Month: April 2015

Mismatches Aren’t Always ‘Mismatchy’

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In Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, married couple Shadow and Laura spend time together. Which is not surprising, except for the fact that she’s…dead.

Yup, relationships in literature can sometimes be strange, offbeat, unusual, unexpected, or improbable — making it seem, in comparison, like Felix and Oscar were kindred spirits in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. But drama or humor can abound when there’s interaction between people with very different situations, personalities, and demographics.

Most examples I’m about to give are nowhere near as extreme as Laura and Shadow’s “till death doesn’t do us part” union. But the relationships I’ll mention are still of the rather unlikely sort — albeit often positive.

For instance, there’s Queequeg and Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. A masterful black harpoonist and a fairly ordinary white seaman — raised thousands of miles apart in dissimilar cultures — who become pals after their quirky first meeting at a New England inn.

Or take the friendship that develops between elderly nursing-home resident Ninny Threadgoode and middle-aged visitor Evelyn Couch, who are not related and originally didn’t know each other in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Ninny and the stories she tells turn out to be life-changing for Evelyn.

Flagg’s novel partly looks back to distant decades, while Camille is set a short time after the death of Marguerite Gautier (“The Lady of the Camellias”). In Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel, an unnamed narrator and Marguerite’s former lover Armand Duval meet/interact in a non-ordinary way as the story of the late Gautier unfolds.

Another “diva” of sorts is opera singer Roxane Coss of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. When Roxane is among a group of people taken hostage for months, she has an affair with opera-loving, married businessman Katsumi Hosokawa — a pairing that could only happen in such an artificial situation.

Or how about the relationship in Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son? Beleaguered but resourceful protagonist Pak Jun Do ends up audaciously appearing at the doorstep of a famous North Korean actress (Sun-moon) to replace her military husband (Commander Ga).

Fictional relationships rarely get as unpredictable as that of married couple Henry and Clare in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. Henry bounces around in time, always staying an adult as he randomly encounters Clare when she’s a kid and when she’s a grown-up.

Back in the friendship realm, an against-the-odds bond develops between Kiki and Carlene in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty — unusual not because those two women are from different countries (the U.S. and England) but because their less-than-ethical husbands (one a white liberal and the other a black conservative) are bitter rivals in academia.

Then there are unusual work pairings, some of which can almost be friendships as well. For instance, in Charles Portis’ True Grit, Mattie Ross hires Rooster Cogburn to find her father’s murderer, and those totally opposite characters (female/male, young/older, straitlaced/dissolute, etc.) end up feeling a fondness and respect for each other.

Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are also friends in a way — even though Jeeves is the (much smarter) butler and Bertie is his employer in P.G. Wodehouse’s novels and short stories.

Humphrey van Weyden and Wolf Larsen are far from buddies in Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, but their relationship is fascinating as it evolves. The physically weak Humphrey is rescued from the water, and forced to stay and work on the boat captained by the strong, bullying Larsen…until the tables start to turn.

Some other seemingly mismatched relationships: English captain John Blackthorne and Japanese translator Mariko, who become lovers in James Clavell’s Shogun; lower-class white kid Huck and escaped black slave Jim, who develop a friendship in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; “deformed,” goodhearted Quasimodo and beautiful, compassionate Gypsy dancer Esmeralda in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame; and Nino and Giuseppe, half-brothers many years apart in age who share an affectionate but sporadic bond (Nino is not very responsible) in Elsa Morante’s History.

Also: white woodsman Natty Bumppo and the Native American Chingachgook, close friends in James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking” novels at a time when most settlers treated Native Americans horribly; brilliant, young, computer-hacking “punk” Lisbeth Salander and brilliant, middle-aged, somewhat-more-conventional journalist Mikhail Blomkvist, who have a complex relationship in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, etc.); and Dorothy, The Scarecrow, The Tin Man, and The Cowardly Lion in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Also: mismatched college roommates Walter Berglund (a friendly “nerd”) and Richard Katz (abrasive indie rocker) in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom; Professor Virgina Miner and non-intellectual Chuck Mumpson, who become attracted to each other in Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs; writer Paul Sheldon and his psychopathic fan, Annie Wilkes, who torments Sheldon in Stephen King’s Misery; religious, dying teen loner Jamie and popular, rebellious teen Landon, who have a poignant relationship in Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember; and Jackie Kapp, a jeweler from an immigrant family who gets to know famous New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson in Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant.

When it comes to far-fetched relationships, animals can be involved, too. For instance, there’s Pi and Richard Parker the tiger, thrust uneasily together after a shipwreck in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi; lonely lower-class farmer Link Ferris and high-class collie Chum in Albert Payson Terhune’s His Dog; and Mrs. Murphy the cat and Tee Tucker the dog, pals who talk to each other in Rita Mae Brown’s mysteries.

What are some of the most unusual relationships, friendships, and other pairings 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 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 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.

When Prose Is VERY Praiseworthy

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One reason we read literature is to enjoy writing that’s beautiful, flowing, evocative, and other good things.

Prose doesn’t have to be exceptional for us to like a fictional work. If the plot and/or characters are compelling, an adequate writing style can be perfectly…adequate. But a wonderful way with words sure is a nice bonus, whether those words are used to describe positive or negative scenarios.

So, I will discuss various authors and novels known for high-quality prose — including a beautifully written book I just read that’s not as well known as it should be outside its author’s home country. The Leopard was Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s only novel, and — in yet another example of publisher stupidity — it was rejected while the author was alive. But after The Leopard was posthumously released in 1958, it became Italy’s best-selling novel ever.

The book, set in 19th-century Sicily as Italy’s aristocracy declined and the country’s unification took place, has historical appeal and an engrossing cast headed by a charismatic prince (“The Leopard” of the title) who possesses a mix of admirable and less-admirable traits. But it’s the knockout quality of the prose that’s the chief attribute of the melancholy novel. Paragraph after paragraph of the writing is lovely, rich, deep, elegant, and more. A passage from a ballroom scene:

“They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor…”

One might not immediately think of dystopian literature as a place for gorgeous writing, but there’s also plenty of stunning prose in Ray Bradbury’s sobering Fahrenheit 451 — a novel that ironically depicts the burning of books filled with graceful verbiage. A passage about “fireman” Guy Montag when he starts to have doubts about what he does for a living:

“He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy.”

I won’t continue to slow down this column with excerpts, but will instead just name more authors and novels with exceptional prose. F. Scott Fitzgerald is an obvious example — in works such as The Great Gatsby (which includes one of the best closing lines in literary history), Tender Is the Night, and the unfinished The Last Tycoon.

There’s also Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose superb prose portrays romance in Love in the Time of Cholera and tackles just about everything in One Hundred Years of Solitude; and Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time thrills some readers more than others, but contains language most agree is exquisite.

Or how about the often challenging yet lyrical writing of William Faulkner, or the almost biblical prose of Faulkner semi-disciple Cormac McCarthy? The latter, in works such as The Border Trilogy novels and The Road, is almost incapable of writing an average sentence.

Mary Shelley’s writing can also be a bit dense, yet extraordinarily evocative in the novels Frankenstein and The Last Man. The same with A.S. Byatt in her multilayered masterpiece Possession, and with expert wordsmith Henry James — especially in The Portrait of a Lady and many of his other mid- and late-career works. Toni Morrison artfully mixes the colloquial with the highly literary in novels ranging from Sula to Beloved.

Edith Wharton offers very smooth prose in books like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, while James Hilton casts a writing spell in Lost Horizon and other titles. Erich Maria Remarque’s writing is also off the charts in All Quiet on the Western Front, Arch of Triumph, The Night in Lisbon, etc.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky? Obviously, it’s hard to beat the breathtaking way he crafted books such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

Another 19th-century classic, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, inspired Jean Rhys’ 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea “prequel” that reads like a lush fever dream.

Perhaps the best 19th-century stylist of them all was George Eliot, whose magnificently composed novels included Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, and Adam Bede.

Then there are authors known for very good prose who, in one novel, got their eloquence into an even higher gear. Examples of that would include Willa Cather in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Robert Louis Stevenson in his incomplete last work Weir of Hermiston.

Of course, there are other authors who write brilliantly in a spare way — such as Ernest Hemingway in the literary-fiction realm and Lee Child in the thriller genre (I just read Child’s Jack Reacher novel One Shot, and…wow! Riveting). But terse authors are another subject…

Before ending this piece, I should mention that some gifted authors overdo the florid prose — showing off their writing chops to such an extent that it might distract from a book’s overall appeal.

Which authors and novels do you feel are exceptional in putting words together?

(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 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 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’s Best Moms and Dads

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They’re kind, warm, patient, honest, tolerant, unselfish, reliable, entertaining, good listeners, occasionally firm but not smothering, and other positive things. Politicians? Not a chance. We’re talking about…great parents!

And who are the best mothers and fathers in literature? This blog post will name some of them — and all are members of the PTA: Parents to Admire.

Let’s start with that 3M person herself: Margaret “Marmee” March of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She’s almost perfect — which is a bit unrealistic but impressive. She holds her family of four daughters together through thick and thin while dad is away during the Civil War or musing philosophical thoughts. Marmee also has an even disposition (after some hot-tempered younger years), gives good advice, is not materialistic, engages in charitable efforts, and believes girls should be thoroughly educated — not a typical 19th-century attitude.

Another memorable mother from 19th-century fiction is Hester Prynne of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Even as she deals with her social-outcast status, she is a great single parent to Pearl — and allows her daughter to be a free spirit.

It’s hard to top the love and courage of the enslaved Eliza, who, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, makes a harrowing escape to the North with her young son Harry to spare him from being sold to a crueler master.

The brave and self-sufficient Helen Huntington also has the safety of her son in mind when she flees an abusive marriage in Anne Bronte’s early feminist classic, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Ma Joad of The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the supreme female creation of an author, John Steinbeck, mostly known for his male protagonists. The compassionate Ma (I don’t think her first name is mentioned in the novel) has a deep reservoir of toughness and leadership qualities she will need as the Joad family gets into increasingly difficult straits.

In Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Lee is a servant/housekeeper rather than a biological parent, but he’s essentially a father — and a darn good one — to the Trask sons.

Another non-parent who’s basically a parent is orphan Denise Baudu, who becomes a substitute mother to her two younger brothers in Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames.

Matthew Cuthbert, the adoptive dad of former orphan Anne Shirley in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, is shy and and socially awkward. But he is a sweet, gentle soul who gives Anne what she needs emotionally — and sometimes practically (we’re talking puffy-sleeved dresses here!). Matthew’s sister Marilla (Anne’s adoptive mother) is initially a tough cookie as parents go, until…

As fictional fathers go, few can match widowed lawyer Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Integrity is practically his middle name, and he mixes lots of low-key love and lesson-giving when parenting his daughter Scout and her older brother Jem.

A great single dad of more recent literary vintage is Subhash Mitra, of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, who becomes a dedicated father to his niece Bela after his activist brother Udayan is murdered by police (before Bela is born).

Then there are Molly and Arthur of the large Weasley household in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Those two parents are rather eccentric and disorganized, but somehow the family dynamics work. Molly and Arthur are also fun, smart, curious, and brave — all of which rubs off on their children.

I’ve of course just scratched the surface here. Who are your favorite great parents in literature? (And, if you’d like, you could also name the most memorable bad parents. 🙂 )

(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 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 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 Appreciation of Social Justice Literature

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Reading literature is often an escapist break from life’s grim realities — such as that appalling (now somewhat amended) new Indiana law allowing conservatives to deny service to gay customers under the guise of “religious freedom.”

But literature with a strong social-justice component can also be enjoyable, because fiction of that kind not only addresses festering problems but can also feature memorable characters, great stories told in a non-preachy way, and some humor. All that is often found in the work of authors such as Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Grisham, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and Emile Zola, among others.

I’ll add Jhumpa Lahiri to that list now that I’ve finished her 2013 novel The Lowland. The two previous works of hers I read — the short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies and the novel The Namesake — had some sociopolitical context but mostly chronicled the personal lives of their protagonists. The Lowland also focuses on a small number of specific characters — in a compelling (and melancholy) way — but devotes plenty of pages as well to India’s communist Naxalite movement against poverty and the government’s brutal response that includes the cold-blooded police murder of Lahiri’s fictional Udayan character. Udayan’s posthumously born daughter Bela also becomes an activist of sorts.

Famous novels with lots of sociopolitical context include — among many others — Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (anti-slavery), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (which exposed horrendous conditions in the meatpacking industry), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (which addressed severe economic inequality), Emile Zola’s Germinal (which chronicled exploitation of the working class — specifically miners), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (which envisioned a dystopia even more sexist and patriarchal than we have in real life), and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (which looked at homophobia during a time when the kind of anti-gay attitude displayed by some Indianans was much more the norm).

Those novels’ authors all wisely focused on how specific characters were affected by the prejudice, oppression, and other nasty things society flung their way.

Speaking of dystopian novels a la The Handmaid’s Tale, that genre is usually sociopolitical by its very nature. The question of “liberty and justice for all,” or lack thereof, is an undercurrent in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, and various other dystopian novels.

Barbara Kingsolver alone has tackled many important issues while creating three-dimensional characters who readers like or dislike. The Poisonwood Bible (evangelicalism, colonialism), The Lacuna (McCarthyism), Flight Behavior (climate change), etc.

The area of mental health? Addressed in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, among other novels.

Anti-war fiction also mixes wider issues with the stories of particular protagonists. To name just four powerful books: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die — the last being one of the most heartbreaking novels set in wartime you’ll ever read.

There are also literary works that are not war novels per se, but depict or reference armed conflict in some chapters. Examples include Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.

And then there are novels that depict the religious intolerance and hypocrisy that have such an impact on society — including nowadays in Indiana. Elements of that can be found in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (as practiced by Mr. Brocklehurst), James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain (Gabriel Grimes), and other works.

By the way, I’ve visited Indiana many times (my wife used to live there), and it’s a state with lots of great places and people. As with many other states, a minority of narrow-minded “leaders” and residents make things troublesome for everyone else.

What are some of your favorite novels with sociopolitical 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.)

—

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 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.