, and wryly funny about, our culture’s worship of celebrity. This appears most obviously in the fourth book, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” where Hogwarts Academy is infiltrated by a malicious tabloid journalist called Rita Skeeter. When it is revealed that Rita is able to turn into a beetle at will, we are surely seeing the fruits of Ms. Rowling’s own encounters with the British press.

But the theme is present from the very beginning of the series, which is built around the idea that Harry is himself a celebrity. Because he survived an attack by the evil Lord Voldemort while still an infant, he goes through the world of wizards as the object of constant fascination, speculation, and resentment – all the ingredients of tabloid fame. Ms. Rowling’s masterstroke, however, is to make Harry famous for something that he himself can’t remember. This makes his celebrity feel gratuitous, like mere celebrity always is, while simultaneously turning it into a perfect metaphor for the self-consciousness of adolescence. Like all teenagers, Harry feels that everyone is always looking at him; the difference is that, in his case, it’s true.

The whole saga of the books, with their ever-expanding cast of good and evil wizards, is really the story of Harry’s attempt to earn the fame he already has, by defeating Voldemort once and for all. In other words, Harry faces the very same challenge as Ms. Rowling herself: to exchange factitious acclaim and notoriety for genuine esteem. This makes Harry’s story a fitting parable for our time, when the boundary between the two often seems to have been lost, or deliberately erased. If the “Harry Potter” books do survive their moment, and their marketing, it will be because J.K. Rowling helped a generation of readers learn the difference between celebrity and heroism.