Month: September 2014

Bad Marriages…We’ve Read a Few

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What is literature full of? Words, sentences, paragraphs, and…unhappy marriages.

And why not? There are tons of unhappy marriages in real life, and many fiction readers are fascinated by car wrecks — whether literal (dented vehicles) or figurative (dented relationships). Heck, authors are among the people in negative wedlock, and the adage is “write what you know,” isn’t it?

I just read E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, a 1930s-set memoir/novel in which young Edgar’s parents Rose and Dave “exemplify” several reasons why unhappy couples are unhappy. The too-practical Rose is frustrated in the way many stay-at-home moms were before the modern feminism era, while the free-spirited but at times irresponsible Dave has wider interests — one of which seemingly involves cheating on Rose. Also, Dave’s mother is very condescending to Rose, who not only bitterly resents that but resents Dave for not taking his mother to task for her attitude. Meanwhile, the family is slipping financially.

Yes, marriages can be troubled because of money problems, adultery, mismatched personalities, and many other reasons — including health issues, mental issues, and physical or psychological abuse.

The passive-aggressive Edward Casaubon is psychologically abusive to his young wife Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which also dissects the strained marriage between the ambitious Dr. Lydgate and the spoiled Rosamond Vincy. In the same author’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, the willful but basically decent Gwendolen Harleth marries wealthy brute Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt out of financial desperation — and disaster ensues.

Few authors depict wedded non-bliss in as astute a way as Eliot does.

Published a year after Daniel Deronda, Emile Zola’s 1877 L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den) sees a happy marriage between Coupeau and the hardworking Gervaise go sharply downhill when the former gets injured and becomes an alcoholic. Eventually, Gervaise…well, I won’t give away what happens to her, except to say that the abused wife in Stephen King’s Rose Madder ends up faring much better (with a little supernatural help).

Societal racism can also weigh heavily on a marriage that might have been happier in a more unbiased world. That weight is certainly apparent with couples in novels like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

While the male half of a couple is often most at fault in literature, that’s not always the case. For instance, Cathy is amoral while Adam Trask is merely clueless in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and the hypochondriacal Zeena is much less sympathetic than the taciturn title character in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. Wharton also created another unlikable woman in The Custom of the Country‘s social-climbing Undine Spragg, who badly treats her first husband Ralph Marvell.

Here are a few of the countless other fictional works with somewhat or very troubled marriages, of long or short duration: Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, Graham Greene’s short story “The Basement,” Henry James’ The American, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behavior, W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, and Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection.

This blog post focused on heterosexual marriages because gay marriage is relatively new enough to not yet appear in a lot of novels (as far as I know). And I didn’t discuss not-wed couples in order to keep this post a manageable length! Besides, it’s often easier to get out of a bad relationship than a bad marriage.

Which unhappy marriages do you remember most 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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

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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 and 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 people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

An Array of Activist Authors

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There are loner authors who do little but write during their working hours, and then there are activist authors who spend a fair amount of time on various causes that are important to them. This post is about that second group of fiction writers, living or dead.

Looking outward can be a mixed bag for activist authors. The time they spend advocating for various things can siphon valuable hours from writing, perhaps make their fiction too polemic for some readers’ tastes, and/or turn off some politically opposite readers even if the fiction doesn’t get strident.

On the other hand, being an advocate can enrich authors’ literary output by giving their works more passion and more of a seen-it-firsthand foundation, and by making their fictional characters more vivid and realistic because activist authors meet many more people than reclusive authors do. Also, the advocacy of authors can engender intense loyalty from their ideological soul mates among readers.

Of course, working for causes isn’t admirable if the causes aren’t admirable. A case in point is the way Orson Scott Card of Ender’s Game fame has spent lots of time ranting against same-sex marriage — making him a “poster child” for anti-human-rights blather. But many Card fans say his homophobia isn’t noticeable in his fiction.

Activism obviously takes many forms, and I’m going to mostly discuss activist fiction writers of the liberal persuasion. But please feel free to also mention conservative authors in the comments section below.

I’ll start with Upton Sinclair, who spent nearly two months working incognito as a meatpacking plant worker to help research The Jungle novel that exposed the horrendous, unsanitary condition of those plants. Nearly three decades later, another example of Sinclair’s activism would be his campaign for governor of California.

Then there are the fiction writers who, in wartime, help the wounded (as Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman did during the American Civil War), work as journalists (as Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway did during the Spanish Civil War), or even participate in military action at an older age than the typical fighter (as George Orwell did during the Spanish Civil War). In some cases, those actions directly result in a novel (like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls) or nonfiction book (like Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia).

Parker’s sympathetic writing about Spain’s anti-fascist forces for a leftist magazine, along with her other political work over the years, eventually got the humorist/short-story writer/screenplay writer blacklisted by Hollywood movie bosses during the McCarthy era — affecting her work in that way. And right-wingers were surely not pleased to learn that Parker, who died in 1967, bequeathed her estate to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaking of civil rights, one example of South African author Nadine Gordimer’s anti-apartheid activism was helping to edit the famous “I Am Prepared to Die” courtroom speech that Nelson Mandela gave in 1964 before being sentenced to his long prison term.

Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize-winning author of the novel The Interpreters and other works, was also a political prisoner, in Nigeria. He was denied writing implements in jail — hardly conducive for an author to continue one’s career — but still managed to compose some poems, among other creations.

In the French literary realm, Victor Hugo went into exile after criticizing Napoleon III’s autocratic regime, and Emile Zola fled to England in 1898 after authorities targeted him for taking his public “J’accuse” stand against the anti-Semitic railroading of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus. Zola’s courage may not have greatly affected his novel writing (which had creatively peaked between 1877 and 1890), but it could have affected his life: Zola’s 1902 asphyxiation death from a blocked chimney may have been retaliatory rather than accidental.

Among the many other past and present authors who have been activists in deed or speech include Douglas Adams (animal rights), Margaret Atwood (feminism, the environment), Margaret Drabble (anti-war, anti-imperialism), Alice Walker (civil rights, anti-war), Rita Mae Brown (civil rights, anti-war, gay rights, feminism), Arundhati Roy (anti-globalization, anti-imperialism, anti-nuclear power), Stephen King (pro-gun control, pro-higher taxes for the rich, anti-Tea Party), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (anti-czar, anti-serfdom), Booth Tarkington (served a term as a Republican legislator in Indiana), Norman Mailer (ran for mayor of New York City), and Gore Vidal (ran for U.S. Congress).

Many authors in the above paragraph, and in this blog post as a whole, were involved with other causes in addition to those I mentioned. And the very act of writing certain books is activism, with an obvious example being Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Who are some of your favorite activist authors? (As noted earlier, I named mostly liberal ones but you’re welcome to name conservative ones, too.) As an optional question, do you think author activism is a good, bad, or mixed thing — and why?

(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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

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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 people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Fiction and Nonfiction Writers Can Be One and the Same

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Many notable novelists have also written nonfiction books — and that’s a fact. So while this blog usually focuses on fiction, I’m expanding things today to discuss some memorable nonfiction books penned by literary lions and lionesses.

I thought about this topic last week while reading My Family and Other Animals, a very funny memoir of the boyhood years British naturalist Gerald Durrell spent on a Greek island with his mother and siblings. The adult Durrell became better known for his nonfiction than fiction, but I’ll turn that around and mention writers better known for their fiction than nonfiction — one of whom was Gerald’s brother Lawrence Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet fame.

Obviously, some great novelists can write nonfiction books that are almost as compelling and readable as the best literature. One expert at that was Mark Twain, who’s a legend for fictional works such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but penned terrific nonfiction as well.

My favorites in Twain’s factual canon are The Innocents Abroad, which is the funniest travel book I’ve ever read; and Life on the Mississippi, which is partly a river’s history and partly a memoir of the young Samuel Clemens’ stint as a riverboat pilot before the Civil War.

John Steinbeck, a novelist icon of the 20th century, also wrote nonfiction works such as Travels With Charley — a touching book about seeing America with his dog, and a revealing book about an America partly going to the dogs (though Travels does contain some optimism).

There have been questions about whether Steinbeck fictionalized certain sections of Travels, an uneven book with both excellent and so-so moments. But memoirs and other nonfiction often contain at least some of the “imagination” fiction writers excel at, even as most fiction has at least some basis in reality.

Also, many fiction writers are as skilled as nonfiction writers at doing research; indeed, many novelists spend countless hours unearthing and confirming the facts that help make their books believable. Steinbeck certainly did tons of research before writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Another major 20th-century author best known as a novelist was Richard Wright, whose riveting Native Son is his fictional masterpiece. But he also wrote plenty of nonfiction, including the famous memoir Black Boy.

One of the living novelists who has occasionally veered into nonfiction territory is Barbara Kingsolver. Her co-authored book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle — about eating more locally grown foods — may not be as compelling as her fiction, but it’s quite informative and engaging.

Among the many, many other present or past novelists who have also written nonfiction books (with just a few examples of those books in parentheses) are Isabel Allende (Paula), Isaac Asimov (The Egyptians), Margaret Atwood (In Other Worlds), Alexandre Dumas (A Year in Florence), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Clandestine in Chile), Zora Neale Hurston (Dust Tracks on a Road), Stephen King (On Writing), W. Somerset Maugham (The Summing Up), Sir Walter Scott (The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte), Alice Sebold (Lucky), Leo Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God Is Within You), and David Foster Wallace (his Consider the Lobster collection).

What are your favorite nonfiction books by authors best known for their fiction? And, if you’d like, you could also name your favorite nonfiction books by authors who rarely or never wrote fiction.

(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.)

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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.

A Look at Young Protagonists in Literature

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With the school year underway, kids are on the minds of many — including book lovers. So, our subject this week is literature’s most memorable young characters (from babies to teens).

I just finished Elsa Morante’s History, and Giuseppe in that magnificent/heartbreaking novel is one of the most adorable, engaging, precocious, well-drawn kids I’ve ever encountered in fiction. This is especially amazing because he was conceived when a German soldier raped his Italian mother Ida — after which she and Giuseppe spend the rest of World War II suffering additional privations such as the loss of their bombed home, near starvation, and Ida’s constant fear that her half-Jewish ancestry would be discovered by the Nazis. (All that horror, combined with a hereditary condition, does eventually affect Giuseppe’s psyche and health.)

Obviously, the vast majority of young people in literature don’t have to go through those things. Readers can enjoy the innocence of many kid characters, hope those characters turn out okay when older, cringe if they get jaded or go bad, and be reminded of their own childhood and/or their own kids and grandkids.

Another unforgettable child in fiction is Anne Shirley, who’s an 11-year-old orphan when we first meet her in Anne of Green Gables. Brainy, friendly, funny, needy — Anne has captivated readers since L.M. Montgomery’s novel was first published in 1908. Heck, a late-in-life Mark Twain said Anne is “the dearest, most moving, and most delightful child since the immortal Alice.” That of course being Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland-visiting Alice — another enduring kid in lit.

Montgomery created a second memorable girl in her semi-autobiographical Emily trilogy, whose title character becomes a writer.

Among the many other young females who strongly resonate in literature are the four diverse sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women; the bright, frustrated Maggie Tulliver, who’s initially nine years old in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss; the mistreated, resilient Celie when a teen in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; the neglected, loyal Florence in Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son; the iconic Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; and the offbeat, perceptive Pearl — daughter of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

The young Owen Meany is also offbeat and perceptive in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Other compelling boys in lit include Charlie, the beleaguered teen son of a semi-crazy dad in Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast; Twain’s entrepreneurial, bossy, annoying, sometimes admirable Tom Sawyer; and the more likable Huck Finn, a secondary character in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before taking the spotlight in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Speaking of annoying, the kidnapped boy in O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” story is so grating that the kidnappers have to pay his father to take him back! Now that’s a memorable young character.

Other great literary creations include the intelligent, buffeted-by-tragedy fraternal twins — impulsive Rahel and mute Estha — in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; and the destined-to-meet Yuri Zhivago and Lara during their adolescent years in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

The seven Harry Potter books are of course chock-full of distinctive young people: the brave Harry, the brilliant Hermione Granger, the affable Ron Weasley, the hilarious Weasley twins, the spacey Luna Lovegood, the spoiled Dudley Dursley, the often-brutish Draco Malfoy, the at-first-downtrodden Neville Longbottom, etc.

Children’s books also have tons of interesting kid protagonists, but that could be the subject of a whole other blog post. So The Cat in the Hat‘s Sally and her brother get only a brief Seussical mention here.

Who are your favorite young characters in YA or grown-up 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.