An internment camp in Idaho for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

It’s quite intense when fictional characters who are in love disappear from each other’s lives. So many questions evoked: Why did they get separated? How long will they be apart? Will they ever get back together? If so, how will that come about? If not, why not? All this can make for page-turning, emotionally wrenching novels.

I experienced this again last week when reading Jamie Ford’s heartwarming/heartbreaking 2009 novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which focuses on Chinese-American preteen boy Henry Lee and Japanese-American preteen girl Keiko Okabe in the months after they meet in Seattle in 1942. They develop a charming relationship amid anti-Asian prejudice that’s especially virulent against Japanese-Americans at a time when the U.S. and Japan were on opposing sides during World War II.

Then, Keiko and her family are forced to move, along with other innocent Japanese-Americans, to a bleak internment camp in Idaho. She and Henry manage to stay in touch for a while until their relationship is sabotaged (we learn how that happened late in the book) and the two go on to have totally divergent lives with no contact at all. Then Henry, who married someone else, becomes a widower in the mid-1980s. Will he and Keiko find each other again? (During a time when the Internet, and its search-for-people possibilities, was not a general-public thing.)

Through these two characters, author Ford (who is partly of Chinese descent) makes us deeply feel the injustice of what was done to loyal Japanese-American citizens during WWII. And I couldn’t help thinking of the blatant racism that spared most (not all) white German-Americans and white Italian-Americans from also being wrongly put in custody, even though the countries of their ancestry were at war with the U.S., too.

Speaking of white Europeans, we have the English characters Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. They’re engaged until things get broken when the young, not-yet-mature Anne is persuaded by interfering family and friends that Wentworth doesn’t have high enough social status. Eight years later, the two meet again. Will things work out this time? My favorite Austen novel.

In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre classic published three decades later, we have the famous rupturing of the Jane/Edward Rochester relationship. They are subsequently apart for about 10 months (a 10 months in which a LOT happens) until…

A novel written in the 20th century but set in the 19th features an unconsummated “affair” between Newland Archer and the free-spirited Ellen Olenska even as Newland is engaged and then married to the conventional May Welland. This is in Edith Wharton’s memorable The Age of Innocence. After May’s death nearly three decades later, Newland has the chance to see Ellen again. The ending surprised me.

Circling back to World War II, a key relationship in Herman Wouk’s gripping War and Remembrance is between Byron and his Jewish wife Natalie. The two are parted as Byron serves in the U.S. Navy, and further parted when Natalie — through a series of events too complicated to summarize here — ends up in a Nazi concentration camp despite being an American. Will she survive?

Reunions don’t always occur, or, when they do, don’t always result in “happily ever after” endings. While I don’t want to give specific spoilers, not every situation I discussed above concluded as pleasingly as readers might have hoped. But others finished in a more upbeat way.

Examples fitting the theme of this post?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about an unfortunate intra-town lawsuit and a great cat cafe — is here.

Josephine Tey (credit: Sasha/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

One of the many reasons we read literature is to get a sense of the past. Some fictional characters are quite interested in the past as well.

I just finished Josephine Tey’s intriguing 1951 novel The Daughter of Time, which features a hospitalized 20th-century Scotland Yard inspector who’s ultra-bored as he recovers from a badly broken leg and other injuries. Alan Grant eventually gets immersed in the late 1400s — specifically in sleuthing (via old documents brought to him) whether or not King Richard III was a murderer. Fascinating to try to solve a mystery involving people dead for hundreds of years, and Tey also has lots to say about historical-writing bias that reflects the perspective of “the winners.”

There’s an even bigger time gap in Daphne du Maurier’s haunting 1969 novel The House on the Strand, in which 20th-century guy Dick Young takes a drug to repeatedly go back to the 1300s — becoming engrossed in the goings-on of that period (to the detriment of his life in modern times).

Visiting the past is also a thing in Octavia E. Butler’s powerful 1979 novel Kindred, in which 20th-century Black writer Dana Franklin is involuntarily thrust back in time to America’s slave-holding South. There the young Californian meets her ancestors, Black and white, and one of the plot points involves Dana trying to ensure that she’ll end up eventually being born and existing in her own time. Butler of course has plenty to say about racism, too.

One of the highlights of another time-travel work — Diana Gabaldon’s page-turning, still-ongoing Outlander series — involves 20th-century physician Claire Randall doing research as she considers a return to 18th-century Scotland. That’s where Claire met and married Jamie Fraser before she had to return to the 1900s, pregnant with their child. Claire, assisted by her now-grown daughter and future son-in-law, uses historical records to try to determine whether Jamie is still alive at a certain point of the 1700s and, if so, where in Scotland he might be.

A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession, which I recently discussed in another blog post, features two 20th-century academics studying two 19th-century poets (a woman and a man) and whether they had a romantic relationship. The academics don’t physically go back in time, but their minds are certainly focused there for much of the book.

The nameless narrator of Henry James’ absorbing 1888 novel The Aspern Papers is also interested in a dead 19th-century poet (Jeffrey Aspern) as he uses subterfuge to try to get access to Aspern’s old papers from the late poet’s now-aged lover.

Fiction you’ve liked in which the characters are very interested in the past?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a welcome reelection bid, a squandered hate-crime grant, a great high school concert, and more — is here.

Sometimes, the subject matter of a novel is almost too painful to read. But if the book is good, we read it nonetheless.

Why? We might admire the storytelling, like the author’s writing style, relate to the characters, learn a lot, think about our own lives and the lives of people we know, and get a needed reminder of how much sadness and inhumanity there is in the world — which exercises our empathy muscles. Also, a painful novel might offer a bit of hope and inspiration, via some silver linings in the plot and/or the courage and resilience of certain characters. Plus some truly nasty characters might get their comeuppance. (Or might not.)

My latest experience with a gut-wrenching work of fiction came last week when I read John Grisham’s riveting 2010 novel The Confession, which tells the ultra-depressing tale of a Black teen put on Death Row in Texas after being framed by law enforcement for a murder a white man committed. Such an agonizing scenario that I almost put down the novel in despair, especially when I sensed that the pulls-no-punches Grisham was going to again give his readers a sad or mixed ending. But I kept on — admiring Grisham’s suspenseful writing and his fury at the injustice rampant in America’s legal system…and his fury at spineless, amoral politicians.

I had a similar reaction a few years ago to Angie Thomas’ excellent The Hate U Give — a novel I’ve discussed here before that focuses on the plucked-from-the-headlines killing of a young Black man by a trigger-happy white cop, and the reaction to his death by his (female) friend and the community at large.

More recently, I read and wrote about Rohinton Mistry’s India-set A Fine Balance, which had many excruciating moments of the powerful making life miserable for the powerless but was crafted so well I had no thought of stopping.

Of course, novels about war, genocide, slavery, a pandemic, and so on will make readers despondent but glued to the pages if the books are good enough. I’m thinking of titles such as Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Albert Camus’ The Plague, to name just four novels among many.

And, yes, dystopian works like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy are simultaneously hellish and very compelling.

In an ideal world, we would hope that enough people perusing painful books might help (through reader change of heart, activism, etc.) lead to a society where fewer painful things happen. Perhaps wishful thinking, but…

Your thoughts about this topic, and any examples you might have of distressing novels you’ve read or tried to read?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a welcome mayoral candidate, no teacher layoffs, an overpaid township manager, and more — is here.

Who IS this guy? You’ll find out near the end of the post. 🙂

It’s 2024, and time for me to again mention novels reaching significant anniversaries in a new year. I’ll discuss books I’ve read, and also list some of the ones I haven’t read. Let’s start with fiction published in 1999 — a quarter century ago.

That year saw the eagerly awaited arrival of the third installment of J.K. Rowling’s mega-popular Harry Potter series. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is considered by many to be the first- or second-best book in the seven-book series, and I feel the same way.

Also released in 1999 were Kent Haruf’s poignant Plainsong, Andre Dubus III’s intense House of Sand and Fog, Stephen King’s suspenseful The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, John Grisham’s compelling The Testament, Ha Jin’s affecting Waiting, Nicholas Sparks’ heartbreaking A Walk to Remember, Susan Vreeland’s engrossing Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s absorbing Pulitzer-winning story collection Interpreter of Maladies.

Among the notable ’99 novels I haven’t read are Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Joanne Harris’ Chocolat (I did see the delightful movie version of the latter book).

Moving on to 1974 — a half-century ago! Published that year were Elsa Morante’s amazing novel History, the aforementioned Stephen King’s eye-opening debut Carrie, Peter Benchley’s “biting” Jaws (I seem to remember a certain blockbuster film it inspired), and Thomas Tryon’s underrated Lady.

Some of the notable ’74-released books I haven’t gotten to include James Michener’s Centennial, James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, John Nichols’ The Milagro Beanfield War, Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, and John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

I should also mention a couple of iconic 1974 nonfiction books I read: Robert Caro’s jaw-dropping tome The Power Broker, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s political classic All the President’s Men.

Now, let’s go back a century. Perhaps the most famous 1924-released novels are E.M. Forster’s culturally complex A Passage to India and Herman Melville’s posthumously published stunner Billy Budd, both of which I’ve read.

Among the 100-years-ago books I haven’t gotten to are Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste, and Joseph Roth’s Hotel Savoy.

In 1874, 150 years ago, we had Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, among other novels.

Two centuries ago? The only 1824 novel I could find that’s somewhat remembered today is one of Walter Scott’s lesser-known titles: Redgauntlet.

Two-hundred-fifty years ago saw the publication of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famous The Sorrows of Young Werther. The author (pictured atop this page) was just in his mid-20s in 1774!

Your thoughts about this post? Also, I’m sure I missed some books, so please name any you’d like. 🙂

One last thing: Below is a screen grab from the back end of my blog showing some stats from 2023. Thanks so much to everyone who read my weekly posts and commented under them! I loved the conversations. 🙂

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — a lament about my community’s Township Council — is here.