Month: January 2015

Literature Reflects Our Digital Age

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I love pre-20th-century fiction, but I’m going to ignore it today. That’s because I’ll be talking about literature featuring computers, email, cellphones, social media, and other manifestations of modern technology.

It’s a subject Jane Austen probably didn’t discuss on a smartphone, Charlotte Bronte probably didn’t text about, Mark Twain probably didn’t tell a Facebook friend about, and Tolstoy probably didn’t tweet about. Heck, the War and Peace cast has more than 140 characters…

Digital devices can appear casually in literature — a character writing something on a laptop, another character taking a photo with an iPhone, etc. — or they can be important to, or even central to, the story line.

Modern technology can certainly affect a plot. For instance, mystery authors of decades ago took advantage of the fact that potential crime victims might find themselves in very isolated situations. Now, potential victims could very well be toting a smartphone that could help them avoid mayhem.

While we might think tech began appearing in lit when the Internet became a mass phenomenon during the 1990s, computers of course were found in fiction — and particularly science fiction — well before that. A prime example is Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — in which HAL the computer plays a memorably important role. Computers are also in decades-ago books aimed at young readers, with one example being 1958’s Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Jay Williams and Raymond Arbrashkin. Man, that homework-helping computer was HUGE!

But the digital age especially permeates literature of the past 10-20 years. This is mightily apparent in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and the two other Stieg Larsson novels that feature major computer hacking by Lisbeth Salander, online research by her and others, and investigative stories and investigative books written on laptops. Tech stuff is almost as important as the human element in driving the story lines of Larsson’s page-turning trilogy.

Modern technology is also prominent in Lee Child’s riveting series of Jack Reacher crime thrillers. Worth Dying For, to name one title, has a pivotal scene where Reacher goes outside to retrieve a cellphone he had earlier grabbed from a bad guy — only to find himself in mortal danger from that bad guy’s just-arriving “boss.” Later, a cellphone conversation plays a crucial role in the 2010 novel’s shattering climax.

J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy (2012) includes cellphones, texting, and computers, too — making for a digital landscape that’s at first a bit jarring after reading Rowling’s magic-filled but almost tech-free Harry Potter series.

Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) opens with transcripts of emails that “introduce” readers to various characters. We learn something about Jerome Belsey (the emailer who’s staying with the Kipps family in England), about the Kipps (who will figure prominently in the novel), and about Jerome’s Massachusetts-based father Howard (including the fact that he’s too distracted, embarrassed, and self-involved to answer emails). Later in the novel, Howard the professor is very reluctant to switch from an overhead projector to PowerPoint — which symbolizes his becoming a has-been. (Not that he was ever much of a “was-been.”)

On a more positive note, Dellarobia Turnbow getting a job that includes some computer work is one example of how that rural, working-class, former stay-at-home mom gains confidence in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012). Also in that novel, computer modeling and online research help scientist Ovid Byron learn about the way climate change is hurting the monarch-butterfly population.

Another 2012 novel, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, includes a satellite-technology element crucial to the effort to try smuggling a prominent North Korean actress out of that authoritarian country.

Moving to the apocalyptic, we have Stephen King’s Cell (2006), in which cellphones don’t come off well. Neither does that novel; it’s one of King’s few mediocre efforts in the wireless or pre-wireless eras of his glittering career.

Last but not least, digital devices can also be a vehicle for humor. In Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company, for instance, protagonist Daniel Pecan Cambridge muses that his name is “D-control/spacebar” in the computer records of his therapist Clarissa — who, incidentally, once had her cellphone battery die at the same time her car battery died. What are your favorite literary works with modern-technology elements?

(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!)

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

I’m also 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.

Sports in Literature

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Just as there are double plays in baseball, there are two ways to talk about sports in literature. One is to discuss sports fiction itself, and the other is to discuss non-sports fiction that includes some athlete characters. This post will do both — the blog equivalent of a two-point conversion in football?

Heck, I’ll also mention literature that’s not sports-oriented and doesn’t have athletes in the cast, yet mentions sports in other ways — for instance, via a character who’s a sports fan. So this post will actually be sort of like basketball’s triangle offense or a hockey player’s three-goal hat trick.

I think you get the idea why the metaphors I overdid in the above paragraphs are not an Olympic event… 🙂

Among the non-sports novels with athlete characters are Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (which includes former college basketball player Patty Berglund), John Irving’s The World According to Garp (wrestler T.S. Garp), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (golfer Jordan Baker, inspired by real-life golfer Edith Cummings), and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire (boxer Paolo Roberto, based on real-life boxer…Paolo Roberto).

Football is the most popular pro sport in the U.S. while soccer (aka football) is the most popular elsewhere, but baseball novels often first come to mind when thinking about sports fiction. Some of the most famous titles in this category include Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (a very literary baseball book), Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (turned into the Broadway play Damn Yankees), and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (turned into the movie Field of Dreams, minus the novel’s J.D. Salinger presence).

Kinsella’s baseball novels also include the offbeat Magic Time and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

Among other notable baseball titles: William Brashler’s The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (starring a 1930s team of African-American players competing before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s racist color barrier), Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back (time-travel plot with a Mark Twain appearance), John Grisham’s Calico Joe (good but not as much of a page-turner as the author’s legal thrillers), and E.R. Greenberg’s The Celebrant (Jewish fan admires and befriends New York Giants pitching legend Christy Mathewson).

In addition, there are many lesser-known baseball novels aimed at kids and teens. One of my favorites way back when was Dick Friendlich’s Relief Pitcher — about a Major League infielder who is injured by a showboating rookie teammate, goes to the minors, returns to the Majors as a pitcher for another team, and ultimately takes the mound to face the showboater at a crucial pennant-race moment.

Another memory from my youth is “The Mighty Casey” — a terrific Twilight Zone episode, starring a robot pitcher, that was adapted into a print tale for Rod Serling’s Stories From The Twilight Zone collection.

There are nowhere near as many football novels as baseball ones, but perhaps the most famous gridiron fiction is Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty.

Why is some sports literature so riveting and popular? That kind of fiction is almost inherently dramatic — teams win or lose, underdogs sometimes triumph, egos clash, athletes do great or bumbling things, and those with mediocre talent might work hard enough to excel while those with immense talent might coast. Also, athletes flourish for a while and then fade because of age or injury — which can make for poignant scenarios.

Sports also get mentioned in literary works that are not really about sports and don’t have athlete protagonists. Zadie Smith’s On Beauty refers to a “cricket-club tie” worn by Monty Kipps that serves as another reminder of how that conservative academic possesses many more talents than his more liberal but equally annoying academic rival Howard Belsey. Don DeLillo’s Underworld recounts New York Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson’s famous 1951 home run — a real-life event that helps place part of that novel in a certain era and has an impact on the book’s plot and fictional characters. Also in the 1950s, young Irish woman Eilis Lacey experiences “America’s pastime” (like many recent immigrants did before) when accompanying her U.S. boyfriend to a Brooklyn Dodgers game in Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn.

What are your favorite literary works about sports, your favorite literary works that are mostly not about sports but have athlete characters, or your favorite literary works that just mention sports?

If you’d also like to mention your favorite nonfiction sports books, please do! Among mine are David Maraniss’s When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi (about the legendary Green Bay Packers football coach), Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (which depicts the Yankee great as anything but great as a person), Jane Leavy’s Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (about the iconic Dodgers pitcher), Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer (about the Dodgers when in Brooklyn), George Plimpton’s Paper Lion (in which the author “plays” quarterback for the Detroit Lions), and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four (one of the first books to depict — in an often humorous way — pro athletes as warts-and-all human beings rather than whitewashed, mythic figures).

(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!)

—

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

I’m also 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.

Authors as Landscapers

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The most crucial elements of most literary works are the characters, plot, and quality of prose. But another important element is the landscape: where things happen, what that place looks like, the mood that locale might create, and how that place might affect what’s going on with the characters and plot.

And when some of that aforementioned prose is used to describe “the scenery,” the description can be quite evocative in the right authorial hands.

Landscape is a key part of Lee Child’s 61 Hours, a Jack Reacher crime thriller I just read. Reacher unexpectedly finds himself stuck in a bone-chillingly cold South Dakota town — and the bleak, wide-open spaces in and near that town help establish the novel’s spare, tense, scary, lonely, downbeat vibe.

South of South Dakota — in Oklahoma — is where John Steinbeck depicts the parched, dust storm-decimated farm country the impoverished Joads are forced to leave in The Grapes of Wrath. When they finally arrive in California after an arduous journey, they are struck by the Golden State’s lushness and beauty — only to find that the oppressive rich control just about everything.

That contrast of beauty and misery also crops up in Herman Melville’s first novel Typee, in which the protagonist is stranded on a gorgeous South Seas island where some ensuing events turn ugly. (Another contrast is the fact that the good but not great Typee sold many more copies than Moby-Dick during Melville’s lifetime.)

Then there are the rolling, moonlit, windswept moors in Wuthering Heights that do so much to help create the novel’s wild, eerie mood. When Emily Bronte’s characters trudge through that terrain, their destinations usually aren’t happy ones.

Rivers? Literature has a few, with perhaps the most famous being the mighty Mississippi in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Also memorable is the Tennessee River in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, whose titular protagonist lives in a houseboat. The Tennessee is lovely in parts, but also speaks to the poverty and despair of some characters — as when a suicide victim is pulled from the water.

Mountains? Glad you asked! In Lost Horizon, various characters are flown to (the fictional) Shangri-La amid Tibet’s majestic peaks. That towering, remote, dream-like setting is a big reason why many readers find James Hilton’s novel so mesmerizing. Even more towering are the peaks in H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

Swamps? Mentioned in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Jungles? Parts of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. The desert? Um…Desert by J.M.G. Le Clezio.

Changes in scenery when traveling? A good example, in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, is when Brit-living-near-Boston Howard revels in the no-snow look of England when he goes there during the winter.

A landscape can of course be urban, too. In The Marble Faun, Rome is almost a living, breathing character as Nathaniel Hawthorne describes its beautiful but hectic 19th-century present and its beautiful but spooky ancient past. The excitement and claustrophobia of a big city like Chicago comes through in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. An amazing visual image in Jack Finney’s Time and Again is the Statue of Liberty’s torch-holding arm in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park, where that arm was actually displayed from 1876 to 1882 — before the full statue arose in New York Harbor.

Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand shows an English town’s landscape in both the populated 1900s and less-populated 1300s, depending on the century protagonist Dick Young mentally occupies in his drugged mind.

Other time-travel novels, such as H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, hauntingly picture future civilizations with architecture in partial or full ruin.

Science-fiction books, such as Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, feature the unfamiliar yet at times sort of familiar landscapes of other worlds besides Earth.

There are also devastating views of battlefields — during and after the fighting — in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, and many other novels.

Landscapes in literature can also convey a strong sense of nostalgia, as with James Fenimore Cooper’s descriptions of New York’s unspoiled 18th-century woods in novels such as The Deerslayer. Some of those forests were already getting cut down when Cooper was writing in the 19th century — and undeveloped areas are of course much more scarce today.

What are some of your favorite fictional works featuring memorable landscapes?

(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!)

—

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

I’m also 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.

It’s Hard Being Indifferent to Characters This Different

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Literature is filled with memorable characters, but which are the most original?

There are probably almost as many answers to that question as there are readers, so I’ll give you some of my picks and then ask for yours.

By original, I mean characters who have a rare set of skills, or possess an unusual combination of personality traits, or have done amazing things, or are unusually good, or are unusually evil, etc. They’re so original that it’s hard to find similar protagonists in literature, and so original that it’s difficult to find real-life people like them.

Given that I just finished reading Stieg Larsson’s riveting “Millennium Trilogy,” I’ll start by naming Lisbeth Salander — whose one-of-a-kind nature especially blazes forth in book two: The Girl Who Played With Fire. The 20-something Salander is under five feet tall and weighs less than 100 pounds, yet she can take care of herself against much larger bad guys — fueled by rage against all the wrongs done to her by men in high places. She’s antisocial, stoic, resourceful, a brilliant computer hacker, and more. Original enough?

Another 21st-century novel, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, features a North Korean character whose name is reminiscent of the generic “John Doe.” But Jun Do has a non-generic set of abilities. He’s a kidnapper (involuntarily), a radio operator, a learner of English, a hard worker on the lower rungs of society, and a survivor extraordinaire as he deals with physical and mental pain and deprivation. Then, to top it off, he audaciously manages to become a bigwig under a different name in an already existing family — and even gets his “wife” to watch…Casablanca!

Despite his part-African ancestry, French author Alexandre Dumas rarely featured black characters in his novels. One exception is the titular hero of Georges, which in some ways is a precursor book to The Count of Monte Cristo. The multidimensional Georges is cultured, educated, and has many hobbies and skills. His skin color allows him to pass as white, but he’s so outraged by racial injustice that he becomes a fierce military man leading a revolt against slavery on what’s now the island of Mauritius.

(As an aside, there are many similarities between The Count of Monte Cristo‘s Edmond Dantes and Lisbeth Salander. Both are falsely accused, both become rich, both are out for revenge, and both are very capable of exacting that revenge.)

Another 19th-century novelist, Jane Austen, gives us the impressive Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Anne is kind, smart, mature, cool in a crisis, adept at dealing with a difficult father and difficult siblings, and in love with a man — Frederick Wentworth — who’s self-made rather than born rich. While sad and frustrated for many years about her thwarted relationship with Wentworth, Anne doesn’t give in to despair despite being “old” (27) for an unmarried woman of her time.

Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back stars Sam Fowler, a 20th-century man thrust back in time to 1869 — where he joins the legendary Cincinnati Red Stockings. Sam is only so-so at baseball, but he has some boxing ability and lots of entrepreneurial instincts — even “inventing” the ballpark hot dog! And when he gets sick of America’s crappy 19th-century cuisine, he visits a Chinese neighborhood to pay a random resident to cook him some decent food. Sam also falls in love with the widowed sister of one of his Red Stockings teammates, and gets involved in major intrigue after meeting Mark Twain.

A few other nearly unique characters: Mattie Ross, the religious, fearless, stunningly mature 14-year-old who seeks to avenge her father’s death in Charles Portis’ True Grit; Wolf Larsen, the sadistic, handsome, and immensely strong ship captain who’s brilliant but not quite brilliant enough in Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf; and Cathy Trask, the amoral psychopath in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Also: Charles Strickland, the selfish, people-hating stockbroker who makes an astonishing career change to become a legendary painter in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence; Dinah Morris, a very rare female preacher for her time (18th-century England) in George Eliot’s Adam Bede; and Reggie Love, the brainy, brave, compassionate woman who rises above an abusive marriage and alcoholism to become a crack attorney in John Grisham’s The Client.

Also: Owen Meany, the small boy with a high-pitched voice and lots of smarts who predicts his own unusual destiny in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany; Oscar Wao, the nerdy Dominican-American who’s into stuff like cartoons and sci-fi before things get scarily serious in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; and Ignatius J. Reilly, the slobby, delusional, neurotic, narcissistic, modernity-disdaining “wise fool” in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

Who are some fictional characters you’ve found to be very original, and what makes them so different?

Thanks to everyone in 2014 who read my weekly blog posts, and left comments about literature and other topics! Those comments were wonderfully knowledgeable and friendly (and often humorous). This blog started on July 14, 2014, and by the end of the day on Dec. 31 there were 4,200 comments and 13,690 views from 85 countries during those five-and-a-half months.

(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!)

— For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here. I’m also 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.