The former Ogre-in-Chief. (Photo by Seth Wenig/Associated Press.)

A successful novelist and her agent meet for lunch, and the author mentions an idea she has for the main character in her next book.

“Get this,” says the novelist. “The protagonist is a former President of the United States who illegally brings sensitive White House documents to his palatial resort home in Florida, where the papers could be eaten by retired crocodiles in nearby condos.”

“He took those important papers with him after leaving office? Ridiculous plot device,” replies the agent. “No ex-POTUS would ever do that. Suspension of belief is one thing, but that’s more bonkers than Yonkers.”

“Where some of those crocodiles retired from. How about if I make the novel science fiction? After all, sci-fi author Ray Bradbury wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

“That’s what decent-minded Floridians said when Donald Trump headed to their state in 2020,” recalls the agent. “Still, I’m not convinced your protagonist is credible.”

“Also,” the author pushes on, “my protagonist disputes the results of the presidential election he clearly lost by a wide margin, and most members of his political party disgustingly support that brazen undemocratic nonsense.”

“Readers will laugh in your face at something that implausible. And many won’t be wearing COVID-prevention masks…”

“How about if I make the novel a fantasy? You know, like The Lord of the Rings, only the rings are very tiny because the protagonist has very tiny hands.”

“Hmm…tell me more.”

“The ex-POTUS aligns himself with an evil Sauron-like figure named Putt-in, who shares the former President’s penchant for golf instead of work — though Putt-in does find the time to invade a neighboring golf course.”

“I just can’t accept the idea of a former U.S. president vile enough to ride AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ so quickly there’d be no time for Satan to prepare a welcoming brunch of toasted bagels. VERY toasted bagels.”

“Maybe YOU should write a novel,” replies the author. “Anyway, my proposed protagonist is also a misogynistic brute guilty of multiple instances of sexual misconduct yet always avoids criminal prosecution and always avoids losing support from most members of his political party. He’s as Teflon as the pots and pans he never cooks with because he never cooks.”

“What’s gotten into you?” asks the agent. “Your previous characters were all so three-dimensional. Even The Fifth Dimension music group that made a cameo in one of your novels shed two dimensions to fit in.”

“I think I have enough ‘cred’ with my readers to pull off this ex-POTUS character — who’s also virulently racist and anti-LGBTQ, insults people with disabilities, lies constantly, doesn’t read books, is cheap and money-grasping despite being an alleged billionaire, etc.”

“Are you prepared to risk your career like Liz Cheney did?”

“You remind me that my protagonist also successfully urged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol building to try to get his reelection loss overturned — yet is still nowhere near being jailed for his treasonously fake ‘Stop the Steal’ claims.”

“Is there anything I can do to convince you to ‘Stop the Spiel’ about this novel and not write it?”

“I feel I must write it, even though a protagonist that dishonorable could never exist in real life.”

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about a local Starbucks unionizing and future plans for my town’s problematic Municipal Building — is here.

Connie Willis

When it comes to reading fiction, many of us have a guilty pleasure or three. One of mine is time-travel novels.

Yes, few of those novels are great literature, though some come close. But even mediocre time-travel books attract my interest. That’s because the genre can fire the imagination as well as offer wish-fulfillment (who among us hasn’t dreamt of visiting the past or future?). I’m also curious how the protagonist will fit in with the visited time, and whether she or he will be “found out” as someone not of that time. Some time-travel novels also grab readers by cleverly taking unexpected approaches to their temporal leaps, and/or by making strong sociopolitical points, and/or by including real-life famous people in cameos or major roles.

My most recent foray into time-travel fiction, this past week, was Connie Willis’ novel Blackout — which stars several historians from 2060 who go back to World War II-era England to observe people and events, even as the 2060 society’s time-travel system starts exhibiting some glitches that put the historians in added danger. Among the points Willis makes amid the absorbing plot threads is that “average people” (in this case, English citizens of the 1940s) can exhibit a lot of bravery or at least stoicism, and that history unfolds somewhat differently than the way it’s chronicled. Plus there’s the inevitable question of whether going back in time might change history.

One of the memorable fiction works relating to that last possibility is Ray Bradbury’s iconic short story “A Sound of Thunder.”

Re time-travel fiction as a sociopolitical device, excellent examples include Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In Butler’s novel, the vicious evil of American slavery is depicted via the experiences of a 20th-century Black woman yanked back to the pre-Civil War south, while Twain uses his seriocomic time-travel book to satirize deadly militarism.

The Looking Backward novel by Twain contemporary Edward Bellamy puts a lens on the dystopian nature of much of late-19th-century life by making the year 2000 a utopian time. (Our real 21st century turned out differently. 😦 ) H.G. Wells is much more pessimistic about the (distant) future in The Time Machine.

Many other time-travel books offer readers pure entertainment and/or edge-of-the-seat adventure and/or mystery and/or passionate romance. Among them are Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander and its eight sequels co-starring 20th-century doctor Claire Fraser in the 1700s, Jack Finney’s New York City-set Time and Again, and Darryl Brock’s baseball-themed If I Never Get Back — all terrific novels.

Other titles I’ve read with a lot or some time-travel elements include Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Karl Alexander’s Time After Time, Marlys Millhiser’s The Mirror, Ken Grimwood’s Replay, Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Caroline D. Emerson’s The Magic Tunnel, and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” to name a few.

Any time-travel works you’d like to mention?

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about my town’s sorry public pool situation — is here.

Susan Glaspell

Last week I discussed writers being influenced by other writers. This week, I’ll talk about writers who helped other writers get published, discovered, or rediscovered.

Novelist, journalist, actress, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell (1874-1948) is unfortunately almost forgotten these days. She’s best known for her powerful feminist play Trifles that she also turned into a short story called “A Jury of Her Peers,” and for co-founding the Provincetown Players theatrical organization that launched the career of…Eugene O’Neill.

A mesmerizing, superbly acted, half-hour screen version of “A Jury of Her Peers” from 1980:

Poet and shipping-line heiress Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) established The Hours Press — which gave playwright, novelist, and poet Samuel Beckett a major early break by publishing a poem of his. Later, in 1934, Cunard edited and published a massive collection of African-American writers that featured Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, W.E.B Du Bois, and others. (Many in the collection were already known.)

Walker Percy made his name with novels such as The Moviegoer, but is also remembered for helping get John Kennedy Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces posthumously published in 1980. That was after Toole’s mother Thelma’s Herculean years-long effort to get her son’s manuscript noticed following his 1969 suicide. The novel went on to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

In the 19th century, Charles Dickens gave a big assist to a pre-famous Wilkie Collins by running a Collins short story in Dickens’ literary magazine Household Words. Collins and the 12-years-older Dickens became close friends.

One writer can also help another writer posthumously. Alice Walker revived interest in the aforementioned mostly forgotten Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) in various ways — including her 1975 piece about Hurston in Ms. magazine. Walker even replaced the headstone on the uncared-for grave of the Their Eyes Were Watching God author.

Of course, various authors review the work of other authors — with several commenters here doing that so ably on their WordPress blogs. 🙂

Any examples or thoughts relating to this topic?

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about a rude Township Council and more — is here.

Most authors have some kind of literary lineage. Their work might be quite distinctive, but clearly they’ve been influenced by some writers who came before.

I thought about this the past few days while reading Louis Auchincloss (pictured above) for the first time — namely his compelling novel The Lady of Situations starring the brainy, crafty, ambitious, strong-minded, money-conscious Natica Chauncey as she navigates an intensely patriarchal and class-stratified time.

It’s pretty obvious that Auchincloss took some cues from authors such as Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton while also putting his own, more-modern stamp on things. There’s the upper-class milieu (though certain characters like Natica are a bit on the outside looking in) and there’s Auchincloss’ comfort with and insider knowledge of that milieu — even as there’s some satirizing of the rich going on. Specifically, The Lady of the Situations reminds me more than a little of Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, with Natica a nicer version of Undine Spragg.

Meanwhile, my brief mention of Jane Austen reminds me that she was influenced by earlier authors such as Fanny Burney.

Moving to other literature, we can see a magic-realism line from Jorge Luis Borges to Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Isabel Allende.

I read Garcia Marquez’s The General in His Labyrinth just before The Lady of Situations, and I must say I found that novel about South American hero Simon Bolivar’s last days often tedious and repetitive, albeit wonderfully written. I much prefer Garcia Marquez’s other work, including of course One Hundred Years of Solitude.

More lineage examples:

Fyodor Dostoevsky famously was said to have said, “We all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,'” referring to Nikolai Gogol’s influential short story “The Overcoat.” Alexander Pushkin also influenced subsequent Russian authors, as well as non-Russian authors.

In 19th-century France, Emile Zola took some cues from the earlier Honore de Balzac; they both created multi-book sagas in which many of the same characters appeared in different novels despite those realism-infused books not being “series” per se.

The sprawling mix of humor, earnestness, and social consciousness in John Irving’s work is partly reminiscent of Charles Dickens.

When it comes to novels of the past few decades with a strong social-conscience component, one can see Barbara Kingsolver following in some of Margaret Atwood’s footsteps.

In the creepy horror genre, there’s a trajectory from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Edgar Allan Poe to H.P. Lovecraft to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King.

A number of Cormac McCarthy’s novels show him to be a “southern gothic” disciple of William Faulkner. In a more comedic southern vein, we see certain Erskine Caldwell elements in the later work of Charles Portis.

Agatha Christie of course influenced many a subsequent mystery writer — and, in the science-fiction realm, there’s a path from Mary Shelley to Jules Verne to H.G. Wells to countless 20th-century authors ranging from Isaac Asimov to Octavia E. Butler.

Literary lineage can often be indirect and subtle and not exact, but it’s there.

I obviously just scratched the surface in this post. Any lineage examples you’d like to mention and discuss?

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — which discusses too-high buildings and a possible return of public pre-K in my town — is here.

The childhood home of Buzz Aldrin, the second astronaut to walk on the moon, a few blocks from my apartment in Montclair, New Jersey. (Photo by me.)

With today the 53rd anniversary of Apollo 11 returning to Earth after its famous moon mission, I thought of novels that include space travel. Most of those books are of course in the science-fiction category — a genre I haven’t read that widely in even as I was a big fan of the first four Star Trek series during a former time when I watched TV. But I guess I’ve enjoyed enough novels that include space travel to write a short blog post about them. 🙂

The most recent one I’ve read is Andy Weir’s The Martian, about a human stranded on Mars who uses his ingenuity to try to survive. The novel is…ingenious, and often a page-turner.

I also liked H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon (yes, “in” not “on”) — which is rather underrated in the Wells sci-fi canon but quite interesting. How the novel’s characters get to the moon, and what they find there, is memorable.

Arthur C. Clarke’s iconic novel 2001: A Space Odyssey is not as mind-blowing as the movie version, but it’s still a great read. HAL the computer!

Ray Bradbury’s short-stories-as-novel The Martian Chronicles is an evocative work that launched the author into the realm of literary renown.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy is one of the impressive career highlights from an author who wrote, co-wrote, and edited more than 500 books.

A photo I took of Isaac Asimov in 1986, at a press event announcing he would start a syndicated newspaper column.

Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is very funny at times but overall I can take it or leave it.

Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is gripping in spots but too militaristic for my tastes. It did inspire the title of a great song by the progressive-rock band Yes:

Space-travel novels can of course fire the imagination and take readers where they’ve never gone before. And given that few humans have traveled in space and none have visited other planets, books in this genre allow authors a certain latitude in making things up. 🙂 (Hopefully informed by some scientific knowledge and research. 🙂 )

Any space-travel novels you’d like to mention?

The plaque in front of Buzz Aldrin’s childhood home. (Photo by me.)

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — which includes an arts theme — is here.

Reading an intense novel is great. Reading a lighter novel is also great. Alternating between the two can be ideal. Our brains tend to crave variety, and can use a bit of a relaxation break.

My latest pairing, not planned per se, was first reading John Grisham’s legal thriller A Time for Mercy. An emotionally wrenching novel about a teen who kills a brutish cop who had been living with — and abusing — the teen, the teen’s younger sister, and their mother. Eventually followed by a dramatic trial.

Then I turned to Jane Smiley’s Perestroika in Paris, about a racehorse named Perestroika who escapes her stall, roams part of the French capital, meets an interesting array of other animals, and then also meets a boy. Of course, so-called “light” novels are often not totally light; Smiley’s poignant book has some serious things to say about animal-human relationships, family, loneliness, death, and more.

Coincidentally, both novels were published in 2020.

Next on my to-read pile is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The General in His Labyrinth, which I expect will not be light. 🙂

My other literary juxtapositions are almost too numerous to mention. I’ve read a George Eliot novel and then a Janet Evanovich book starring Stephanie Plum, a Dostoevsky novel and then a Terry McMillan book, a Mary Shelley novel and then a Sue Grafton alphabet mystery, a Toni Morrison novel and then a P.G. Wodehouse novel featuring Jeeves, a W. Somerset Maugham novel and then a Discworld book by Terry Pratchett, an Isabel Allende novel and then a Jack Reacher thriller by Lee Child, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and then Twain’s Tom Sawyer (a reread), John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and then Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, etc. Yes, a specific author can be on both sides of the literary spectrum.

In case you’re wondering, I keep an in-order list of novels I’ve read. Perhaps I have OCD: Obsessive Canon Delineation. 🙂

Again, lighter novels are often not totally light — just as intense books can also have sunnier/funnier moments. Many lighter novels do have happy endings, which can be comforting once in a while.

What have been some of your consecutive reads that veer from weighty to less so? Do you consciously or subconsciously try to change things up as you choose novels?

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about unopened town pools and more — is here.

This is an edited and updated version of a post I wrote in 2013:

The novel “came of age” in the 1800s, but that of course doesn’t mean there weren’t excellent literary works before then.

Among fiction’s memorable quite-old titles is The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe’s 1774 novel — about a sensitive, self-involved guy pining after an unattainable woman — is surprising in certain ways. Some of the best 18th-century novels are long and kind of clunky, but Werther is short, smoothly written, and seemingly simple while packing a lot of wisdom per square inch.

And Goethe wrote Werther at the quite-young age of 24!

Other quite readable 18th-century novels include Voltaire’s incandescent Candide (1759) and Jonathan Swift’s classic Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Both are satirical works and adventure stories, meaning a reader can of course enjoy them on one or both levels.

Also quite readable is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Not surprising given how compelling the tale of a shipwrecked character can be.

Defoe, with Moll Flanders (1722), also proved that 18th-century novels can be satisfying despite prose that might be rather long-winded, plots that might be a bit creaky, and/or narrative that might be kind of awkward. I also put in this category Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (which, like much of Werther, is in the form of letters) and Henry Fielding’s somewhat choppy but very entertaining Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Those three books are from 1740, 1742, and 1749, respectively.

Also humorous is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), but, for whatever reason, I found parts of it rather tedious.

Another book I liked a lot was Fanny Burney’s excellent 1778 novel Evelina about a memorable young woman. (The memorable Burney’s portrait is on top of this post.)

And I shouldn’t forget to mention Miguel de Cervantes’ earlier Don Quixote (1605-1615), which many consider the first modern novel. It’s deep, engaging, and often comic.

Then there’s Murasaki Shikibu’s 1,000-year-old novel The Tale of Genji, which ranges from interesting to somewhat boring.

Some pre-19th-century writers of course excelled at plays and/or poetry. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Moliere, to name a few.

Great pre-1800s literature is interesting for reasons besides the quality of the work itself. We see the roots of — and influences on — later fiction. We also get a fascinating sense of long-ago life. And we feel gratitude that more recent fiction is no longer mostly written by a bunch of white guys. 🙂

What are your favorite literary works from before the 19th century?

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about July 4th and more — is here.

Two-thirds of this group are ultra-conservative zealots.

The six far-right Republican justices on the nine-member U.S. Supreme Court have made dreadful ruling after dreadful ruling — gutting abortion rights, gun safety, environmental protections, limits on corporate power, and more. All against the wishes of the vast majority of Americans. Now those rogue wreckers of democracy have turned their narrow minds to literature, and it ain’t pretty.

Justice #1: “I heard John Irving’s novel The Cider House Rules has a pro-choice theme. We need to ban it, burn it, or both.”

Justice #2: “Yes! Didn’t Irving also create Rip Van Winkle?”

Justice #3: “That was Washington Irving, brother of basketball player Kyrie Irving, who refused to get vaccinated against COVID — thus standing up for freedom.” 

One of the three liberal, decent-minded Supreme Court justices: “Freedom to be a selfish idiot.”

Justice #4: “Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom includes a character who played basketball in her youth, but, more importantly, that novel is thick enough to stop a bullet.”

Justice #5: “True! ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a…book.'”

Justice #6: “I love Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged Because He Was Packing Heat.”

Justice #1: “Speaking of heat, climate change is over-warming the planet — among other disastrous effects — so I’m very proud that our Court’s recent ruling will make things even worse.” 

Justice #2: “Yay! If the Earth dies, liberals die — while conservatives get raptured into Heaven, aka a Trump rally. Each rally featuring the man who picked three of us for the Court is appropriately held at least 25,000 miles from a public library.”

Justice #3: “I do have one climate-change regret. As noted in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior, Monarch butterflies are being hurt. My sympathies go to any species with an authoritarian name.”

Justice #4: “Mine, too! But I wish King Solomon’s Mimes would say something.”

Justice #5: “H. Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon’s MINES!”

Justice #6: “Oh. Anyway, as a proud racist I love the title of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White even though it’s unfortunately not a racist novel. I was also disappointed with W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Turned out to be a fiction classic when I thought it was a how-to for men wanting to rob women of their rights.”

Justice #1: “That reminds me that we need to sue Margaret Atwood for plagiarizing our 2022 views in The Handmaid’s Tale.”

One of the three liberal, decent-minded Supreme Court justices: “Um…that novel was published in 1985, when Republicans were already far right but didn’t yet need to hold War and Peace in their left hands to keep from toppling over.”

Justice #2: “Coming before Tolstoy’s opus was Gogol’s Dead Souls. We six on the Court resemble that title!”

Justice #3: “We actually have souls?”

Justice #4: “Don’t forget The Big Sleep!”

Justice #5: “The Raymond Chandler novel that uses a colorful phrase for death? We on the Court are doing our part by condemning women to die from botched back-alley abortions, condemning more children to die in school massacres, condemning many to die from worsening climate change…”

Justice #6: “Yes, the future is bright! Perhaps we can next end same-sex marriage, which would thrill our fellow anti-gay citizen, novelist Orson Scott Card. And when we ruin the economy, Orson can lay off one of his three names.”

Justice #1: “What about also ending interracial marriage? I didn’t like seeing that kind of union in Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred.”

Justice #2: “An excellent idea if it weren’t for the fact that one of us six Supreme Court fanatics is a Black man married to a white woman.”

Justice #3: “Surely H.G. Wells can write a sequel to The Time Machine to undo that 1987 marriage.”

Justice #4: “The author of that 1895 novel died in 1946, so his writing days are over. Our Court has turned the clock back many decades for Americans, but we can’t make Wells alive again.”

Justice #5: “You have a point there, as do the first and third words of Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point.”

Justice #6: “But there are many Wells Fargo banks alive in 2022!”

One of the three liberal, decent-minded Supreme Court justices: “We serve with A Confederacy of Dunces.”

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about the U.S. Supreme Court’s appalling anti-women abortion decision, Independence Day, and my local high school’s commencement — is here.

When I see wealthy people depicted in novels, my first impulse is to dislike them. After all, while some people make their own fortunes and don’t hurt others doing so, many other people are rich because they inherited money or because they’re ruthless employers. But occasionally my defenses are beaten down and I really like a very affluent character.

An example — in a novel I’m currently reading — is Count Alexander Rostov of Amor Towles’ superb A Gentleman in Moscow. Rostov evokes our sympathy not only because he’s under house arrest in a Moscow hotel after the Russian Revolution but because he’s also smart, talented, patient, charming, good-natured, and nice to everyone in all walks of life. Plus Rostov has a history of not being a total apologist for Russia’s pre-revolution aristocracy — which is why he was sentenced to house arrest rather than execution at the hands of the newly empowered Bolsheviks.

Other upper-class protagonists impossible to hate? Bertie Wooster of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels and stories is an idle sort but often rather endearing — as well as funny and loyal. Also likable is financially comfortable son-of-a-judge Archie Weir in Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston.

It helps us feel sympathy for wealthy characters when they go through difficulties that money can’t solve or completely solve. One example is the title character in Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth who’s an automobile magnate but also going through later-in-life marital troubles. Newland Archer of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a wealthy young lawyer engaged to bland socialite May Welland before becoming conflicted by getting romantically interested in the unconventional countess Ellen Oleska. Isabel Archer (hmm…that last name again) of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady is an heiress but seems like a genuinely nice person who makes a very bad marital choice.

Oh, and Edmond Dantes becomes super-rich in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo but had to endure enormous suffering before a chance meeting in prison eventually made him a non-blood-related heir to a fortune — which he put to good use getting revenge on the people who framed him.

There are also novels featuring moneyed queens and kings whose behavior is often nasty but sometimes decent. For instance, King Louis XI of Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward is Machiavellian and King Louis XIII of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers is petty but the eventual king Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is brave and admirable. Of course, Aragorn wasn’t rich and not living the royal life during most of the trilogy. 🙂

Wealthy fictional characters you’ve liked?

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about expanded library hours in my town and other topics — is here.

Andrew Sean Greer

In today’s post, MLC means more literature content and…mid-life crisis.

Yes, many of us of a certain age have gone through that crisis, as have many characters in novels. Whether middle-aged people are real or fictional, they often wonder if they’ve accomplished enough…and they lament some decisions made when younger…and they worry about what the upcoming years will be like…and they perhaps make a major change or three.

Such is the case in Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 novel that focuses on Arthur Less as he nears his 50th birthday. Arthur is a novelist — with only modest sales, partly because he’s an out gay man — whose long-time partner is about to marry someone else. Arthur decides to escape the wedding and the United States by taking a low-budget trip around the world. Definitely mid-life crisis stuff, yet with plenty of comic moments.

Then there’s John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) starring Ethan Hawley, a married dad whose family members wish they were richer. The straight-arrow Ethan, who works in a job clearly beneath his education and abilities, starts to consider doing some unethical things. Clearly, a rather dramatic mid-life crisis.

In Cat’s Eye, the 1988 novel by Margaret Atwood, protagonist Elaine Risley returns to her hometown of Toronto for a retrospective of her paintings — after which she wrestles with painful memories from her childhood and young adulthood. Looking back with regret, and perhaps making peace with some aspects of that, can be one manifestation of a mid-life crisis.  

Having an affair, or contemplating one, is another possible MLC manifestation. One example is in Edith Wharton’s 1911 novel Ethan Frome, whose title character feels miserable about his marriage (with good reason) and falls in love with someone who happens to be his wife’s cousin. Then…

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) has a trifecta of mid-life crises — with one sibling (Denise) recently divorced, another (Gary) dealing with depression, and a third (Chip) working in a sketchy job.

Among the other novels I’ve read with MLC aspects are Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast, Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, to name a few.

Novels you’ve liked with characters experiencing the crisis thing?

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 for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — about a huge local Pride festival and more — is here.