Author: Dave Astor

Murder Amid American Medical Malice

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Luigi Mangione and Brian Thompson

After Brian Thompson was shot and killed in New York City this month, millions of Americans from all parts of the ideological spectrum flooded social media to express little sympathy for him. That’s because he was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the massive company known for denying a huge number of legitimate medical-insurance claims in order to maximize its profits.

The result of those denials? Anguish for millions of patients and death for thousands of patients who (either individually or via employer plans) pay large monthly premiums for medical coverage — even as residents of every other developed country enjoy some form of much-more-humane national health insurance. And doctors with years of medical training and experience get their requests for needed tests and treatment for their patients denied by insurance bureaucrats with little or no medical expertise.

Meanwhile, Thompson — who was specifically targeted for assassination (the arrested suspect is Luigi Mangione) — raked in yearly compensation of $10.2 million.

Obviously, murder shouldn’t be celebrated, and this was an awful tragedy for Thompson and his family. But he and other execs at UnitedHealthcare and other private insurance providers are guilty of indirectly/continually causing tragic deaths — only their method is shooting down claims rather than shooting a gun.

As with many other situations, I was reminded of certain books I’ve read. There have been numerous nonfiction titles covering the cruel, pricey, unequal, inefficient U.S. medical system — which only works very well for the wealthy — but I’m a literature blogger and will thus focus on fiction in the remainder of this post. To me, the novel I’ve read that best expresses the fury “inspired” by the U.S. medical system is Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That. I highly recommend her 2010 book, despite much of it being a painful read. Somehow, Shriver manages to often make things entertaining, too.

And I thought of novels that have strong elements of vigilantism, which of course involves seeking justice by “illegal” means when such justice might not be achieved through “legal” channels. In the U.S., there have been various efforts by Senator Bernie Sanders and others urging “Medicare for All” to give Americans the type of health-insurance system every other “first world” nation has. But those efforts have been thwarted by a political class (virtually every Republican and most Democrats) as well as a mainstream media mostly bought off by campaign contributions and ad dollars from the profit-swollen companies (also including “Big Pharma”) benefiting from a privatized medical system. So, what are beleaguered citizens to do?

Among the novels with characters who take the law into their own hands for the “right” reasons (not necessarily medical-related reasons) are Louis Sachar’s Holes, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books, and Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano featuring the protagonist who would also become the title character in Isabel Allende’s later Zorro. For those who haven’t read those novels, I’ll refrain from giving specifics in order not to spoil things.

As we know, there are also strains of vigilantism in many western novels (like Owen Wister’s The Virginian) and in comic books starring superheroes such as Batman.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

As Christmas nears, Misty the cat says: “Ho Ho Ho means Harness off Harness off Harness off.”

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: 🙂

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 — which discusses a Mideast-related yet local police chaplain controversy — is here.

Misty the Cat: Mentioning Novels Isn’t Novel for Me

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The Sun Also Rises on my kitty self. (Photo by Dave the biped.)

I, Misty the cat, have returned to write another guest post about “books, books, books.” Which sounds like a chicken saying “buk, buk, buk.” Why did the chicken cross The Road? To get to the other side of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel.

Not funny was last month’s news that the late McCarthy had a relationship with a girl that started when she was 16 and he was 42. That’s sleazy Lolita territory, which reminds me that Vladimir Nabokov also authored Pale Fire about a blaze slathered with enough sunscreen to prevent it from getting burned. Not exactly an Elin Hilderbrand “beach read.” Nor was Andre Dubus III’s novel House of Sand and Fog, which I could’ve pierced with a beach umbrella if I had it in paperback rather than hardcover. I, the feline writing this post, live in the House of Broadband Blog. Actually an apartment, but the wifi is decent.

Late autumn isn’t swimming weather, but November 30 was the 150th anniversary of L.M. Montgomery’s birth. She of course wrote the iconic Anne of Green Gables, an exceptional YA novel. YA means Young Adult as well as Yowling Adult, which describes Dave after I grabbed his laptop to write this post. He’ll get over it, especially when I give him a newfangled quill pen and parchment paper to scribble this week’s shopping list. First seven items: cat food, cat chow, cat cuisine, cat edibles, cat victuals, cat nourishment, and cat sustenance.

Moving to my book list, I recently read Nelson DeMille for the first time — his novel The Quest. Quite exciting once I got over my first disappointment about the book’s tired trope of focusing on white visitors to a “third world” country — and my second disappointment that the quest was for a holy relic rather than a cat treat at peak freshness. A good chunk of DeMille’s story takes place in Ethiopia, where injera is a food staple. That pancake-like bread is slightly spongy, so a big-enough piece would make for an excellent cat bed. But my local pet store only sells cat beds with inedible cushioning; Goodnight Moon will never be the same.

Speaking of children’s books, The Cat in the Hat‘s title character is a rather slim kitty — certainly slimmer than me, a feline who starts his midnight snacking at noon. I’ve read that Dr. Seuss based his tall feline’s look on the Uncle Sam he had previously drawn in his political cartoons, which reminds me that I’m weighing a presidential run in 2028. To practice for my future time in the Oval Office, I occasionally walk in circles.

My favorite novels with at least some political themes, schemes, dreams, teams, screams, and memes? Among them are Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Trumpote, co-starring Donald Trump’s loyal squire JD Vanza. Cervantes lived in Spain during the same circa-1600 era that James Clavell’s Japan-set novel Shogun unfolded. Little-known fact: Spain and Japan are walking distance from each other despite being 6,600 miles apart. Admittedly, the walk would take a year or two, even for a fast cat like me. The Inedible Journey without an injera cat bed.

Anyway, this month begins The Incredible Journey known as the march to the holiday season, meaning I might reread A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, who invented the CD when he initialed a document. There’s also Fannie Flagg’s excellent A Redbird Christmas, John Grisham’s so-so Skipping Christmas, and the classic song “I’m Dreaming of a White Pearl Harbor Day” — which you can hear on a CD player that Dickens also invented.

Yesterday, December 7, was Pearl Harbor Day. Today, December 8, is the seventh anniversary of when I was adopted into my current home! That was in 2017, the year Aaron Judge hit 52 home runs as a rookie. Or was it 52 apartment runs as a rookie? No idea what his living arrangements were back then, or why Edith Wharton wrote The House of Mirth rather than The Yurt of Mirth. Maybe because her protagonist Lily Bart didn’t live in Mongolia?

Getting back to the festive season, my Misty the Cat…Unleashed book would make a great holiday gift this month for the kitty lovers in your life. I co-wrote it with my human peep Dave, sort of like how Woodward and Bernstein co-wrote All the President’s Cats about the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon, and his 1974 resignation — with no mention of cats. Surprisingly, Nixon didn’t blog about any of this at the time.

Dave will reply to comments, because I’m in serious pre-winter training to vigorously shred the wrapping paper on holiday gifts.

Misty the cat says: “Today’s my 7th adoption anniversary. I appreciate the celebratory lights.”

Dave’s 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 I, Misty, say Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for Dave’s book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, Dave writes the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which includes a “Twelve Days of Christmas” theme — is here.

A Title Wave of Opposite-Gender Novels

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(Courtesy of Harper.)

Elvis Presley sang “Return to Sender.” Today, I’m going to…return to gender. Heck, I’m not even a Presley fan, so excuse my blog-post opening as I write about characters who are the opposite sex of their novelist creators.

While female authors have created many of the most-memorable female protagonists and male authors have created many of the most-memorable male protagonists, skillful novelists can of course successfully cross gender lines. It takes some imagination, some research, and some drawing on experiences with opposite-sex parents, spouses, siblings, children, friends, work colleagues, etc. And authors can obviously include memorable co-stars and supporting characters of the same gender as themselves.

For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to focus on characters who are in the novels’ titles.

An example of today’s theme that I finally read last week is Barbara Kingsolver’s tour de force Demon Copperhead, the 2022 coming-of-age story of a boy who faces poverty, the death of his parents, foster care, addiction, injury, and other enormous challenges. It’s uncanny how well a female author in her late 60s gets into the psyche of a male who’s a preteen or teen during virtually the entire Pulitzer Prize-winning book — for which Kingsolver took inspiration from Charles Dickens’ 1850 classic David Copperfield while transferring the time and setting from 19th-century England to late-20th-century/early-21st-century Appalachia in the United States.

After finishing Demon Copperhead, I read Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (2014) — about the prickly (male) owner of an island bookstore. A funny and poignant short novel with some echoes of George Eliot’s compelling classic Silas Marner.

About 150 years earlier, Eliot was an accomplished female author with a male title character in three of her five best-known novels: Adam Bede (1859), Daniel Deronda (1876), and the aforementioned Silas Marner (1861). All three of those men are quite believable and three-dimensional, even as prominent female characters steal (or almost steal) the show.

The 19th century also saw the publication of such female-written works as Mary Shelley’s mega-influential Frankenstein (1818), George Sand’s Jacques (1833), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mr. Harrison’s Confessions (1851), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s cry-for-justice Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), among other novels.

Moving into the 20th century and beyond, we have Edith Wharton’s emotionally wrenching Ethan Frome (1911), Willa Cather’s okay debut novel Alexander’s Bridge (1912), Colette’s Cheri (1920) and The Last of Cheri (1926), Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Lord Edgware Dies (1933), and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and (you knew I would get to this eventually 🙂 ) J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster Harry Potter series of seven books published between 1997 and 2007.

And we can’t forget Murasaki Shikibu’s VERY early female-authored-novel-starring-a-man The Tale of Genji, written in the early 11th century.

Given that there were many more male than female authors published pre-1900, we can easily find a slew of male-written novels back then with female title characters: Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Honore de Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet (1833), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1857), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867) and Nana (1880), R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1869), Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), Henry James’ Daisy Miller (1878), and Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), to name a few.

Plenty of titles after that, too, such as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar (1955), William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979), Walter Mosley’s Rose Gold (2014), and multiple ones by Stephen King — including Carrie (1974), Dolores Claiborne (1992), and Rose Madder (1995).

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this theme?

Misty the cat says: “I’m Nancy Drew starring in ‘The Mystery of the Aromatic Leaves.'”

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: 🙂

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 my town’s harassed CFO, unaffordable housing, an environmentally awful plan to cut down many trees, and more — is here.

When You’re Getting an Unexpected Setting

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St. John in the Virgin Islands. (Credit: Visit USVI.)

A number of authors set their novels in the same place. So, it becomes quite noticeable when they set their novels in…a different place.

This surprise can be welcome or not, depending on the reader and how good the books are. But a change-of-pace is often a good thing, for both the writers and their fans wanting to avoid a “rut.” The authors might have to do a little more research, but they’ll survive. 🙂

I most recently enjoyed a setting switch in the work of Elin Hilderbrand. She is known for placing her novels on Nantucket, and I have loved the ones I’ve read featuring that Massachusetts island milieu. Then I picked up Hilderbrand’s Winter in Paradise, thinking I was returning to Nantucket — only to find that the novel was mostly set on St. John in the Virgin Islands. That was initially a bit disorienting, but Winter in Paradise turned out to be another compulsively readable Hilderbrand book…this time about how a family’s life changes when they learn the father had a secret second family. Then I quickly finished the second and third installments of the trilogy: What Happens in Paradise and Troubles in Paradise — the latter book ending with a dramatic and destructive hurricane. I’m sure it helped the Nantucket-based Hilderbrand in writing the trilogy that she visits St. John for several weeks each year as a warm-weather writing retreat and vacation spot.

Among the other authors who’ve produced the occasional geographic surprise is Sir Walter Scott, who placed most of his historical novels in Scotland but situated Quentin Durward in France. Still, the archer Quentin is Scottish, so Sir Walter didn’t stray completely from his own real-life roots.

Charles Dickens usually used London as the locale for his novels, but did set part of A Tale of Two Cities in Paris and part of Martin Chuzzlewit in the United States.

Given that travel was much more difficult and time-consuming during the pre-1900 era in which writers such as Scott and Dickens lived, it’s not surprising that many long-ago authors kept their novels pretty close to the locales they knew most in a firsthand way. But Dickens did take two extended trips to the U.S., and Scott visited France (though after Quentin Durward was published). Also, Scott’s wife Charlotte was of French descent.

Another 19th-century author, Mark Twain, was among the most globetrotting Americans of his time — which bore fruit in such novels as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (England) and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (France), and in his hilarious nonfiction travel masterpiece The Innocents Abroad (in which Twain chronicled his visits to many places, including the Mideast).

In post-1900 literature, William Faulkner virtually always set his novels in Mississippi, but three of his books unfolded elsewhere: including France in A Fable.

Barbara Kingsolver also placed the vast majority of her novels in the U.S. (usually Appalachia, the South, or the Southwest), but sent her American characters to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible and situated a large portion of The Lacuna in Mexico.

Your thoughts about, and example of, this theme?

Misty the cat says: “Orange skies don’t appear like clockwork; what was Anthony Burgess thinking?”

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: 🙂

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 possible end to free holiday parking and a local U.S. congresswoman’s entry into New Jersey’s governor race — is here.

Guest Literature Post by Donald Trump! (Again)

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Credit: Free Books Photos

In early 2017, soon after reprehensible right-winger Donald Trump first became President of the United States, I wrote a certain post. Now that Trump will depressingly occupy the White House again, I’m bringing back that post, revised and updated. Hopefully, my blog will return to “normal” next week. 🙂

I, Donald Trump, demanded to write a guest literature piece, and I always get what I want. Sure, I don’t read novels or know much about any of them, but I do read the backs of McDonald’s “Happy Meal” containers. Lots of back story, ya know?

Actually, I know a yuge amount about fiction, but more the “alternative facts” kind than the literary kind. I’m a fabulous fabricator! Liane Moriarty wrote Big Little Lies; I’m more into Big BIG Lies.

Anyway, I was told I should read The Ambassadors by Henry James, but I already have a list of the corrupt, distasteful envoys I’ll appoint for various countries. Including Chile, which McDonald’s has on its menu, though misspelled as chili. And my weird, startling, extremist, incompetent, fox-guarding-the-henhouse cabinet picks? They make Stephen King’s Misery seem upbeat.

The Red Badge of Courage? Believe me, bravery is for losers. I showed more courage getting Vietnam War deferments for alleged bone spurs in my heels, even though I played sports at the time with no problem. They called me The Natural — inspiring a Bernard Malamud novel that later became a movie starring one of those Hollywood “libtards,” Robert Redford, who’s no relation to Robert Redtesla. My best buddy Tesla guy Elon Musk owns the now-fascist-friendly X, formerly Twitter and still the Roman numeral for the low level of Musk’s social IQ.

Also, I bigly love Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie character. I’d like to grab her by the [deleted]. Make An American Tragedy Great Again? I’m on it!

You see, I have immense respect for women. But was George Eliot transblender or something? George is a guy’s name, but that 19th-century scribbler looks female in photos. Lock her up!

And the clever nicknames I come up with! “Sleepy Joe Biden,” “Crazy Kamabla,” “Tampon Tim,” “Deranged Jack Smith,” and “George Slopadopolus,” to name a few. From the past, there was also Chris “Agatha” Christie; And Then There Were None: cabinet positions for him in 2017.

I also know history, because I know everything! Toni Morrison was the lead singer of The Doors, Harper Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant, Richard Wright co-invented the airplane, and the Brontë sisters were at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. I always have a Tan, but it’s not Amy.

Another George: Orwell. Love, love, LOVE the oppressors in Nineteen Eighty-Four! I even tried doublethink, but I can’t think once most of the time. Ask Herman Melania, my wife’s ancestor, who wrote about a big white male — that’s me! Captain Ahab sounds kind of Muslim, doesn’t he?

My wife Melania was an immigrant, but an okay one because she’s white. I have promised to deport millions of “other” types of immigrants. Sure, it will ruin their lives, devastate communities, and wreck the U.S. economy. My response? The Art of Me Saying “Big Deal.”

No new non-white immigrants, either; Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez will never cross our southern border while I’m racist-in-chief, um, sexual-predator-in-chief, um, commander-in-chief. It helps that those two Hispanic writers are dead. Not much border-crossing potential there.

The Blacks, The Blacks. Why didn’t E.B. White use the name E.B. Very White? The title of Jack London’s White Fang novel rocks. I heard about Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God — thrilling that those eyes were watching me nine years before I was born.

Flowers for Algernon — also thrilling! It gave me a chance to mentally mock the disabled for pages and pages. Can you beat that? Which reminds me that I’ll encourage the police to beat up any Americans who oppose me. The Hate U Give? Nope, not the Angie Thomas novel. The Hate I Give.

Mark my words, I’m really going to build a wall this time — paid for by Mexico (aka American taxpayers). We’ll build that big, beautiful fence at The Border: a novel by Cormac McCarthy, whose last name reminds me of one of my heroes, Joe McCarthy.

Jim Casy of The Grapes of Wrath was a commie, wasn’t he? Not the good kind like Vladimir Putin. Although I don’t read any books, I love Russian literature — including War and War and Crime and No Punishment for Me. But Anna Karenina? Overrated! Blood coming out of her whatever (after she was hit by a train). And Alexander Solzhenitsyn? I like authors who don’t get jailed.

Did I mention I drained the swamp? So I could have a dry place to burn books by liberal, pinko writers. Ever read Fahrenheit 451? The same number as my IQ. It’s genius-ly high! But I actually never really drained the swamp — I made it swampier.

My second presidential administration — Trump 2.0 — will be like a dystopian novel come to life again. I have no idea what dystopian means, but right-wing media nut Ben Shapiro and my nasty vice president-elect JD Vance mentioned that word one day. I think of those two as The Sound and the Fury. Me? Pride and Prejudice.

It Can’t Happen Here? It already has.

Misty the cat says: “I’m waiting for the window to open, even though Godot’s not inside.”

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: 🙂

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 problematic proposed townhouse plan and more — is here.

Faking a Look at a Presidential Book

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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. (Getty Images.)

How does a literature blog respond to this past week’s ultra-depressing election of far-right wild guy Donald Trump as 47th President of the United States? Liar, grifter, felon, dictator wannabe, sexual predator, misogynist, racist, homophobe, non-reader…yes, that Donald Trump.

Well, a literature blogger could suggest a fact-based novel about how it came to pass that the ghastly Trump will again occupy the White House when that repulsive Republican should instead be occupying a jail cell. I’m not the person to author that book — I prefer to write about a cat happily occupying my apartment and life — but I can discuss some of the book’s main characters. Starting with…

Donald Trump himself: Born into a filthy rich family, he takes that one family fortune and turns it into six…business bankruptcies. Improbably becomes President in 2016. Loses reelection in 2020 to Democratic opponent Joe Biden, but Trump falsely claims he won via a “Stop the Steal” campaign that doesn’t stop Shohei Ohtani from stealing 59 bases in 2024. The 1994-born Ohtani accomplishes this feat despite not being a character in Haruki Murakami’s 1979 debut novel.

Mike Pence: The also-far-right (and judgmental Christian evangelical) vice president during Trump’s first presidential term subserviently does everything Donald wants for four years until refusing Trump’s order to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election. The mob Trump subsequently goaded to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, ghoulishly threatens to hang Pence — who doesn’t recite lines from A Tale of Two Cities because Charles Dickens’ novel features a different method of execution.

JD Vance: Trump’s 2024 vice-presidential running mate first becomes famous for his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Vance around that time calls Trump “America’s Hitler,” but, seeing where the wind is blowing among Republicans, goes on to cravenly transform into a bootlicking toady for Trump. This pays off big time for Vance with Trump’s 2024 win, which also makes the grotesque JD an early favorite to become the 2028 Republican nominee for President…of The Bootlicking Toady Society. Not to be confused with Mary Ann Shaffer’s and Annie Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Mitch McConnell: The scheming but spineless Republican U.S. Senate leader initially denounces Trump for the January 6 riot, but doesn’t support the subsequent impeachment effort — dooming it to failure. That gives Devil in a Blue Suit (Trump) a political lifeline that helps Donald’s eventual return to power. Democrats prefer Devil in a Blue Dress, the Walter Mosley novel.

Merrick Garland: Biden’s 2020-2024 attorney general is so wimpy and cautious that the dawdling Democrat waits too long to try to bring Trump up on criminal charges for “Stop the Steal,” January 6, and more. Garland’s cowardly slowness makes Marcel Proust’s 4,215-page In Search of Lost Time feel like a quick read.

Joe Biden: A pretty good President in the domestic-policy area, partly thanks to the work of such people as progressive U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. But Biden’s continual arming of Israel’s brutally disproportionate assault on Gaza after Hamas’ brutal October 7, 2023, attack is a major blot on Joe’s record. Also, Biden had originally implied he’d be a one-term President but, despite advancing age and obvious cognitive decline, wrongly decides to seek reelection — short-circuiting a chance for a real 2024 Democratic primary that could have strengthened Kamala Harris or another candidate. The annual Jack Reacher novel is published anyway.

Kamala Harris: After Biden is finally forced from the 2024 race weeks after a disastrous debate performance against Trump, Vice President Harris becomes the nominee. She’s in tune with the majority of Americans on a number of issues such as reproductive rights, but being a woman and person of color doesn’t help in a country filled with so much sexism and racism. Harris runs a good, part-populist, part-anti-corporate campaign for a while — and makes the excellent choice of progressive Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate — but then tacks too right-center/Wall Street-friendly at a time when many Americans want change, are hurting economically, and distrust outsized corporate power. Of course, Trump is infinitely worse (including being even more corporate-captured) but still wins. So much for that — my could-be-wrong analysis, and the title of a novel by (Ms.) Lionel Shriver.

The Muse: Why did Trump win? Among the reasons: he’s perversely entertaining, doesn’t sound like a programmed politician, gives his supporters permission to be their worst selves, has a powerful right-wing political and media ecosystem behind him, and gets endless coverage from the mainstream media because that boosts their audiences and profits. Much of the media, and many Americans in general, are attracted to…the call of the wild — far-right wild guy Trump, and the title of the novel by Jack London.

Misty the cat says: “I’m where O. Henry will soon write ‘The Last Leaf’ again.”

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: 🙂

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 Trump’s depressing win and more — is here.

When Genres Are Happy Together

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The 1935 movie version of the She novel.

Some literature offers readers content spanning at least two genres. Bonus!

It’s a blend that can make fiction richer and more interesting. Perhaps more challenging, too, but potentially very satisfying. All requiring some serious authorial skill and imagination, obviously. I’ll give some examples of this approach via multi-genre novels I’ve read.

My most recent experience was with Val McDermid’s The Skeleton Road, which combines a compelling murder mystery with well-researched historical fiction about the oft-brutal Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

Another example is Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, a novel that mixes a feminist/social-justice perspective with science fiction. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin also unites a realistic story with sci-fi, and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred melds an anti-racism theme with time travel.

H. Rider Haggard’s novel She is squarely in the adventure genre yet contains a major fantasy element: Title character Ayesha is more than 2,000 years old — perhaps a bit longer than the usual human life span. 🙂

Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour straddles the fantasy and supernatural horror genres.

Fiction that includes ghosts usually has those ghosts interacting in some way with the real world, making for two genres of a sort. Among the novels in this realm are Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, and Elin Hilderbrand’s The Hotel Nantucket, to name a few.

Museum objects and exhibits come alive in Gore Vidal’s The Smithsonian Institution and Christine Coulson’s Metropolitan Stories — even as life is also depicted normally. So, fantasy and realism co-exist.

Then there are books that genre-blend in a different way; for instance, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is part-novel and part-poem, while J.K. Rowling’s The Ink Black Heart mixes traditional prose with a blitz of chat conversations. Actually, chat conversations are not exactly a literary genre. 🙂

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “The driver of that ‘On the Road’ car must be Jack Kerouac.”

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: 🙂

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 — featuring a pre-election theme and more — is here.

Nice Characters: a Morale Boost in Fiction’s Roost

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Megan Follows as Anne Shirley and Richard Farnsworth as Matthew Cuthbert in 1985’s beloved Anne of Green Gables screen adaptation.

With all the scary real-world stuff happening (that has nothing to do with Halloween), it’s good to think positive…about nice characters in literature.

Those characters can be admirably nice or cloyingly nice, but they’re…nice. (Even as they, like most people, usually have some flaws.) They can also be boring or interesting, with some of them interesting enough to carry a novel and others needing “villains” to play off of — possibly to be victimized by or possibly to triumph over. The latter scenario is of course heartening wish fulfillment when it occurs.

Nice characters come from all walks of life. For instance, Sonya — a beacon of goodness and decency in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s oft-disturbing classic Crime and Punishment — is a drunkard’s daughter forced into prostitution to help her family.

There are also moral religious characters such as Helen Burns, the very kind classmate of the young Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte’s equally classic novel. (It should be noted that it’s hardly a given a religious person will be moral.)

Another 19th-century-literature character in the kind category is Fanny Price of Mansfield Park. Super-nice but rather on the boring side, unlike Jane Austen’s usually fascinating female protagonists.

A more interesting 1800s character with a kind nature is Denise Baudu, the young countrywoman who moves to Paris to work in a pre-Walmart-like department store in Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Delight.

And young Eva of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is positively angelic. Sort of one-dimensional but a potent contrast to another of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s white characters — vicious slaveowner Simon Legree — in a rare 19th-century novel with a multiracial cast giving African-Americans (such as Tom, Eliza, and George) prominent roles.

Going back further in time, the titular Joseph Andrews of Henry Fielding’s satirical 18th-century novel is comically pure of heart.

Very nice characters in 20th- and 21st-century fiction? Among the many are shy Matthew Cuthbert, who becomes Anne Shirley’s beloved adoptive father in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables; masochistic-until-he’s-not Philip Carey, who eventually becomes a physician in W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage; caring, disease-stricken Jamie Sullivan in Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember; and altruistic Subhash in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland.

There are also admirably good characters who become full or sort-of social/political activists — including lapsed reverend Jim Casy in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, attorney Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, reproductive-rights advocate Dr. Wilbur Larch in John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, the anti-dictatorship Mirabel sisters in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, and the anti-police-brutality teen girl Starr Carter in Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give.

Thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “I’m editing a manuscript.”

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: 🙂

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 — featuring a pre-Halloween theme — is here.

Portraying Betraying

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The Chateau d’If, where Edmond Dantes was imprisoned in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Betrayal is a Harold Pinter play, and betrayal in novels is the subject of this blog post.

Literature with a betrayal element can make for intense reading. We feel sympathy for the betrayed, anger at the person doing the betraying, curiosity about whether the betraying person will get their comeuppance, and more.

The Bad Daughter, a Joy Fielding novel I just finished, includes plenty of betrayal — most notably perpetrated by a vile real-estate developer who betrays his son by marrying that son’s fiancée and at the same time betrays one of his daughters because that fiancée was also the daughter’s best friend. Is the father’s betraying action why he gets shot in the book? The Bad Daughter is a suspenseful page-turner with several skillful red herrings, but is unfortunately marred by a surprise ending that doesn’t feel believable.

Another nasty/betraying dad not respectful of boundaries is Fyodor Karamazov, who’s enamored with the same woman (Grushenka) his son Dmitri is in love with in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Monumentally betrayed is Edmond Dantes, who’s framed for a crime he didn’t commit in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. A long imprisonment and epic revenge ensue.

Another 19th-century classic containing a memorable betrayal is George Eliot’s Silas Marner, whose title character is done wrong by his supposed best friend. This devastates Silas and changes the trajectory of his life in two profound ways — one bad and one good.

Modern fiction offers many other betrayals in addition to those in The Bad Daughter. For instance, the title character in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Nel are best friends when growing up, but Sula later has an affair with Nel’s husband. In Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a cowardly Amir betrays his friend Hassan by not intervening when Hassan is attacked — and Amir’s longtime guilt subsequently drives the plot. Ian McEwan’s Atonement features a teen girl who betrays her older sister and that sister’s boyfriend by not-so-mistakenly accusing him of a rape he didn’t commit.

Betraying one’s country is also a thing, as Benedict Arnold did during the Revolutionary War. Arnold is among the real-life American notables who have cameos in Diana Gabaldon’s (mostly) 18th-century-set Outlander series.

Any thoughts about, and/or other examples of, this theme?

By referencing a memoir during his leashed walk this morning, Misty the cat doesn’t betray book readers. (Alternate quip to the one on YouTube: “From Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day to Misty the cat’s The Remains in the Bray.”)

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: 🙂

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 Columbus Day vs. Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and with more about a possible moratorium on artificial-turf fields — is here.

Say Hi to a Certain Kind of Hybrid Fiction

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Flying without an airplane in The Master and Margarita. (Screenshot by me.)

Most novels are basically realistic, but quite a few others — including those in genres such as sci-fi, fantasy, time travel, and ghost fiction — are, shall we say, imaginative.

Then there novels that fall somewhere in between: containing a little or a lot of the magical/supernatural, yet also grounded in actuality — making for a potentially fascinating mix. Those hybrid-ish books are the subject of today’s blog post.

I just read Elin Hilderbrand’s The Matchmaker, an excellent novel about the life and work of Nantucket woman Dabney Kimball Beech — whose long-ago love returns to the Massachusetts island after 27 years as a foreign correspondent. All is pretty much realistic, except Dabney has the power of knowing if a potential couple is or isn’t made for each other by the color of an aura she sees surrounding them. Dabney has “arranged” 42 still-intact marriages over the decades — even as her daughter Agnes is in a toxic relationship that Dabney had warned against. What happens with them and other characters makes for compelling reading of the uplifting and tragic variety.

Another supernatural-type moment in an otherwise mostly realistic novel is when the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre hears Edward Rochester’s anguished voice from a distance way too far to have actually heard his voice. A reader might initially think this pivotal occurrence was Jane’s imagination, but the novel makes it clear it wasn’t.

All-too-real domestic violence perpetrated by a brutal police officer against his wife is a major focus of Stephen King’s novel Rose Madder, but things eventually take a turn to the fantastical when people can literally enter a painting. Which reminds me of Jasper Fforde’s novel The Eyre Affair, in which people can literally enter the pages of Bronte’s aforementioned classic.

Then there’s “magical realism” — the very name of which says this genre of fiction combines the material and the mystical. For instance, some people fly in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the character Clara in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits possesses paranormal powers. Also, “father of magical realism” Jorge Luis Borges wrote short stories that included such things as a library of infinite size.

In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, there’s also a character who flies sans airplane — as well as a magical skin ointment that creates invisibility and, most notably, the appearance of Satan among humans.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series? Mostly set in the wizard world, but there are also various scenes in the human (Muggle) world where a young Harry lived for more than a decade.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Not ghost fiction but ghost fact: In the video below, my cat Misty encounters a pre-Halloween decoration during his daily leashed walk this past Friday morning. 

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: 🙂

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 problematic former mayor who’s running for governor, the welcome possibility of a moratorium on artificial-turf fields, and more — is here.