Month: May 2025

When Authors Insert Hurt

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My screen grab from the 2011 Jane Eyre movie shows the injured Rochester just after he struggles back onto his horse.

As I recover from a broken toe, I’ve thought about injuries in literature — many of them more serious than a broken toe. What first came to mind was Annie Proulx’s short story “Broketoe Mountain.” 🙂 Or was that “Brokeback Mountain”? 🤔

Injuries in fiction (whether accidental or deliberately caused by a malicious person) are often more than incidental elements in story lines. They can help shape a plot, offer insight into how stoic and resilient the injured character might or might not be, give a hurt character more time to do other things and think about things, etc.

Now I’ll offer a few examples, some of which I’ve mentioned in past posts.

There are two significant injuries in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Fairly early in the 1847 novel, Edward Rochester’s spooked horse stumbles when its rider first encounters new governess Jane, throwing him to the ground and badly spraining his ankle. Jane’s immediate reaction to this incident shows her skill as well as calmness under pressure, and Rochester being homebound during his subsequent recuperation gives him and Jane a chance to get to know each other — which leads to subsequent dramatic events. I’ll refrain from discussing the book’s second set of injuries to avoid a spoiler for anyone who has yet to read Bronte’s iconic British novel.

Across “the pond” four years later, American author Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was published. In the novel’s back story, Captain Ahab had part of his leg chomped off by the white whale of the title, and his obsessive pursuit of revenge against the massive sea creature is what drives the 1851 book’s plot.

In the much-more-recent Demon Copperhead (2022), the very-challenged-by-life title character of Barbara Kingsolver’s modern-day take on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850) suffers a severe knee injury while playing high school football — which becomes a big factor in his spiraling into the opioid addiction also afflicting many of his fellow residents of America’s Appalachian region.

U.S. soldier Joe Bonham of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1939) is horrifically/permanently injured by an exploding artillery shell during World War I, and his bitter thoughts in the time after that make for a devastating anti-war argument.

In Scottish author Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel The Daughter of Time, 20th-century police inspector Alan Grant is confined to a hospital bed with a severely broken leg. That enforced inactivity gives him the time and the avoid-boredom desperation to investigate the alleged 15th-century crimes of King Richard III.

Near the start of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, we see that the title character had been badly injured at some point. The 1911 novel goes on to heartbreakingly explain the love story leading to that.

When 20th-century Claire first meets 18th-century Jamie in Diana Gabaldon’s first Outlander book (1991), the Scottish warrior’s shoulder is dislocated. The time-traveling Claire, a nurse who later becomes a physician, expertly snaps the stoic Jamie’s shoulder back into place — illustrating the advances of modern medicine while getting the epic Claire/Jamie relationship started on the basis of mutual respect.

Parts of limbs are lost — in various tragic scenarios — in novels such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Stephen King’s Misery (1987), and J.K. Rowling’s seven (so far) Cormoran Strike/Robin Ellacott crime books published between 2013 and 2023. Those grievous injuries are all very relevant to the respective plots and shaping of the affected characters.

Physical injuries caused by domestic violence are a way for authors to convey how awful this violence is — with what happens in Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone (2018) just one of countless examples. And of course there’s also the psychological trauma inflicted by domestic abusers.

Two more book mentions:

I recently read Val McDermid’s Still Life (2020), the sixth installment of the excellent series starring brilliant, dogged cold-case detective Karen Pirie. In this installment, her nice/loyal/not-super-bright-but-learning assistant investigator Jason Murray is injured by a criminal suspect and ends up trapped in a locked basement.

And my own fiction/fact hybrid, Misty the Cat…Unleashed, includes some pages about my teen daughter Maria tearing her ACL in 2022 and getting reconstructive surgery because of a gymnastics accident. While the 2024 book was published before all the ramifications of this mishap would unfold, the tear/operation/rehab changed the course of Maria’s life: which sport she would switch to (crew), which university she would enter this fall because of getting recruited for that sport (Boston University), and which career path she would choose (the health-care field). Major injuries can do that.

Any comments about, and/or examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says in 2020: “This is not your typical municipal library.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

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 too many topics to list 🙂 — is here.

Briefly Rome-ing Through Italian Literature

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Last week I used the ascendancy of American-born Pope Leo XIV as an excuse to write about literature set in his hometown of Chicago. The new pontiff is of course now based in Vatican City, so I’ll use that as an excuse to write about literature set in…Italy. 🙂

I’m no expert on Italy, or on fiction by Italian authors, or on Italy-set fiction by non-Italian authors, but know enough to eke out a short blog post. 🙂 I’ve visited Venice twice, Florence once, and Rome once, and have read a handful of novels by Italian authors — of which these three are my clear favorites:

1. Elsa Morante’s History (1974), a gripping World War II-era novel about a beleaguered schoolteacher, her two sons (one VERY precocious), a beloved dog, and more in fascist-ruled Rome.

2. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously published The Leopard (1958), about seismic changes during the time of Italy’s 19th-century unification. Certainly one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve ever read.

3. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), a riveting historical murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery.

Some Italian literature I’ve read that I was not as fond of include Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum novel, Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter novel, and Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo book of linked short stories.

I have not gotten to Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy — a fact that is not divine and not comedic. 🙂

Then there are of course novels by non-Italian authors set or partly set in Italy/what is now Italy. Among those I’ve read are Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (starring a young Italian nobleman); Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (my favorite HJ work), The Aspern Papers (set in Venice), and Daisy Miller (Rome); Robert Grave’s I, Claudius (ancient Rome intrigue); Anthony Burgess’ The Kingdom of the Wicked (which also unfolds around 2,000 years ago); Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (about Michelangelo); Martin Cruz Smith’s The Girl from Venice (set near the end of World War II); Sally Vickers’ Miss Garnet’s Angel (Englishwoman moves to Venice for six months); and John Grisham’s Playing for Pizza (American quarterback joins a football team in Italy).

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this week’s theme? (After posting this piece, I realized I completely forgot that I had already written about Italian literature in 2022 — as in 2022 AD, not 2022 BC. 🙂 Sorry about that. This piece is somewhat different, at least.)

A note from Misty the cat: “Dave has a broken big left toe and can’t walk me for a while. My female humans Laurel or Maria are now taking me out every morning, but the daily videos you’ll be seeing for a while are ‘reruns’ filmed by Dave in years past, with new captions. The video below is from 2020.”

Misty the cat says: “Here I am in the ‘Up the Down Staircase’ movie.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

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 the impending departure of my town’s skilled CFO, New Jersey’s governor race, a section of a venerable fallen tree turned into a bench, and more — is here.

The Windy City Is a Written-About City

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Chicago’s skyline. (Photo by Kelly Liu/Getty Images.)

Newly named Pope Leo XIV was born Robert Prevost in Chicago, so that’s as good an excuse as any to write a blog post about novels partly or fully set in “The Windy City” off Lake Michigan.

With a population of more than 2.6 million, Chicago is America’s third-largest city after New York City and Los Angeles, so there were and are plenty of stories to be told in a Midwest metropolis known for its diversity, urban architecture, commerce, arts institutions, sports teams, etc., etc.

On a personal note, my wife Laurel Cummins (Happy Mother’s Day!) was born in Chicago. Also, I went to graduate school at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago in Evanston, Illinois. Needless to say, I often took the “El” to Chicago during that year, and have since visited the city several times.

One of the best-known novels with a Chicago setting is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a searing 1906 book depicting the struggles of its working-class characters and the horrendous conditions in the meat-packing industry.

Another Chicago-based classic is Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) — which, among other things, depicts the city’s very complicated racial dynamics.

Theodore Dreiser’s two best-known novels are mostly or partly set in Chicago; those books being Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).

Published during one of the years between those Dreiser books was Willa Cather’s 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, in which future opera singing star Thea Kronborg studies music in Chicago.

Then there’s W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1944), in which the traumatized World War I pilot protagonist is from Chicago.

A 21st-century novel — Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 bestseller The Time Traveler’s Wife — is an ode to Chicago amid its offbeat love story and frequent time-jumping.

The main character in Stephen King’s Rose Madder (1995) escapes an abusive police officer husband by fleeing to an unnamed big city that’s almost certainly Chicago.

Saul Bellow set a number of his novels in Chicago, but the only one of his I’ve read (Seize the Day) unfolded in New York City. 🙂

The title character of John Grisham’s 2012 baseball novel Calico Joe has a brief career with the Chicago Cubs.

I’ll add that while Eliot Asinof’s 1963 baseball book Eight Men Out is basically nonfiction, it does have some fictional elements. And the true story about eight Chicago White Sox players paid to “throw” the 1919 World Series for the benefit of gamblers is almost novelistic in its drama.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “Me eating. Birds eating. It’s a Sunday brunch frenzy.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

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 aging ice rink, a probably doomed-to-fail affordable housing plan, and more — is here.

Older Women, Younger Men, and a Newborn Blog Post

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As in real life, many novels feature couples consisting of a younger woman and a man older than she is. So it’s refreshingly different when the age gap goes in the opposite gender direction.

I most recently experienced this last week when reading Elin Hilderbrand’s excellent early-career novel Barefoot, which includes a man in his early 20s who has an affair with a woman in her early 30s during a summer in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The relationship works for multiple reasons, even as both characters’ life situations are rather complicated.

One of the best-known examples of this “genre” is Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which stars a divorced 42-year-old woman who finds romance during a Jamaica vacation with a man half her age.

Three-quarters of a century earlier, Colette offered a similar 40-something/20-something dynamic in Cheri — which was followed by The Last of Cheri sequel.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader features a 36-year-old woman (a former Nazi guard) and a 15-year-old teen boy. As you can imagine, things get rather fraught personally and politically.

Then there’s Harold and Maude — released as a movie and a Colin Higgins-written novelization of that movie at roughly the same time. In the film, which became a cult classic, Harold is about 20 and Maude is 79, with the “hook” that Maude has a more youthful personality and sunnier outlook on life than the morbid Harold.

Another novel lesser known than its film version is Charles Webb’s The Graduate, in which Benjamin has an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father’s business partner.

There are obviously many examples in fiction of a woman being only a modest number of years older than the man with whom she is romantically involved. For instance, the time-traveling Claire is Jamie’s senior by about five years in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books.

Of course, novels with an older man and a younger woman can also work, but it depends. One reason I found Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead kind of off-putting was because its elderly pastor was so much older than his wife. (He was sort of a fictional religious version of celebrities such as The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger and football coach Bill Belichick, who are both in relationships with much-younger women.) But somehow the romance between Jane Eyre and the two-decades-older Edward Rochester felt right — partly because Jane was emotionally and intellectually very mature for her age in Charlotte Bronte’s novel.

We will not mention what goes on in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita…

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “All those flowers are white? Trump’s anti-DEI efforts have gone too far.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

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 confusing proposed school district budget — is here.