Month: March 2015

A Look at Loners in Literature

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One of literature’s major archetypes is the loner — a character who, happily or not, often goes the solo route.

Some loners are rather boring, which can happen when a person has minimal social interaction. But other loners are interesting and even fascinating. Why do they do things “their way”? What inner resources keep them functioning? How do things go when they encounter people? If they’re unlikable, we’re rather glad they don’t have a wider circle of friends and family. If they’re likable, they draw our sympathy.

Heck, a good number of real-life loners are drawn to literature — reading is usually a by-yourself thing — so they relate to their fictional counterparts.

Some people are of course loners by nature or choice, while others might be more gregarious types who find themselves out of the social loop because of betrayal, tragedy, or other circumstances.

An example from the nature/choice category is the title character in Toni Morrison’s Sula. She does for a time have close friend Nel, but mostly “marches to a different drummer” due to her intelligence, wanderlust, unconventionality, lack of empathy, and refusal to be confined to a racial/gender box during a more biased era.

From Sula to Silas: The introverted star of George Eliot’s Silas Marner has loner leanings, too, but is somewhat “of the world” until a betrayal by a close friend sends him into an emotional tailspin and hermit-like existence. Then…

Another kind of major disappointment (being jilted by her fiance) leads Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations to mostly withdraw from life.

Years of abuse, mistreatment by male authority figures, and more make the brilliant Lisbeth Salander a hostile loner in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and the two other novels in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

And the biggest blow of all — death — makes Gauri almost incapable of love as she sheds her two closest relationships in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. Gauri actually deals with two deaths: the murder of someone very close to her, and a different man’s murder she peripherally helped make happen.

The self-sufficient Jane Eyre of Charlotte Bronte’s novel is like Silas Marner in that she has social tendencies yet fate has conspired to often keep her solo. Jane grows up with a family that doesn’t love her, sees her best friend die, and gets engaged to a man with a devastating secret.

In current mass-audience literature, a quintessential loner is Jack Reacher of Lee Child’s adventure series. He’s unmarried, has no home, drifts around the country meting out vigilante justice to bad guys, and then, before getting very close to anyone, hitches a ride or takes a bus elsewhere. In Never Go Back, he does get into a romantic relationship, but…

Some of Reacher’s roaming is in the West (South Dakota, Nebraska, etc.) — which reminds me that the “western novel” is full of loner types. Among the countless examples are Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn of Charles Portis’ True Grit, Billy Parham of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, and early frontier protagonist Natty Bumppo of James Fenimore Cooper’s five “Leatherstocking” novels. Natty is only out west (Kansas) in The Prairie, but the woodsy New York milieu of the other four novels was wilderness in the 1700s.

Cornelius Suttree of McCarthy’s Suttree — a novel set in the South rather than the West — is another memorable loner. Like many of his type, he does have friends and a (temporary) romance even while going solo much of the time.

But some characters are just loners through and through, like the enigmatic Bartleby of Herman Melville’s famous short story “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

Certain circumstances almost guarantee significant solitude. For instance, some characters who would like to be liked are meanly ostracized (or they self-ostracize) because of their looks or mental situation. Examples include the overweight “nerd” who stars in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and the intellectually challenged Charlie Gordon in Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon and Boo Radley in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Also, between-performance solitude can be the lot of traveling entertainers — such as music-hall dancer Renee Nere of Colette’s The Vagabond and Sinclair Lewis’ corrupt preacher Elmer Gantry, who’s a performer in a way.

Loneliness is of course also felt by jailed characters, such as Edmond Dantes during his Chateau d’If imprisonment in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo — though Edmond does eventually find a friend/mentor during his solitary confinement.

Traumatic battle experiences can also push survivors into the loner camp, as with World War I veteran Larry Darrell as he searches for some transcendent meaning to life in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

And in apocalyptic novels where much of the human race is wiped out, some characters obviously have to become loners — whether it be “The Snowman” protagonist in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake or Lionel Verney in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.

In a related matter, there are also reclusive writers such as Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger, and the aforementioned Harper Lee, but that’s another story…

Who are your favorite fictional characters of the loner persuasion?

(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, Walter Cronkite, 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.

They Pass the Bar of Reader Interest

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Lawyers in literature. They file suits. They wear suits. They’re good. They’re bad. They’re honest. They’re crooked. They seek justice. They seek money. They appear in this blog post. They will not be paid for doing so.

But attorneys often give “zing” to fiction. We love them if they fight for social justice, and dislike them if they’re highly paid legal shills for big corporations. Plus many take part in courtroom scenes, which have plenty of dramatic potential.

Perhaps the most famous fictional attorney of them all is To Kill a Mockingbird‘s Atticus Finch — smart, compassionate, courageous, realistic, low-key. He was said to have been based on author Harper Lee’s admirable lawyer dad.

In the 55 years since Lee’s novel was published — and particularly in the past quarter century — there has thankfully been a huge rise in the number of female attorneys in literature. A big reason for this, of course, is the huge rise in the number of real-live women becoming lawyers; statistics show that they now comprise 34% of the profession and 47% of law-school enrollment.

So it’s no surprise to meet two female attorneys — Helen Sullivan and Tracy Edmonds — in the first 46 pages of Lee Child’s Never Go Back, one of the novels starring the feminist-leaning scourge of evildoers Jack Reacher. Then there’s Annika Giannini, whose defense of Lisbeth Salander makes for riveting reading in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest; and Reggie Love, who emerges from an abusive marriage to practice law with brilliance and empathy in John Grisham’s The Client.

There are also unsavory attorneys, and few novels have more of them than Grisham’s The Firm. That book’s law office (well, it’s sort of a law office) has an all-male roster of corrupt legal guys — of whom some are viciously evil and others sold out for the money and because they feared for their safety. But Grisham provides one (flawed) legal hero — the new attorney, Mitch McDeere, who weighs a very risky FBI request to take down the firm in The Firm.

Other hard-to-like lawyers (greedy, nasty, corrupt, etc.) include Mr. Tulkinghorn in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Guillaumin in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Luzhin in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Daniel Palmer in Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor.

Also, many politicians in literature (and in real life) began their careers as attorneys, and we know how unadmirable many elected officials are.

Of course, there are male lawyers other than Atticus Finch who are very or somewhat ethical and impressive. They include the unprejudiced attorney Boris Max who defends Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son, fingerprint expert David Wilson in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, environmentalist Walter Berglund in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, the ultra-skilled Perry Mason in the Erle Stanley Gardner novels, and the Clarence Darrow-like Henry Drummond in the Inherit the Wind play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee.

In a related matter, there are a number of novelists who are/were lawyers — including the aforementioned Erle Stanley Gardner and John Grisham as well as Lisa Scottoline, Meg Gardiner, Scott Turow, Louis Auchincloss, Sir Walter Scott, Henry Fielding, and Goethe, among others.

Which fictional attorney characters have you found the most memorable?

(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, Walter Cronkite, 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.

Reverse Chronology in Fiction (Or Maybe This Headline Should Be at the End of This Post)

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The start comes before the finish, right? That’s what I hear, but some literary works don’t follow that timeline.

Back in 2013 (which reportedly preceded 2015), I wrote a Huffington Post piece about how some fiction is chronological while other fiction jumps around via flashbacks and such. Today, I’m going to take that a step further by discussing literature in which you know the fate of the protagonist from the start.

That removes much of the suspense and story development, doesn’t it? Well, in a way. But things can still be interesting — sometimes even more interesting — when the conclusion comes first. We’re more alert to foreshadowing as we continue to read, and we’re curious how the protagonist gets to the “place” we’ve already witnessed. Plus we want to know why things ended up the way they did.

I thought about that last week while reading Camille — the novel by the Alexandre Dumas who was the son of the more famous Alexandre Dumas. Camille (originally titled The Lady of the Camellias) features the “courtesan” Marguerite Gautier, who is dead at the start of the book. Then the emotionally powerful story unfolds about how she lived her short life.

Camille was adapted for the stage and screen — two places where Betrayal also found its home. Harold Pinter’s play begins at the end of an affair and then backtracks to the start of that liaison — a stunningly effective device that adds to the reading or watching experience.

There’s also Susan Vreeland’s novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which traces a painting — and the painting’s profound effect on various people’s lives — from the 20th century to the 17th century. The scrolling back in time adds to the mystery and poignancy.

Or how about Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome? It’s not strictly “reverse chronological,” but we soon know that the title character has become physically damaged and very unhappy. The rest of the riveting novel goes back in time to explain how that came about.

There are also introductory sections set years or even centuries after the events in the novel unfold. For instance, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” essay that precedes his iconic The Scarlet Letter tells about finding — in the 19th century — a faded “A” that Hester Prynne wore in the 1600s. Also, Old Mortality first focuses on an 18th-century man re-engraving the tombstones of Covenanter martyrs before Sir Walter Scott starts telling the compelling 17th-century story of those deceased people who wanted to re-establish Presbyterianism in Scotland.

Many other novels, such as Margaret Atwood’s excellent Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, show middle-aged or old protagonists in the book’s present time and then flash back to those characters’ much younger years.

While this is not strictly on-topic, I also think of Graham Greene’s (very) short shocker of a story “Proof Positive.” Is Philip Weaver dead at the start of the tale? At the end of the tale? Or both? You can read it here.

What are your favorite works that start at the end? What are the pros and cons of literature with that kind of chronology?

Given that there might not be many examples of the above, you’re also welcome to name your favorite works that don’t necessarily begin with a concluding event but are non-linear (jumping back and forth through time via flashbacks or other narrative devices). Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five would be among countless examples.

(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, Walter Cronkite, 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.

One Reason to Like Recent Fiction

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I love classic literature that was written decades or centuries ago. But one advantage of more recent lit is that it features more women and people of color in prominent professions — such as medicine, law, academia, the media, and politics.

Older fiction has mostly white males as doctors, attorneys, professors, publishers, etc. — which of course reflected real life at the time. Female and “minority” characters tended to be homemakers, secretaries, laborers, craftspeople, servants, governesses, one-room-schoolhouse teachers, and so on — with many of them frustrated that societal norms didn’t allow them better job opportunities.

Obviously, long-ago classics featured some exceptions — including preacher Dinah Morris in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, journalist Henrietta Stackpole in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, and the title characters in Mark Twain’s historical novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones. But those cases were relatively rare — and the characters were often “punished” in some way for their prominence, or eventually became stay-at-home wives/mothers.

Which reminds me that Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables and its many sequels is a brilliant girl who later becomes a teacher and college student (in that order) — but then ends up as a homemaker. She is happily married (to Dr. Gilbert Blythe), a great mother, and an admired person who retains intellectual interests, but it’s all a bit disappointing after her early promise. L.M. Montgomery’s Anne novels were set during a time of more restricted gender roles, but the author did break the mold by having the title character in her semi-autobiographical Emily trilogy become a professional writer.

Sometimes, women and people of color in older novels fared okay if they were prominent in the arts or entertainment fields. For instance, while her life was by no means perfect, renowned opera singer Thea Kronborg did pretty well for herself in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark.

Accomplished women often felt/still feel that they have to choose between professional success and marriage/parenthood, while men have less trouble attaining both. That’s of course the case in fiction as well as real life.

Life can also be hard for the rare females and “minorities” who don’t know “their place” in novels written recently but set in earlier times. For instance, Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures co-stars amateur fossil hunter Mary Anning, whose expert 19th-century work was mostly dismissed because of her gender (and because she was working-class). Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising features Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, a brilliant military and political leader who couldn’t indefinitely overcome overwhelming odds.

Obviously, tons of recent books that are not historical novels feature women and people of color in prominent jobs. I’ll name just a few.

Female professors? In such works as Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs (Virginia Miner) and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride (Tony Fremont), while academics in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty include female prof Claire Malcolm and black prof Monty Kipps.

Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters focuses on several young Nigerian intellectuals in various fields, while Terry McMillan’s novels include African-American women such as Stella Payne (a stockbroker in How Stella Got Her Groove Back) and Savannah Jackson (a TV producer in Waiting to Exhale).

In the health-care field, we have pharmacist Zandy and psychiatrist-in-training Clarissa in Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company — among many other examples of medical people populating recent novels.

We also have attorney Reggie Love in John Grisham’s The Client, prominent law-enforcement agent Julia Sorenson in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novel A Wanted Man, computer wiz Kat Potente in Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, politician Alma Coin in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, and publisher Erika Berger in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy” (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, etc.).

Who are some of your favorite female and “minority” characters holding prestigious positions in both recent and older 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!)

—

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, Walter Cronkite, 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.

Presenting Protagonists Placed in Prison

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In last week’s post about author aliases, I mentioned a couple of writers (O. Henry and Voltaire) who spent time in jail. That gave me the idea to focus this week’s post on some of literature’s incarcerated characters.

Yes, I know all characters are imprisoned inside book covers or Kindles, and are sentenced to appear in sentences. But only some protagonists are actually caged in fictional slammers.

Being in jail can certainly make for dramatic, intense reading. Is the character guilty or innocent? A “regular” prisoner or a political prisoner? In a brutal facility or (if rich enough) a “country club” jail? On death row? A prisoner of war? Is racism involved? How is the detainee dealing with the loss of freedom? How long before release? Is an escape planned or possible? Etc. All of that can “raise the bars” in keeping a viewer glued to the page.

In Charles Dickens’ life and work, debtors’ prisons loom large. The author’s father was sent to one, and Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield and Mr. Pickwick in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club were also jailed for monetary reasons. Two fictional examples of how Dickens depicted and expressed his indignation at poverty and economic inequality.

Dickens’ pal Wilkie Collins wrote A Rogue’s Life, in which the protagonist ends up being shipped to a penal colony in Australia.

George Eliot’s Adam Bede includes the jailing of a despondent Hetty Sorrel after the young working-class woman abandons an infant born from her liaison with a rich squire. The prison scene between Hetty and preacher Dinah Morris, just before Hetty’s scheduled hanging, is memorable.

Rebecca is unjustly imprisoned for “witchcraft” in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe — a fate that also befalls a number of women in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which is set in 17th-century Salem, Mass., but is also a parable of the McCarthy era that saw many progressives jailed for their beliefs.

A jailed Canadian woman, accused murderer Grace Marks, is the focus of Margaret Atwood’s set-in-the-19th-century historical novel Alias Grace.

In France, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo sees the innocent Edmond Dantes banished for years to an island prison off Marseille. His escape is clever and riveting.

French author Stendhal’s Italy-set novel The Charterhouse of Parma has the young and charismatic Fabrizio sentenced to a 12-year term in a tower prison for a self-defense murder. But it’s really political and romantic intrigue that gets him locked up. Several months later, the two women who love Fabrizio urge him to try a highly dangerous escape to avoid possibly being poisoned.

Near the end of Herman Melville’s Pierre, the title character is jailed for murder in New York City, where he’s visited by the novel’s two main female protagonists. What happens in that cell to Pierre, Isabel, and Lucy is shocking, and reflects Melville’s despair at negative reaction to his poor-selling Moby-Dick masterpiece of the year before.

One of the most famous 19th-century novels with a prison element is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, although Raskolnikov’s Siberian jailing doesn’t come until almost the end of novel. Still, that conclusion conveys a compelling mix of painful punishment and future hope.

A later Russian writer’s book — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — depicts the unjustly held Ivan’s boredom, huge difficulties, and tiny satisfactions in a harsh Soviet gulag.

Then there are Holocaust novels, such as William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and Erich Maria Remarque’s Spark of Life, that show the horrors of those genocidal years by focusing on a few individual characters. Also, Billy Pilgrim is a World War II prisoner of war who somehow survives the bombing of Dresden in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Many other 20th-century and 21st-century novels have prison elements. Tom Joad is just released from an Oklahoma jail as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath begins. A huge South Dakota penitentiary is a major presence in Lee Child’s 61 Hours, starring Jack Reacher.

The way the U.S. “justice” system treats African-Americans more harshly than whites is all over literature, as can be seen in novels such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Tom Robinson is falsely accused of attempted rape, nearly pulled from jail to be lynched, and outrageously found guilty — before things get even worse.

Things aren’t always good outside the U.S., either. John Grady Cole, a teen cowboy from Texas, is thrown into a brutal Mexican jail for having an affair with a powerful ranch owner’s daughter in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, while the Spanish Inquisition prisoner in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” story is in danger of being executed in the most painful way imaginable.

Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison features crime writer Harriet Vane in jail on murder charges when she’s visited by amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Drama and love (?) ensue. Obviously, the mystery and detective genres have many a person locked up — as do dystopian novels.

Characters are also sent to prison for white-collar offenses, as is the case with Swedish journalist Mikael Blomkvist after his conviction for alleged libel in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Who are the fictional prisoners you remember most? What are the literary works with incarceration elements you remember most?

(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, Walter Cronkite, 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.