Month: August 2014

LOL! Literature Offering Laughs

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After writing about war in literature and enemies in literature the past two weeks, it’s time to lighten up. So this post will analyze Dostoyevsky’s use of smiley-face emoticons in Crime and Punishment.

Well, maybe not. But I do plan to discuss some of the funniest novels — ranging from satirical to just plain silly — that I’ve read. Then I’ll ask you to name your favorites!

Obviously, some novels are mostly comedic in content. But many serious, dramatic, poignant novels contain enough hilarious passages to be part of this post, too. Moby-Dick himself was in stitches when reading Herman Melville’s bedroom scene featuring Ishmael and Queequeg. Or perhaps I’m confusing that with Captain Ahab’s leg being in stitches after said whale took a bite…

Let’s start with Charles Dickens’ laugh-out-loud first novel: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which features the fabulously funny Sam Weller. Pickwick launched Dickens into a popularity stratosphere he never left — even as his wonderful, increasingly ambitious books were never quite that humorous again. Was Bleak House a jest-fest? Don’t think so.

Colette had a similar career arc, entering the novel-writing realm with the sidesplitting Claudine at School before moving on to weightier (yet still engaging) works. The title character in Colette’s late-career Gigi wouldn’t last a minute in a battle of witticisms with the rambunctious Claudine — and wouldn’t beat Claudine in mixed martial arts, either.

Speaking of first novels, the seriocomic Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has more laughs per square page than any of the six subsequent novels in J.K. Rowling’s series.

Also hilarious is Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, in which the “thing” that hits an incandescent bulb is not a light-dazzled moth…

Then there’s Jeeves in the Offing, or almost any other P.G. Wodehouse novel or story starring the brilliant British valet and his rather clueless “master” Bertie Wooster. Wodehouse could make a shopping list funny, though Amazon execs didn’t chuckle when the pre-Internet Jeeves declined to buy household supplies online.

In a very different milieu, novels don’t get much more amusing (or ribald) than Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. Delightful “southern humor” can also be found in Charles Portis’ Norwood and The Dog of the South, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle novel and Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries, and Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Mixed with the laughs in those books are serious themes such as poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia. “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?” Those authors know.

Academia can also be a great source of humor and satire, as evidenced by novels like Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and, to an extent, Adam Langer’s Ellington Boulevard. The first two books star professors (one beleaguered and the other basically a stalker), while Langer’s work has a disaffected graduate student as a secondary character. Duke Ellington Boulevard is another name for West 106th Street in Manhattan, a rapidly gentrifying borough with rents that are…hilarious.

Returning to older novels, we see Mark Twain mixing strong antiwar satire with goofy humor in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Henry Fielding even naming a character “Lady Booby” (for her personality) in his uproarious Joseph Andrews, and Miguel Cervantes being much funnier than one expects in Don Quixote. (By the way, Rocinante is Don Quixote’s horse, not an artificial sweetener.)

More hilarity? Valancy Stirling dramatically parts with her oppressively conventional mother and other relations in L.M. Montgomery’s moving/inspiring The Blue Castle, but the conversations the newly confident Valancy has with her family are funnier than the funniest sitcom. Italo Calvino is incredibly droll in his short-story-collection-as-novella Marcovaldo. John Steinbeck, so earnest in The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, will crack you up in Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday. And you don’t need an explanation from me about how delightful (albeit unsettling) are Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Given the Queen of Hearts’ predilection for offing heads, I’m grateful the top of this blog post still has one.

Your examples of the funniest literary works?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering/meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson, among others.

Enemies As Engines of Engrossing Fiction

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A couple of posts ago, I wrote about memorable friendships in literature. Now I’ll get less “warm and fuzzy” and discuss…enemies in literature!

Reading about adversaries is hardly pleasant, but well worth the time. The dramatic possibilities are endless, as are the questions: Who’s right and who’s wrong? Are both parties hostile or is one person doing most of the hating? Will the relationship improve or go even more downhill? Will someone get hurt (psychologically or physically)? If righteous revenge comes into play, how viscerally satisfying is that? (Very satisfying, as the many fans of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo will tell you.)

Enemies of course appear in both modern and classic literature as well as in both literary and popular fiction. In the last category, Richard Matheson’s Hunted Past Reason features two friends who go on a wilderness trip that sees one of them turn on the other. Some of what happens next is too graphic to describe here.

Another intense work is The Hunger Games, in which young people forced into a state-sanctioned contest of death become each others’ enemies to try to survive. Also not pals in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy are Katniss Everdeen and Panem President Coriolanus Snow, and ultimately Katniss and District 13 President Alma Coin.

Adversaries abound, too, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books — most notably the villainous Voldemort vs. the heroic Harry. Also, Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy is seething with small-town foes.

Or how about Taliban psychopath Assef vs. the flawed but basically good Amir in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner?

Obviously, adversarial pairs don’t have to consist of one bad person and one good person. Enemies can both be likable or both be unlikable. For instance, one wouldn’t want to go near either “The kid” or Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. And cousins Phillip Boyce and Norman Urquhart are both unappealing in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison, though one ends up being far worse than the other.

Indeed, friends can become enemies (Philip and Norman seemingly had a congenial relationship at one point) and enemies can become friends — or at least somewhat friendly. One example of the latter happens with two pivotal characters in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits; to avoid a plot spoiler, I won’t give their names here!

And enemies aren’t always a one-on-one proposition, as exemplified by Zenia trying to wreck the lives of three women in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.

In fact, a whole state apparatus can be the enemy of almost an entire populace, as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the aforementioned The Hunger Games.

Moving to older literature, there is of course the police inspector Javert who obsessively hounds Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

Another authority figure, the physically strong Capt. Wolf Larsen of Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, treats the initially soft Humphrey van Weyden viciously much of the time before their fraught relationship turns into something more equal.

Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons features the spoiled/selfish George Amberson Minafer, who makes himself a foe of Eugene Morgan by interfering with the love that likable widower has with George’s also-widowed mother Isabel. Complicating matters is George being in love with Eugene’s daughter Lucy.

Yes, the enemy thing can get very messy when it involves family. I think of Janie Crawford, who begins to hate her prominent husband Jody Starks after he treats her so nastily and patronizingly in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and Dorothea Brooke, who realizes her husband — the Rev. Edward Causabon — is an ice-cold, unfeeling excuse for a human being in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

In the child-parent realm, Dmitri loathes his vile father in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and John Grimes fears and dislikes his overbearing/hypocritical dad in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain.

Sibling relationships gone bad are also a staple of many fictional works, as when a character poisons the drink of her sister in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Who are some of your “favorite” foes in literature?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also in the middle of writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering/meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson, among others.

War in Literature: A No-Peace Piece

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With all the tragic fighting this summer in Gaza, Iraq, the Ukraine, and elsewhere, my literature-obsessed mind began to think about novels referencing wars, lead-ups to wars, and aftermaths of wars.

That mindset also had something to do with reading For Whom the Bell Tolls last week. Ernest Hemingway’s intense novel takes place during the Spanish Civil War, which pitted those loyal to Spain’s democratically elected government against Francisco Franco’s ultimately victorious fascists. (A war my wife’s late father, Robert Cummins, experienced as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.)

Hemingway — who covered the Spanish Civil War as a reporter and was wounded during the earlier World War I — uses For Whom the Bell Tolls to expertly touch on almost everything that makes many war novels riveting: death, injury, fear, courage, exhaustion, coping strategies, smart decisions, dumb decisions, poignant romances that blossom almost instantly, the psychological devastation of some survivors, and more. War novels are almost inherently dramatic, because the characters know they might lose their lives at any moment.

That’s certainly the case with Erich Maria Remarque’s heartbreaking A Time to Love and a Time to Die, in which Elizabeth and soldier Ernst meet during Ernst’s brief furlough and desperately try to condense a lifetime’s worth of a relationship into way too short a time.

Remarque also wrote several other remarkable novels with pre-war, war, and post-war themes — including Arch of Triumph, The Night in Lisbon, and of course All Quiet on the Western Front. Like Hemingway, Remarque had a visceral sense of war from his own experiences — as a soldier hurt during World War I and as an exile from his native Germany after being vilified by a Nazi regime that later brutally beheaded his sister Elfriede in displaced revenge against Remarque.

The Remarque canon also includes Spark of Life, a superb and sorrowful novel set in a World War II concentration camp — where much of William Styron’s beyond-sad Sophie’s Choice takes place as well.

Another author deeply affected by war was Kurt Vonnegut, whose darkly humorous Slaughterhouse-Five was inspired by the author’s traumatic time as a WWII prisoner. There’s also the satirical masterpiece Catch-22 by WWII bombardier Joseph Heller.

While it certainly helps to have firsthand military knowledge before writing a war novel, some authors manage to create excellent works without that direct experience. They include Stephen Crane, whose The Red Badge of Courage is set in America’s Civil War; and Dalton Trumbo, who depicts the physical devastation of Joe Bonham in his powerful antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun. Library research, visiting battlefields after the fact, and interviewing veterans are among the devices that help such authors.

Not surprisingly, fewer women than men write war novels — which reflects, among other things, usually having less combat experience than males (though that’s of course changing these days as more women enter the military). Still, some female authors have written about war and its toll as well or better than men. They include Willa Cather, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning One of Ours takes place during World War I; and Virginia Woolf, whose Mrs. Dalloway searingly conveys post-war stress via the shell-shocked Septimus Smith character.

Speaking of WWI, Larry Darrell in W. Somerset Maugham’s absorbing The Razor’s Edge becomes a spirituality seeker after a terrible experience during that century-ago carnage.

Many novels feature fictional wars, but the emotions of the characters who fight are much the same as those felt by participants in real wars. Among those books are J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (with its dramatic battle at Hogwarts), H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s depiction of warfare in his iconic trilogy was at least partly inspired by World War I experiences that included the almost complete wipe-out of his battalion while the future author was on sick leave.

More examples of real-life conflicts depicted in memorable novels: The Siege of Orleans and other bloody skirmishes in Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, The Battle of Bothwell Bridge in Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, The Revolutionary War in Robertson Davies’ Murther & Walking Spirits, the Haitian Revolution in Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising, and South Africa’s anti-apartheid fight in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story. I haven’t read any Vietnam War novels (yet).

What are your favorite novels, or other literary works, with war themes?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’ve also written more than half of a literature-related book, but I’m still selling my often-funny Comic (and Column) Confessional memoir — which recalls 25 years of covering/meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The memoir also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. I can be reached at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson, among others.

Our Favorite Friendships in Fiction

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Perhaps we remember the great romances more, but literature’s great friendships also provide us with many pleasurable reading experiences.

Fictional friendships — which are often more enduring than romances — can teach us, touch us, blunt our cynicism, and remind us of our own longtime pals. And if some of literature’s buddies have a falling out, the silver lining for readers is plenty of dramatic tension.

I love friendships of all types in literature, but my favorites are the ones that cross the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Those different-background relationships can be tricky in real life, so it’s especially nice to see them succeed in fiction.

One obvious multicultural pairing is Mark Twain’s Huck and Jim — a white boy and a slavery-escaping black man who gradually become close. Heck, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could have been called The Friendship of Huckleberry Finn — and we’re not talking about Huck’s interactions with the annoying Tom Sawyer!

There are also the unshakable comrades Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s five absorbing “Leatherstocking” novels. The final The Last of the Mohicans scene between the Native-American chief and the white hunter (aka Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder, etc.) is one of the most touching depictions of friendship in literature.

Or how about Uncle Tom and young Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Two admirable people who become interracial and intergenerational friends before circumstances turn tragic for each.

Another great example of friendship across age and class lines — this time with both characters white — is that of the working-class Mary and the older, more-moneyed Elizabeth in Tracy Chevalier’s historical novel Remarkable Creatures. Fossil hunting brings them together.

Mixed-gender friends? They include Jim and Antonia in Willa Cather’s excellent My Antonia, and none other than Harry Potter and Hermione Granger in J.K. Rowling’s mega-popular series.

Of course, many pals are the same gender and socioeconomically similar. One of the most memorable friendships in literature is between Jane Eyre and the sickly, religious, warmhearted Helen Burns (when both are kids) in Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel.

There’s also the prison friendship of Edmond Dantes and Abbe Farina in Alexandre Dumas’ rousing The Count of Monte Cristo, with the latter character doubling as a mentor; and the relationship between Dmitri and destined-for-prison Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment — though Dmitri does most of the heavy lifting after the initial stages of that friendship.

Or how about “kindred spirits” Anne and Diana in L.M. Montgomery’s marvelous Anne of Green Gables?

In novels of more recent vintage, Terry McMillan’s appealing Waiting to Exhale features four friends (Savannah, Bernadine, Robin, and Gloria); John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany depicts a fascinating friendship between John and the very original Owen; Margaret Atwood’s terrific The Robber Bride chronicles the many-year relationship between Roz, Charis, and Tony, all three of whom share an enemy; and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior includes the fun, satisfying friendship between Dellarobia and Dovey.

I haven’t even gotten into friendships between humans and animals in novels such as Jack London’s riveting The Call of the Wild and White Fang, Albert Payson Terhune’s poignant His Dog, and William H. Armstrong’s also-poignant Sounder.

Who are your favorite friends in literature?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else’s comment.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’ve also written more than 50% of a literature-related book, but I’m still selling my often-funny Comic (and Column) Confessional memoir — which recalls 25 years of covering/meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and various authors. The memoir also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. I can be contacted at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson, among others.