Month: June 2016

Great Novels With One Memorable Flaw

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There are novels we love that might contain one disliked — even cringe-worthy — scene, element, or subplot we could do without. But we still love the books…most of the time.

Why do some great novels have a memorable flaw? I hate to break this to anyone, but authors aren’t perfect. 🙂 It’s hard to do anything as difficult and time-consuming as writing a book without the occasional misstep.

I thought about this while reading Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That last week. The 2010 book is fantastic — perhaps the best 21st-century novel I’ve had the privilege to read. It’s exquisitely written, devastatingly sad, wickedly funny, and wonderfully inspiring as Ms. Shriver (this Lionel is a she) focuses on two star-crossed families, overrated consumerism, exploitation of the powerless, and the profit-driven mess of an American medical system (two characters have fatal diseases). Plus there’s pitch-perfect dialogue — including some amazing rants — from the novel’s memorable cast. And the tropical-island ending? Wow! But there’s one subplot about a botched penile enlargement that — while sort of germane to the book’s themes and something that indirectly brings two other characters together — is rather gross and not truly needed. Yet…what a novel!

Another health-crisis-filled book — Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper — has a disturbing plot twist near the end that’s very hard to take. A twist so disturbing that it knocked the otherwise-excellent novel down enough notches to make me doubt I was glad to have read it.

In Elizabeth Berg’s Open House, protagonist Samantha makes a humiliating/embarrassing attempt to give her unlikable husband oral sex many weeks after he had coldly left her — even though the novel had already made it abundantly clear that Samantha’s self-esteem was low at the time. Fortunately, Samantha more than got her act together by the end of the mostly great book.

One of the most famous examples of a clunky moment in a terrific work is the epilogue that ends The Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling’s seventh and final Harry Potter book. Those few pages showing Harry, Hermione, Ron, Ginny, and others 19 years later are rather tedious and awkwardly written. But Rowling’s series is so wonderful that the rare false note is okay — and, heck, the epilogue ended up inspiring the new play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

Turning to older classics, there are missteps in three outstanding novels by three giants of 19th-century American literature. Mark Twain’s iconic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn includes the repellent section in which Tom Sawyer treats the escaped slave Jim cavalierly. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables is magnificently moody and melancholy until the authorial gears switch to a happy ending that doesn’t seem right. Pierre proves that Herman Melville didn’t need a sea setting to write eye-opening fiction (the book features a possibly incestuous relationship), but Melville goes off the rails when his bitterness over Moby-Dick bombing with 1850s readers and critics caused him to have Pierre laboriously write a difficult-to-read book that’s greeted with total contempt.

Then there are terrific novels with memorable segments that would have been perfectly fine in smaller doses, but drag on too long. They include the death scenes of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, the wedding-day festivities in Emile Zola’s The Drinking Den, the orgy of eating in Honore de Balzac’s The Magic Skin, and so on.

What are some novels that you love even though they have a fairly major flaw? What is that flaw?

For travel and other reasons, I’ll be skipping a column the next two Sundays (June 19 and June 26), but still checking the blog from time to time!

(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.)

I’m 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 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.

You Don’t Need Historical Fiction to Get a History Lesson in Fiction

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Fiction offers readers many things: emotion, excitement, entertainment, etc. (The four “e’s”!) It also can offer readers a bit of a history lesson.

I’m not just talking about historical fiction (which I covered in this 2011 post) but the way many other novels can give us clues about the past in passing. The plot and characters are often in the forefront, but nuggets about the past (which might be the books’ present) are part of the background. Those nuggets can include references to inventions, social mores, and more.

An example would be some of the content in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, a wrenching post-apocalyptic novel I read last week. Published in 1957, the excellent book reflects Cold War fears of nuclear disaster as it focuses on how its Australia-based characters psychologically deal with the knowledge that a bombing-caused wave of radiation from the north will soon kill them all. But we find here and there, amid the main story line, tidbits of 1950s behavior and “values”: casual sexism (one male character frequently calls a female character “honey”), gender constraints (a highly intelligent woman’s only work opportunity seems to be secretarial), constant social drinking, etc. Kind of the Mad Men mentality.

There’s also some authorial sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and/or other “isms” in certain works by Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Jack London, Margaret Mitchell, and other writers of many years ago. (Sometimes casual background “isms,” sometimes not-so-casual background “isms” — even while the authors might be very enlightened in other ways, as Dickens was with his anger at poverty.)

Occasionally, novelists of bygone decades and centuries expressed clear opposition to those negative “isms” — as did George Eliot in Daniel Deronda, Kate Chopin in The Awakening, Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Alexandre Dumas in Georges, Richard Wright in Native Son, and Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Of course, there are still negative “isms” in today’s world, but authors tend to be more careful about not allowing the biases they might have to overtly appear in their writing. A case in point is Orson Scott Card, who has publicly been quite homophobic in his opposition to same-sex marriage but has not really shown that in his novels. And authors can obviously have their fictional characters be biased while they (the authors) are not biased themselves.

Then there’s interracial marriage being portrayed as not unusual in the background of relatively recent novels such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty — showing that times are changing somewhat for the better in certain ways.

Also in the tapestry of many novels are references to inventions, the urbanization of society, and other signs of progress or alleged progress. For instance, the railroad age is the canvas on which Emile Zola’s The Beast in Man is painted, horse-and-buggies are being replaced by cars in Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, and a long plane ride in aviation’s relative infancy is part of the mosaic in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

And novels from the 19th-century or earlier often show (as secondary elements) characters devoting whatever leisure time they have to reading, painting, playing a musical instrument, putting on shows, engaging in outdoor games, and/or doing other low-tech things when radio, TV, movies, and/or the Internet had yet to be invented. That can be seen in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and countless other works.

Meanwhile, the use (and sometimes abuse) of computers and other digital tools is a prominent background presence in more-recent novels such as Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

A poignant background element in some of James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking” novels (which include The Last of the Mohicans) is the encroaching of “civilization” on the verdant woods of 18th-century America. The way-back stirrings of feminism are felt in works such as Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The U.S. as a nation of immigrants is a subtext in novels such as Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. And America’s increasing Hispanic presence is felt in many novels — including some, such as John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, published many decades ago.

What are your favorite fictional works in which you learn a bit about long-ago social mores, inventions, and so on — even though the focus is on the plot and characters?

(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.)

I’m 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 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.