It's funny, opinion. Among the mainly snotty reviews of JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy published on Thursday, several reviewers pulled out the same lines to illustrate either the author's appalling tin-ear, or else a rare note of genius in an otherwise dull book. To wit:

A used condom glistening in the grass beside her feet, like the gossamer cocoon of some huge grub …

Seemingly, the most quoted line of the book was found by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times to be "a grotesque description", one of the gentler things she has said about The Casual Vacancy.

In Time magazine, meanwhile, Lev Grossman fell on the condom/grub image as evidence of Rowling's "new descriptive dexterity, an extra verbal gear that until now she's kept in reserve". (Further proof, in Grossman's view: a description of an old woman's fingers as "a clutch of bulging knuckles covered in translucent leopard-spotted skin.")

Grub/condom was quoted in Ian Parker's New Yorker profile of Rowling as part of the author's "ostentatiously unremitting" palette, and implicated in her generally overwrought prose, the worst of which, he noted, caused one "to picture a Little, Brown editor starting to dial Rowling's number, then slowly putting down the handset". For example:

There, in his poky office, Simon Price gazed covetously on a vacancy among the ranks of insiders to a place where cash was now trickling down onto an empty chair with no lap waiting to catch it.

And yet this was the very description that, over at the Daily Beast, caused Malcolm Jones to fan himself vigorously to try to calm down. He swooned:

Occasionally, her cruelty achieves a beauty all its own, as when she's describing … a wife-beating, child-beating jerk who rounds out his monstrous profile with the occasional petty theft at work: 'There, in his poky office, Simon Price gazed covetously …'

I have some sympathy for Jones here. Many years ago, I pulled out for praise an equally terrible line – one of Martin Amis's from Yellow Dog, which I can recite from memory since so many people mocked me for it afterwards: a man gets out of a car and it's raining, or as Amis puts it, "a boob-job of a raindrop gut-flopped on his bald spot." Sometimes, you just lose it.

Few reviewers could resist the obvious jibes. "A lazy critic," wrote Monica Hesse in the Washington Post, "might coyly query whether The Casual Vacancy contains enough magic."

Step forward Laurie Muchnick at Bloomberg:

Imagine Harry Potter with nothing but Muggles – mean, graceless people without a trace of magic. It would be a dull book indeed.

And the Daily News:

The magic simply isn't there.

But even Kakutani couldn't help reaching for the nearest insult to hand, with:

There is a vacancy deep in the heart of this novel.

One woman's bad magic, of course, is another's finely spun gossamer cocoon of social realism. In the Washington Post review, Hesse gave as an example of Rowling's fleeting brilliance, the following line:

Krystal's slow passage up the school had resembled the passage of a goat through the body of a boa constrictor.

Wrote Hesse:

You know, exactly the kind of girl and exactly the kind of school system she's talking about.

I'm not sure. Do you?