Nicholas Evans (Associated Press photo/Tina Fineberg).

The last time I devoted a whole post to symbolism in novels was in 2014 – the year this blog started. So, I’d like to revisit that topic via some books I’ve read since then or that I read before 2014 but didn’t mention in that previous post.

As I noted 12 years ago, symbolism can make a novel more interesting and evocative. It’s another element in the mix to draw in readers — along with the plot, characters, prose quality, etc.

I recently read Nicholas Evans’ riveting novel The Divide, which offers a compelling mystery, a heartbreaking family saga…and a symbolic title with multiple meanings. In the book, The Divide is the literal name of a Montana vacation spot where a meeting of two characters (one married to someone else) leads to a fateful romance that helps drive the plot. The title also evokes thoughts of the West/East, rural/urban, and ideological divides in the United States – and of “the divide” between women and men that’s a major theme as the storyline unfolds.

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden does the symbolism thing with a number of Biblical references, including the Trask sons Caleb and Aron having a Cain and Abel dynamic along with the same initials. Their father’s first name in the novel? Adam, of course.

The star of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is obviously not literally an invisible man, but he is one figuratively because African-American citizens – especially decades ago — were not truly and truthfully SEEN by many people in a racist majority-white society.

Marcel Proust’s opus In Search of Lost Time features the serving of a delicious madeleine that triggers nostalgic memories. It’s both a cake and a symbol.

The pigs and other creatures in George Orwell’s Animal Farm are obviously symbolic stand-ins for humans.

Gregor Samsa becoming a giant insect in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis symbolizes alienation, dehumanization, loss of identity, and more.

The title character of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a living/breathing huge white whale but its existence also symbolically represents obsessive pursuit that can be pointless.

In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Mississippi River is a…river…but also a literal symbol of freedom for the slave Jim and a more figurative symbol of the opening of Huck’s mind as he matures.

Robert Louis Stevenson uses the title character(s) in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to shine a symbolic spotlight on the good-evil duality of many humans.

In my 2014 post, among the many novels I mentioned were George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (which uses recurring water situations in a symbolic way), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna (whose title is an actual place in the novel but also symbolically has plot significance as a gap/blank space/missing part), and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (in which “Gogol” is the actual name of a character even as that name evokes the absurdity of life in its reference to the often-absurdist Russian author Nikolai Gogol).

My 2014 post also noted that symbolism sometimes involves the initials of character names – including Jim Casy, the Jesus Christ figure in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; Martin Eden, the semi-autobiographical “me” in Jack London’s Martin Eden; and Undine Spragg, who embodies crass U.S. materialism and ruthless ambition in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Thank you to “Sharon’s Writers Tidbits” for recommending Nicholas Evans!

Misty the cat says: “I got my steps today, and also got my ladders.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 (Not my voice. 🙂 )

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

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 state school funding and more — is here.

Daphne du Maurier

It’s Halloween month, and thoughts turn to writers skilled at creating scary, spooky, suspenseful fiction.

Those authors who come to mind include Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson, among others. But what about Daphne du Maurier?

Well…it’s complicated. A number of du Maurier’s novels and short stories indeed have chilling and sinister elements, but some of her books do not. One could say du Maurier was more an author of literary fiction than of Gothic horror fiction, though she of course excelled at both and could effectively combine the two. Let’s take a look at this British author’s stellar writing career after a brief detour into her interesting family lineage.

The 1907-born du Maurier’s mother Muriel was an actress and her father Gerald an actor/stage manager. Daphne’s grandfather George was a cartoonist and writer – including authoring the novel Trilby whose Svengali character had a name that would live on in language as an evil person who manipulates and controls others.

Daphne’s first novel to achieve wide renown was the potboiler Jamaica Inn (1936), which – along with Rebecca (1938) and her story “The Birds” (1952) – would cement the writer’s eerie bona fides by being turned into Alfred Hitchcock movies.

Rebecca is of course du Maurier’s most famous novel – and a classic. As many of you know, it stars the unnamed young bride of Maximilian de Winter, whose first wife (the title character) died under mysterious circumstances in the water bordering their Manderley estate. The book also features creepy housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who’s intensely loyal to the late Rebecca and threateningly hostile to the new bride.

While the second Mrs. de Winter is initially shy and timid, her eventual turn into a more determined and self-assured person is an example of how du Maurier created a number of strong, feminist women in her fiction.

One of them is Frenchman’s Creek protagonist Dona – a married, upper-class, 17^th-century English mother who daringly has an affair with a French pirate and even becomes a pirate herself for a while. In a 1941 novel of adventure and general fiction that’s not in the Gothic horror genre.

Among other du Maurier novels with little or no hint of the spooky and supernatural were 1949’s The Parasites (about an eccentric theater family) and 1954’s Mary Anne (a fictionalized look at du Maurier’s brainy and ambitious great-great grandmother navigating initial poverty and a patriarchal society).

In-between was 1951’s My Cousin Rachel, a mystery/romance with haunting elements.

The author was still going strong in 1969, when her time-travel novel The House on the Strand was published. The way du Maurier moves her protagonist repeatedly from the 20^th to 14^th century, and the eye-opening experiences he has in the 1300s, make that book one of the cleverer examples of the time-travel genre also explored by H.G. Wells, Mark Twain, Octavia Butler, Diana Gabaldon, Jack Finney, Edward Bellamy, Audrey Niffenegger, and others.

Short stories were a du Maurier strength, too. “The Birds,” of course, but also her later-career 1971 collection featuring “Don’t Look Now” and other memorable tales; a collection I just read for the first time. The “Don’t Look Now” story’s shocking manipulation-of-time conclusion is a wondrous thing to behold.

Among the works by du Maurier – who died in 1989 – that I haven’t read are a few of her other novels as well as her plays and nonfiction.

Any thoughts on this post and du Maurier’s writing?

Misty the cat says: “When that chipmunk writes its memoir, I can narrate the audiobook.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 (Not my voice. 🙂 )

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

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 includes a movie theme — is here.

A forlorn Yankees dugout. (Getty Images.)

With the New York Yankees eliminated from the playoffs again last week despite having one of the highest payrolls in baseball, it’s time to take a swing at the topic of underachievers. In literature.

There are various reasons why fictional characters underachieve. Laziness, being spoiled, making dumb decisions, having psychological issues, having some physical or mental disability, etc. And there are cases where underachieving is a good thing – like, say, choosing a more-relaxing lifestyle over a frantic, high-paying job.

Our first underachiever to discuss is Tom Tulliver of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. He’s from an initially affluent family, is favored over his smarter sister Maggie during an ultra-patriarchal 19^th century, and so on, but becomes only somewhat successful. Why? For one thing, Tom is not that intelligent despite have some drive and practical skills, and he’s not very capable of “thinking outside the box.”

Another 19^th-century character, Isabel Archer of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, also has advantages: smarts, kindness, good looks, an inheritance, some independence. But she gets manipulated into a miserable marriage, and seems too wedded to conventionality to possibly get out of it. Again, a very patriarchal time and place in which to live.

Then there are bright characters whose lives are blighted well into adulthood because of the responsibility they feel, or are browbeaten into feeling, toward problematic parents.

For instance, the title character of Honore de Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet devotes much of her young-adult life to her not-nice, miserly father – essentially assuming the role of her late mother/his late wife.

In Daphne du Maurier’s The Parasites, daughter Celia in the theatrical Delaney family has a lot of drawing talent, but doesn’t pursue that craft as she devotes most of her time to doing stuff for her self-centered, demanding father.

Ignatius J. Reilly of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is a pretty smart guy. But he’s too lazy, too eccentric, and too…various other things to make a success of his life.

Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is also brainy, but drifts through his young life with self-centered and alienated thoughts.

Moving briefly away from novels, famous fictional underachievers include the title character of Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Willy Loman of Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman.”

Of course, novels can feature upward or downward arcs in underachievement and achievement. One upward example is Sydney Carton, of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, who has an unsuccessful life until choosing heroic redemption. One downward example is Gervaise Macquart, of Emile Zola’s The Drinking Den, who painstakingly builds a successful life as a businesswoman until being dragged down by her once-admirable roofer husband after an injury sends him spiraling into alcoholism.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “My apartment-complex inspection has turned up no ‘Lord of the Rings’ orcs.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 (Not my voice. 🙂 )

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

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 covers parking, privacy, and polling places — is here.

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch is not about me but should be,” says Misty the cat during one of his leashed walks. (Photo by Laurel Cummins.)

Misty the cat here, back for my every-two-month guest litterbox…um…literature post as autumn leaves turn from John Green to Tommy Orange to Rita Mae Brown. Prominent authors don’t grow on trees? Perhaps they do.

Speaking of prominent authors, today is the birthday of the late Anne Rice. She wrote many novels starring vampires, which are mythical undead creatures who rise from the grave at night to drink the blood of the living but never show up at my weekly book club gatherings. Perhaps I’m serving the wrong drinks. 

What have I, Misty the cat, been reading lately? The edition of Breakfast at Tiffany’s I borrowed from the library last month included a second Truman Capote novel. I was hoping that bonus book would be Lunch at Burger King, Dinner at Katz’s Delicatessen, or Midnight Snack at the Nearest Dumpster, but it turned out to be Other Voices, Other Rooms. I tried to stay with OVOR, but gave up after too many pages of too much racial stereotyping. Besides, I didn’t like what Holly Golightly did to one of my fellow felines at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. So, I’ll be rereading Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo to fine-tune my vengeful mood – and to learn why The Count moved from Sesame Street to Monte Cristo.

Capote may not have liked it, but Dumas was of part-African descent – as were the writers Colette and Alexander Pushkin, among others. Colette’s most-famous novel was Gigi (despite it hardly being her best book) while Pushkin’s masterpiece was Eugene Onegin. The title of that novel-in-verse has the same initials as Eggy Omelet, which I suspect some people order for breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I’m currently reading Salley Vickers’ The Cleaner of Chartres, and it’s always nice when a working-class character (in this case Agnes Morel) stars in a novel. Of course, many working-class people sadly get laid off – even as the “e” in “Salley” has so far escaped that downsizing fate.

Getting back to the current season of autumn, my thoughts turn to “The Fall of the House of Usher” – one of Edgar Allan Poe’s quartet of tales that also includes “The Winter of the House of Usher,” “The Spring of the House of Usher,” and “I, E.A. Poe, Might Be Dead But Stop Creating Fake Titles for My Short Stories.”

Dave will respond to comments while I, Misty the cat, read “The Summer of the House of Usher.”

Misty the cat asks: “Am I ‘Up the Down Staircase’ or up the up staircase?”

I and 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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 (Not Dave’s voice. 🙂 )

Dave is also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 mentions of many famous plays — is here.

After recently reading Truman Capote’s famous 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I realized that my periodic posts over the years about a specific decade of literature had not yet included the 1950s. That will be remedied today faster than an Elvis Presley hip swivel.

Looking back, the ’50s are considered a relatively conventional time in certain ways, but there were definitely signs of change bubbling under the surface that would explode in the following decade – among them pushes for civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. So, not surprisingly, many ’50s-released novels contained both conventional and unconventional elements – with the unconventionality also including a bit more candid depiction of sexuality and a bit more use of four-letter words than in prior decades and centuries. 

Civil rights and the Black experience in general were reflected in novels such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Unfortunately, the otherwise pretty open-minded Breakfast at Tiffany’s has some racist elements, whether that involved Capote thinking that way himself or the author just showing what many people’s views openly were back then.

Some non-white ethnic characters were also treated non-stereotypically in some ’50s novels. One who comes to mind is the highly educated Chinese-American cook/housekeeper Lee in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952); he’s that book’s smartest, most ethical, and most relatable person.

Independent or partly independent women appeared in novels such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (starring the flighty but strong-willed Holly Golightly), Daphne du Maurier’s Mary Anne (1954), Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar (1955), and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). There’s also East of Eden’s Cathy Ames — though that evil, driven character is far from a role model.

LGBTQ+ characters, whether closeted or not, in ’50s lit? There were certainly some in Breakfast at Tiffany’s – one of the before-its-time highlights of Capote’s novella. Giovanni’s Room (1956) by James Baldwin comes to mind, too.

Meanwhile, Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951) gave readers food for thought about the necessity to distrust authority when the person in authority isn’t worthy of trust. A sentiment that would become more pronounced in the 1960s and beyond.

Also published in 1951 was J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, with its prescient look at teen angst and alienation through the lens of annoying protagonist Holden Caulfield.

Other ’50s novels of note include, among others, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451 (1953), with its book-burning government’s thought-policing and anti-intellectualism; William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which explored how things can go bad when “civilization” is lost; and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955), the pioneering fantasy classic that some considered a World War II allegory despite the author’s denial of that.

Major releases that decade, to name some, also included Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (both 1951); Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (all 1952); Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954); Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955); Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956); Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (all 1957); Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (both 1958), and Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (both 1959).

The ’50s novels mentioned in this post are ones I’ve read; there are of course many other books from that decade I have not gotten to.

As an aside, I’ll mention a novel I recently read by 1955-born author John Grisham. That book is The Widow (2025), and I must say that, after 50 or so novels, Grisham’s still “got it.” The Widow, about a small-town lawyer falsely charged with murdering the title character, is a riveting page-turner.

Thoughts on this post and the books in it? Any other 1950s novels you’d like to mention?

Misty the cat: “I’m keeping the pillow warm for when my college human comes home for Thanksgiving.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

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

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 very interesting Township Council meeting — is here.

Angine de Poitrine! The video I took this screenshot from is at the end of today’s post.

I recently heard about a French-Canadian musical duo named Angine de Poitrine, and I must say that getting-very-popular band is delightfully quirky in its goofy appearance and mesmerizing songs.

The “q” word reminds me of some of the quirkiest authors and novels I’ve read over the years. Sometimes that quirkiness can be too much, but it’s often a nice change of pace…entertaining, compelling, and original. 

One of the first authors to come to mind is John Irving. He frequently deals with quite serious matters – war, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, etc., but mixes in all kinds of weird things. Bear appearances, wrestling situations, a deadly foul ball during a baseball game, and more. Life is unpredictable…

There’s also Franz Kafka’s writing, which is…Kafkaesque. 🙂 One obvious example is the human Gregor Samsa becoming a giant insect in that author’s The Metamorphosis.

Herman Melville got quirky in his rare 100%-land-based novel Pierre, which includes strong hints of incest as well as the author using his title character as a vehicle to obliquely reference Melville’s real-life dismay over the poor reception for his previous year’s Moby-Dick.

Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman? The title alone telegraphs just how oddly the author uses food in her debut novel.

Anthony Burgess’ dystopian A Clockwork Orange is also very offbeat with its slangy different language and more.

Or how about Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five? It mixes horror, black humor, time travel, and more as it makes its antiwar points.

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle features an isolated ultra-eccentric family, strange murders, and other eyebrow-raising content.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita includes the devil in its cast as well as a flying human (no airplane involved) and other fantastical elements.

Which reminds me that magic-realism novels, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, can also feature flying humans and other peculiar things.

Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman includes absurd content such as cops who speak mostly in non sequiturs and are obsessed with bicycles.

And we can’t forget Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, who offers readers all kinds of surreal stuff: Alice’s body changing sizes, bizarre chess goings-on, the fading-away Cheshire Cat…

I’ll end by noting that there are novels that are mostly not weird but have at least one weird element. For instance, the tragic-yet-delightful ghost in Elin Hilderbrand’s The Hotel Nantucket.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

An Angine de Poitrine song:

Misty the cat says: “Before the rain the birds get noisy/That doesn’t mean I live in Boise.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

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

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 ICE agents again menacing my town and more — is here.

Reading fiction offers many pleasures. I’ll discuss one of those pleasures today.

Discovering an excellent living author you’ve never read before is a great feeling, and it can be even greater when that author has been around for a while — meaning you suddenly have a number of novels to enjoy from that writer’s back catalog.

Such was the case when I read the quite-literary, character-rich mystery writer Tana French for the first time last week. I liked The Searcher a lot, and was happy to see that French had written nine other novels – the first dating back to 2007 – from which I could choose to read without waiting for new ones to be published.

The Searcher (2020) stars a 40-something retired Chicago cop who moves from the U.S. to rural Ireland (echoing the American-born French’s relocation to that European country) and has two sequels — the first of which, The Hunter (2024), I’m reading now and finding even better than The Searcher. Then there are six books in French’s “Dublin Murder Squad” series and one standalone novel.

Changing the name Tana by one letter to Tara, Tara Jenkins Reid is another author I recently tried for the first time, starting with her novel Daisy Jones and The Six. I liked that Fleetwood Mac-inspired story enough to quickly read two more Reid novels – Carrie Soto Is Back and Malibu Rising – and am impressed with the way the author infuses pop culture and sports into serious fiction. Six more novels in her back catalog…

Isabel Allende came out with her masterful debut novel The House of the Spirits in 1982, but I didn’t read that magic-realism classic until around 2010 or so. Meaning I subsequently had 14 previous Allende novels from which to choose, of which I would particularly enjoy reading Daughter of Fortune and Zorro. (Allende has written eight more novels since 2010.)

I was also late to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander time-travel series, which launched in 1991 even as I didn’t read the first novel until 2019. By then there were seven more installments, all of which I addictively polished off during the height of Covid in 2020.

Kristin Hannah’s first novel was also published in 1991, but I didn’t discover her until reading The Nightingale less than five years ago. By then, there were more 20 other Hannah novels to catch up on, including the gripping family saga The Great Alone and the moving tale of friendship Firefly Lane.

It was more than 20 years after Elin Hilderbrand’s 2000 publishing debut that I belatedly began reading that author – starting with her delightful 2022 novel The Hotel Nantucket. By then, there were nearly 30 other Hilderbrand books to enjoy – and I polished off most of them.

When I first read Lee Child about a decade ago (his mid-career Jack Reacher novel 61 Hours), he had already written 20 Reacher books. So, there would be many Reacher page-turners in Child’s back catalog to enjoy, while also reading each of his new thrillers that arrived every fall since then.

Similar situation with John Grisham, who I didn’t start reading (choosing The Client) until he was in mid-career.

Of course, reading a deceased author for the first time usually means there are various other novels by that writer to enjoy in the future.

Your thoughts about this topic, and examples from your own reading experiences?

Misty the cat says: 🎵 “‘Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.’ 🎵 Except it’s Sunday.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

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

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, and include many encounters with celebrities.

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 daycare center’s 100^th anniversary and other topics — is here.

Parties in fiction! They can be wild, weird, fun, entertaining, stressful, somber, tragic, etc. These gatherings can tell us a lot about the characters as well as put a spotlight on the culture and customs of their time. Meanwhile, those in attendance might meet for the first time, reunite, break up, and experience many other things. Parties can advance a novel’s plot, too.

Among the craziest parties I’ve encountered in a book is the 1983-set one in Taylor Jenkins Reid’s excellent 2021 novel Malibu Rising, which I read last week. The California shindig features plenty of drugs and sex, couples starting and ending relationships, changes in the lives of the Riva family members who star in the novel, celebrity cameos, police called to the door, and a mind-boggling conclusion. The novel basically alternates between that all-night party and various chapters fleshing out the backstories of the Rivas: rock star father Mick and the wife (June) and four now-adult children (Nina, Jay, Hud, and Kit) he abandoned.

Other novels with memorable parties? Let’s go chronologically back in time (of publishing date) to some examples.

In Zadie Smith’s London-set White Teeth, one of that 2000 novel’s main characters (Archie) is thinking of suicide but decides to go to a party instead – where he meets his future second wife (Clara). There is also much more to the book, which might be the most multicultural novel I’ve ever read.

Don DeLillo’s ambitious Underworld (1997) includes a scene at a real-life party: Truman Capote’s famous 1966 “Black-and-White Ball” at New York City’s Plaza Hotel. A rather high-profile guest list: Lauren Bacall, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Carson, Walter Cronkite, Ralph Ellison, Mia Farrow, Henry Fonda, Joan Fontaine, Katharine Graham (the Washington Post publisher), Lillian Hellman, Lady Bird Johnson, Harper Lee, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Frank Sinatra, John Steinbeck, Andy Warhol, etc. As one can see, some prominent writers attended in addition to the host Capote.

The first book (1954) of J.R.R. Tolkien’s iconic The Lord of the Rings trilogy opens with a massive party for the aged Bilbo Baggins, star of The Hobbit (1937). It’s a party that also serves to introduce Bilbo’s much younger adopted relative Frodo Baggins, who goes on to co-star in the trilogy.

Hermann Hesse’s existential 1927 novel Steppenwolf features a lavish masquerade ball, after which we witness the Harry Haller character’s famous visit to the fantastical “Magic Theatre.”

Two years earlier, in 1925, saw the release of Virginia Woolf’s masterful Mrs. Dalloway – which unfolds in one day as the title character prepares to host a party that then happens. But there is plenty of backstory and profound stuff going on in a book set soon after the trauma of World War I.

Emile Zola’s tragic The Drinking Den (1877) features a Paris wedding party that’s way too expensive for the bride (Gervaise) and groom (Coupeau). The extended scene depicts some happiness but mostly portends the doom to come.

Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre (1847) includes a high-society gathering at Thornfield Hall during which Rochester dresses as a gypsy fortune-teller to question governess Jane, with whom he has been falling in love.

The orgy scene in The Magic Skin certainly has a big impact on things in Honore de Balzac’s 1831 novel.

Short stories of course also feature their share of parties, with two of many examples being James Joyce’s poignant “The Dead” (1914) and Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842).

Thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “I’m where ‘the deer and the antelope play,’ minus the antelope.”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

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

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 – my 500^th column for that website! — is here.

A view of Boston and the Charles River from the 26^th floor of my daughter Maria’s sophomore-year dorm. (Photo by me, taken yesterday.)

My wife Laurel and I were in Boston from Friday to this afternoon moving in our daughter Maria for her second year of college. Not as much time as usual to think of and write my weekly Sunday book post, so I decided to stick with a second theme and write about some of my favorite second novels by authors. I’ll also mention a few not-favorite second novels.

A second novel can be excellent because an author has “practiced” with one published novel and is perhaps ready to move on to greater things. Or, in some cases, an author has been working up to that first novel for years and poured all kinds of effort and pent-up elements into it – creating the conditions to maybe disappoint somewhat with the next book.

I’ll only be mentioning authors whose first and second novels I’ve both read, so these will be my personal opinions and not necessarily the overall critical opinions. 🙂

One great second novel was Anne Bronte’s proto-feminist The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – whose quality was just a step below the Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights classics written by her sisters Charlotte and Emily. Unfortunately, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall would be Anne’s last novel because of her early death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne also hit a home run with his second novel: The Scarlet Letter. That came out a whopping 22 years after his little-known first novel Fanshawe; during the time between the two books, Hawthorne focused on writing short stories.

George Eliot? Her very good first novel Adam Bede was followed by her brilliant The Mill on the Floss. Some consider that semi-autobiographical work to be her best book, though fans of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda might have something to say about that.

Mark Twain co-wrote his uneven debut novel The Gilded Age with Charles Dudley Warner. Twain’s second novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, of course became a classic.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s debut novel The Hobbit is delightful, even as his iconic follow-up The Lord of the Rings trilogy nearly two decades later has more sweep and depth. 

In the not-great-but-very-good category of second novels, we have Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. It’s certainly well-done and memorable, but a bit of a letdown after Dickens entered the fiction realm with his hilarious The Pickwick Papers.

Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was a stunning debut for an author in her early 20s, but her somewhat-less-impressive (and much shorter) second novel Reflections in a Golden Eye is still quite riveting in its quirky way.

Your favorite second novels? Any you’re not particularly fond of?

Misty the cat asks: “If this bouquet is from 1-800-Flowers, where are the other 799?”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 Not my voice. 🙂

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

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 vicious ICE agency detaining two restaurant employees who worked in my town — is here.

I’ve previously covered this topic here and there, but I wanted to return to some of the ways modern novels differ from older ones.

Several examples of this are cropping up as I read The Hallmarked Man (2025) — J.K. Rowling’s eighth excellent book, under her Robert Galbraith alias, starring private investigators Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott.

This long (897 pages) crime novel includes mentions of lots of digital technology that was of course not an element of long-ago books. Strike, Ellacott, and their employees frequently text each other while on stakeouts, pore through social media to seek information about possible suspects and witnesses, explore “the dark web” for clues, etc.

Rowling’s series also features plenty of cursing — taboo in older novels — as well as somewhat explicit sex scenes and somewhat graphic depictions of violence one doesn’t see as much in long-ago literature. (Although Rowling’s work is more reserved than some recent fiction in those respects.)

And, unlike many older novels, The Hallmarked Man and Rowling’s earlier Strike/Ellacott books feature various characters of different ethnicities, various characters who are LGBTQ+, etc. – with all that diversity depicted, like it should be, as an unremarkable part of life.

(Rowling’s unfortunate personal views about transgender people are fortunately not reflected in any of her novels.)

Getting back to the tech thing, one of the first 21^st-century authors to strongly incorporate the digital world was Stieg Larsson in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels — with the Lisabeth Salander character’s computer expertise germane to the plot in Larsson’s 2005-2007 trilogy. There was also Stephen King’s 2006 novel Cell (referring to the phone not a prison space), though it was sadly one of that author’s lesser books.

Of course, early sci-fi writers such as Jules Verne and E.T.A. Hoffmann imagined approximations of stuff in our digital age, but this post’s focus is mostly on authors more current to our time.

Other recent or relatively recent books with many four-letter words and/or frank sexual situations and/or queasy violence? Kristin Hannah’s The Women (2024), Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022), Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), among many others. The cursing and violence in a war-set novel like The Women – which spotlights three American nurses dealing with horrific injury situations in Vietnam — is to be totally expected if the author wants to convey realism.

Other 21st-century books with all kinds of multiculturalism and diversity? Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), to name just two.

As I alluded to earlier, there are always exceptions to the rule. For instance, some older novels, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) by D.H. Lawrence, contain fairly explicit sexual content — and some newer novels are written in the more prim way of decades or centuries ago. (This is also the case with formal and/or wordy prose.) And there are the rare older novels with diverse, non-stereotypical casts – Georges (1843) by Alexandre Dumas is one that comes to mind – while some newer novels have homogenous casts.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “Sheesh…I paid good money for a luxury automobile and get this?”

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 Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂 (Not my voice. 🙂 )

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

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

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 not-beloved builders and an unpopular board — is here.