Fictional People Are Getting Deported, Too

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The Trump regime’s cruel deportation program has extended to fictional characters. And this program is widespread: affecting characters from the United States or other countries, characters who live in the present or lived in the past, etc. Because novels can make readers smarter and more empathetic, most of today’s Republicans feel many characters have to be removed from the pages where they live — including pages in some of my favorite literature.

I first heard about character deportations when The Grapes of Wrath‘s Tom Joad, who develops a stronger class consciousness as John Steinbeck’s book goes on, was yanked from the novel by Trump’s masked ICE agent goons. Determined to find Tom, the rest of the Joad family traveled east instead of west and ended up picking crops in New York City’s Times Square. Needless to say, not much was growing through the pavement.

ICE agents also plucked Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte’s novel because she’s a determined young woman too independent-minded for Trump’s taste, and doesn’t have big blonde hair like many Fox News hosts do. So, U.S. Secretary of Education/wrestling biz wacko Linda McMahon substituted for Jane as little Adele’s teacher, and Rochester instead fell in love with a Disney princess.

Of course, characters of color are most at risk of the Trump regime’s deportations, and Bigger Thomas of Richard Wright’s Native Son was no exception. Plus his attorney is a communist! With Bigger no longer around as a client, that lawyer represented Jane Eyre as she tried to return to her novel, but Jane instead got sent to Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” two centuries before that repugnant concentration-camp-like jail was built.

Clara del Valle Trueba was also deported — from The House of the Spirits. After being kicked out of Isabel Allende’s novel, the clairvoyant Clara took her knowledge of Trump’s guilt in the sickening Epstein pedophile scandal and started a blog about that. Because Clara had been in a magic-realism book, the blog levitated out of her computer screen — which puzzled WordPress customer support.

In Daniel Deronda, Daniel D. and Mirah Lapidoth and Ezra Mordecai Cohen are idealistic proto-Zionists rather than the U.S.-armed genocidal Zionists in Israel’s current leadership who are mass-murdering Palestinian civilians, so the three were deported when entering a government office to register as George Eliot characters. That left Gwendolen Harleth wandering around Eliot’s 19th-century novel, searching for a Burger King in which to have lunch.

Atticus Finch? Taken from To Kill a Mockingbird for being an attorney with integrity. This came after some Trump regime hesitation to deport Finch because author Harper Lee had the same last name as Confederate traitor Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general greatly admired by right-wingers for fighting to defend the appalling institution of slavery. But Atticus did ultimately get booted from To Kill a Mockingbird before joining Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch novel starring a painting of a bird sharing his last name.

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, every character except the ultra-evil Lord Voldemort was deported to make the series more palatable for Republican fascists. One of the characters, Nearly Headless Nick, went on to successfully lose 10 pounds by becoming Completely Headless Nick.

But no character was spared from deportation in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things because Trump erroneously thought the title of that novel referred to his fingers and his…

Misty the cat says: “Where’s my teen human? Oh, she went away to college last weekend.”

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 the book features a talking cat: 🙂

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

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

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the spending to date of money authorized by my town’s massive 2022 school bond referendum — is here.

Reimagination Actualization

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Four years ago, I blogged about fiction that uses previous fiction as a jumping-off point — and perhaps reimagines well-known characters. This post is sort of a sequel to that post, taking a somewhat different angle and including several novels I’ve read since 2021.

In general, I’m not a huge fan of fiction that’s heavily inspired by a famous work; I’d rather writers be more original than that. Still, there have been some excellent novels that offer insights into the previous work and might be great in their own right.

My latest encounter with this reimagining phenomenon was Queen Macbeth, Val McDermid’s 2024 novella that takes a fascinating approach to characters in Shakespeare’s iconic Macbeth play. The book is excellent, giving Lady Macbeth a more positive (and more historically accurate) persona as a compelling plot unfolds in two different timelines.

McDermid’s book reminded me a bit of Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novella The Penelopiad (mentioned in my 2021 post) that gives Penelope a bigger and more feminist role than she had in Homer’s ancient Odyssey poem.

There’s also Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 tour de force that gives Charles Dickens’ 1850 classic David Copperfield a modern spin in America’s Appalachian region during the opioid epidemic.

Kristin Hannah’s gripping 2021 novel The Four Winds was obviously inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), but it’s still plenty original and differs in featuring a female protagonist. (The title character in Demon Copperhead is male.)

Zadie Smith has described the structure/focus of her novel On Beauty (2005) as an homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910).

In her also-published-in-2005 novel March, Geraldine Brooks takes the father from Louisa May Alcott’s 1868-released Little Women and gives him his own story.

I haven’t read it yet, but Percival Everett’s acclaimed James (2024) reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim.

In my 2021 post, I mentioned the 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Jean Rhys gives three-dimensionality to the “madwoman in the attic” of Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre; Rhys’ creation is in effect a prequel to Bronte’s 1847 book. I also discussed the novel (by Gregory Maguire) and the play Wicked, which sympathetically portray the Wicked Witch from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novel (1900) and The Wizard of Oz movie (1939).

Mentioned as well in that post were Isabel Allende’s 2005 novel Zorro, Jasper Fforde’s 2001 novel The Eyre Affair, and Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 Jane Austen parody Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — the last of which I haven’t felt the “Persuasion” to read.

Comments about, and examples of, this theme?

Misty the cat says: “My right turn has nothing to do with politics.”

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 the book features a talking cat: 🙂

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

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

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a badly maintained lower-income apartment building, a change in venue for a senior center, and more — is here.

Going Places

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Elizabeth von Arnim

Can going to a different place change a person for the better? It certainly helps in some cases — as seen in various novels. Characters might get out of rut, meet new people, interact differently with people they already know, see new sights, learn new things, self-reflect, find the new place suits their personality more, etc.

I just read Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April (1922), which focuses on four unhappy British women who rent a castle on the Italian Riviera for a month. The gorgeous setting becomes a big factor in improving things for each of the four. The Enchanted April is…enchanting — an upbeat novel, but with some welcome puncturing of sentimentality.

Another British character travels to Hawaii in David Lodge’s 1991 novel Paradise News, where love is found along with better weather. 🙂

Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 novel Rubyfruit Jungle stars Molly Bolt — who, as a lesbian, finds life somewhat fraught in Florida. She eventually ends up in New York City, where things are of course not perfect but there’s more of an LGBTQ+ community.

The orphaned title character of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre spends many of the 1847 novel’s early pages at Lowood School, a harsh place with little heat and inadequate food until some reforms are instituted. But the big change for Jane is subsequently getting a governess job at the Thornfield Hall manor, where life becomes quite dramatic. Good things happen, but not all good…

Yes, it can obviously be a mixed experience going to a different place. In Kristin Hannah’s 2024 novel The Women, for instance, the rather naive American protagonist signs up to be a Vietnam War nurse. Much of the experience is horrific for her and of course her badly wounded patients, yet she grows so much as a person that going to Vietnam has some positives.

In John Grisham’s 2014 novel Gray Mountain, New York City lawyer Samantha Kofer is a very urban person who nonetheless finds a lot of satisfaction amid fraught moments after taking a legal-aid job in Virginia’s Appalachian region.

A life-changing positive travel experience can also involve leaving Earth, as pioneering female astronaut Elma York does in Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars and its sequel The Fated Sky, both from 2018.

Obvioiusly, characters can get to another place and see their lives go downhill, but that scenario is not part of this blog post.

I’ve just touched the surface here. Other novels that fit today’s theme? Comments about this theme?

Misty the cat says: “Whoever writes ‘Stop’ signs is even more widely published than Stephen King.”

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 the book features a talking cat: 🙂

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

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

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — containing a comedic overreaction to a one-hour-earlier closing time at my town’s municipal pools — is here.

Summer in the City? No, Summer with a Kitty

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My feline self sprawled next to Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, which I will not discuss today because I haven’t finished reading it yet. The first letters of that novel’s title spell “tea,” which I don’t drink. Thank you for your attention to these two matters. (Photo by Dave.)

Misty the suburban cat here with my every-two-month blog post. My previous guest piece was in June, this one is in August, and the next one will be in October. Except that U2’s October album was released in 1981, so I’m not sure how my next blog post will be in…October. There IS a song on that album called “Stranger in a Strange Land,” which is about me at the vet for my yearly check-up.

Anyway, my adult humans Dave and Laurel saw the Superman movie this month, and enjoyed its thrills, acting, and empathy. But I, Misty, was not allowed in the theater because of being a cat. I was actually kind of relieved, because sitting through 25 minutes of ads and previews would have had me yowling loud enough to be heard on Mars — which billionaire bozo Elon Musk, aka the Tesla dude, wants to not only colonize but have The Martian Chronicles author Ray Bradbury write a 2025 sequel called The SpaceX Chronicles. Given that Bradbury died in 2012, he…missed the pleasure of seeing the catastrophic flop of Musk’s stupid Cybertruck.

The Superman film reminds me and other kitties of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the 2000 novel partly based on the real-life Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster duo who created the Superman character for comic books in 1938 — the year the iPhone minus-69 was released.

More generally, the 2025 movie starring the “Man of Steel” also reminds my meowing self of fictional characters possessing abilities beyond the capacity of most mortals. One is the Lee Child-created Jack Reacher — who’s not a superhero but displays unusual strength, incredible fighting abilities, great intellect, and other attributes in the 29-book series that began in 1997. Exactly a century after Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which stars a vampire who acts out in all kinds of ways after Frankenstein defeats him in pickleball. A tip of the hat to Mary Shelley.

Another character who combines exceptional brains with exceptional physical abilities is the prehistoric protagonist Ayla of Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels. Ayla’s many accomplishments included inventing things and being the only person able to ride Baby the lion (a feline like me!), although she never played pickleball with her horse Whinney.

Some fictional people even rise in the air or fly — in magic-realism novels and other books. Among them are Remedios in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Margarita in Mikhael Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and the title character of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan — which was first a play, then a novel, then an animated movie, then a live TV film, and finally a jar of peanut butter which also flew when Dave tossed it out the window to compare its hang time with a jar of Skippy peanut butter. Denying me the opportunity to swat both brands off the counter with my cat paws.

There are also characters who might not be extraordinarily adept in a brute physical way but are really, really smart. Hermione Granger of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Sherlock Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction, Hercule Poirot of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, etc. Lisbeth sadly did not have a cat tattoo, but I forgive her because she’s Swedish and thus might toss some Swedish meatballs my way.

Dave will reply to comments so that I have time to eat the aforementioned meatballs. Rest assured that I maintain a balanced diet — one meatball in each side of my mouth.

I, Misty the cat, say: “After years of study, I’m finally qualified to inspect Belgian blocks.”

My 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 Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

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

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

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

In addition to this weekly blog, Dave writes the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my school district’s huge, recently discovered deficit — is here.

Weekly Post, Monthly Theme

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August has arrived, and thoughts not only turn to the approaching start of the school year but also to…Light in August.

Yes, some novels have months in their titles, and William Faulkner’s 1932 book is no exception. It also happens to be my favorite Faulkner work as the author unspools a “Southern Gothic” story about a man (Joe Christmas) who passes as white but thinks he has some African-American ancestry, a pregnant woman (Lena Grove) searching for the would-be father, and others.

Now let’s work back to previous months. Nadine Gordimer wrote July’s People, a novel set in a near-future version of South Africa where apartheid had ended. This was before apartheid actually ended, at least officially, about a decade after Gordimer’s 1981 book was published.

There’s also Three Junes by Julia Glass, whose 2002 novel has an intriguing tri-format set in 1989, 1995, and 1999.

Various novels include May and April in their titles, but I haven’t read any of them. 🙂

March? We have Geraldine Brooks’ March, but — rather than referring to the third month of the year — the title of the 2005 novel is the last name of the father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as Brooks focuses on that dad’s harrowing Civil War experiences. There’s also Middlemarch, but that’s the name of a fictional English town in George Eliot’s 1871-72 classic.

I haven’t read any novels with February, January, December, or November in the title, but they do exist — including Gustave Flaubert’s…November (1842).

Going further back in the realm of months, we have Tom Clancy’s 1984 Cold War thriller The Hunt for Red October.

Have I read any novels with September in the title? Nope. But the Earth, Wind & Fire song “September” was pretty good.

Watch for a Misty the cat guest blog post next week! He was adopted in December (of 2017).

Any novels you’d like to mention with a month manifestation?

Misty the cat says: “There are twin beds, queen beds, king beds, and hall-floor beds.”

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

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

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

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

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which has a quirky percentage theme — is here.

Ten Years After: a Video Interlude

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A 1987 photo I took of ‘Peanuts’ cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000) on the right, ‘Terry and the Pirates’/’Steve Canyon’ cartoonist Milton Caniff (1907-1988) on the left, and Snoopy.

Today, I’m doing something different in this usually literature-focused blog of mine. 🙂 I was surprised and pleased to see on the Bluesky social-media platform three days ago that my Canadian writer friend Dan St.Yves had re-posted a filmed interview he did with me almost exactly ten years ago, so I decided to re-post it again here instead of going with a more typical lit post.

In that summer of 2015 conversation, we talked about various syndicated cartoonists and columnists I had met and covered while working for Editor & Publisher magazine from 1983 to 2008 — before I started blogging on literature. Among the creators discussed: Charles M. Schulz (“Peanuts”), Jim Davis (“Garfield”), Lynn Johnston (“For Better or for Worse”), Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), Stan Lee (“Spider-Man”), humor columnist Dave Barry, and twin-sister advice columnists Abigail Van Buren (“Dear Abby”) and Ann Landers.

When Dan and I had our conversation, we were in Indianapolis attending the 2015 conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists — for which I was a board member from 2009 to 2023.

Again, this is not a typical book post for me, although all the cartoonists and columnists mentioned above have seen MANY sales of paperback (and in some cases hardcover) collections featuring their work, and some have written some non-collection books as well. (For instance, Dave Barry has authored and co-authored a number of novels.) Also, the 2012 Comic (and Column) Confessional memoir I wrote about my time at Editor & Publisher comes up during the interview. I could add that Alexandre Dumas wrote an 1845 sequel to his famous 1844 novel The Three Musketeers titled Twenty Years After — twice the length of time since this post’s 2015 video of ten years ago. So, if one read half of Twenty Years After…

Anyway, below is a link to the video, which lasts a bit over 20 minutes. Whether you watch it or not (no obligation!), I’ll be back with a more normal literature post next week. Actually, Misty the cat is soon due for another guest blog effort here to discuss books from his feline perspective, but he’s not sure yet if that will be on August 3 or sometime later in the month. In the meantime, Misty is reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Treats and hoping for a happy ending.

Misty the cat asks: “Why is there smoke in July when the new Pope was chosen in May?”

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

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

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

…and the aforementioned 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the cancellation of “The Late Show,” whose host Stephen Colbert is a resident of my town — is here.

Self-Therapy By Book

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Thomas Mann (Picture Alliance/Ullstein Bild)

Sometimes, novels are semi-autobiographical confessionals and/or expressions of authors’ repressed thoughts and/or a way for them to “work out issues” and/or a way of reckoning with their past and/or an exercise in wish-fulfillment, etc. Sort of self-therapy by book.

I thought about this when recently reading Thomas Mann’s novellas Tonio Kroger (1903) and especially Death in Venice (1912), and seeing that there was a whole lot of male longing for other males by the protagonists. Sure enough, a little online exploring showed that Mann — the father of six with wife Katia — was sexually attracted to men, though there’s no conclusive evidence he acted on that during a more homophobic time. But he sure made his feelings known in some of his writing, as when middle-aged Death in Venice protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach (a famous author…hmm) becomes obsessed with a teen boy he finds very good-looking.

Several years later, in 1918, Willa Cather wrote perhaps her best novel: My Antonia. In it, male protagonist Jim Burden holds Antonia in such high regard that he might well be a stand-in for Cather, who was probably gay. Meaning she could have narrator Jim (i.e. Willa) express some feelings the author might have found more difficult to express if that character were a woman.

While sexual orientation isn’t a subtext (as far as I know) in Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic 1826 novel The Last Man, the author did base the male protagonist Lionel Verney on herself despite the different gender and modeled two other characters — Adrian and Lord Raymond — on her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their late friend Lord Byron, respectively. So, Mary was kind of remembering and analyzing her relationships/interactions with the two famous poets.

Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853) also has a semi-autobiographical element: characters Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel are partly based on Charlotte and the real-life Constantin Heger, who Charlotte fell in love with (?) while enrolled in the Belgian boarding school run by Heger and his wife Zoe. And the downbeat tone of some of Villette was shaped to a degree by the 1848 and 1849 deaths-before-their-time of Charlotte’s younger novelist sisters Emily and Anne.

The Brontes’ contemporary Charles Dickens used a number of his novels to indirectly work through the childhood trauma that would help shape his social conscience. The future author’s father was sent to a debtors’ prison, and 12-year-old Charles had to leave school to work in a miserable factory to help support his family. Echoes of that can be found in the impoverished young characters Dickens created in David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist (1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and other works.

Amid the compulsive plot of his 1940 novel Native Son, Richard Wright wrestled with such matters as racism (which he experienced plenty of as a Black person) and his complicated feelings about the Communist Party USA (which he joined but later broke from).

Some authors who served in the military and were perhaps wounded in action indirectly worked through that trauma in war novels they would later write. Erich Maria Remarque — in books such as 1929’s All Quiet on the Western Front — is one prominent example of that.

Also, authors’ unrequited “crushes” in real life can provide rather intense fodder for novels, as was the case with Mann in his aforementioned Death in Venice and with Goethe in his The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Thoughts about and examples of this topic?

Misty the cat says: “Halley’s Comet won’t be back until 2061, so you may not see it in this video.”

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

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

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

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

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — a time-warped look at a long-closed movie theater that might open again — is here.

They’re Serious about Series and Standalone Novels

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Some authors are good at two or more things: novels and short stories, fiction and nonfiction, literary fiction and mass-audience fiction, etc. For this post, I’ll add to that by focusing on authors who are good at series as well as standalone novels. It certainly requires some different writing muscles to wrap up things in one book vs. extending things across multiple books.

This topic occurred to me last week as I read Val McDermid’s A Place of Execution, a superb standalone novel with a concluding twist that will knock your socks off. My previous experience with McDermid was with her series fiction, including the books starring “cold case” detective Karen Pirie.

I followed A Place of Execution with Martin Cruz Smith’s Independence Square — his 10th in the series starring Russian investigator Arkady Renko that began with Gorky Park. (Independence Square was okay; not as good as the earlier Renko books.) Smith has also written standalone novels such as Rose.

Sometimes, authors toggle throughout their careers between standalone books and series — as has been the case with Smith and McDermid as well as authors such as Walter Mosley with his Easy Rawlins books and much more. Other times, authors start with standalone novels before hitting on a hit series and focusing on that — as did Sue Grafton, who wrote two standalones before launching her popular Alphabet Mysteries (25 in all; she reached the letter “Y” before she died).

J.K. Rowling has also written many more series novels than standalone ones: seven Harry Potter books, then The Casual Vacancy one-off, then seven Cormoran Strike/Robin Ellacott crime novels (so far).

L.M. Montgomery followed her classic Anne of Green Gables with seven sequels over the years, during which time she also penned the Emily trilogy and standalones such as The Blue Castle.

Stephen King is known mostly for standalone novels, with a sprinkling of sequels and trilogies, but has also written many books in The Dark Tower series.

Some long-ago authors also toggled. For instance, James Fenimore Cooper wrote the five “Leatherstocking” novels (including The Last of the Mohicans) as well as various standalone books. Alexandre Dumas did both as well — many standalones (most famously The Count of Monte Cristo) as well as The Three Musketeers and its five sequels (sometimes published as fewer sequels when certain books were combined into one edition).

Your thoughts about and examples of this topic?

Misty the cat says: “My fitness tracker better record backward steps.”

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

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

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

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

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a lot of school news during a non-school time — is here.

An Array of Admirable Activists

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Zohran Mamdani walking New York City’s streets during his mayoral campaign.

I’ve written about activist authors (in 2014) and courageous characters (last year), but as far as I can recall I’ve never written specifically about activist characters in novels. So, today I will. 🙂

My inspiration for this topic was 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani winning last month’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor — and, thrillingly, the results weren’t even close. If Mamdani also wins the general election this fall he’ll become the youngest NYC mayor in more than a century, the city’s first Muslim mayor, and clearly the most progressive mayor the biggest U.S. city has ever had. Among Mamdani’s November opponents will be current NYC mayor Eric Adams, a cartoonishly corrupt politician who escaped multiple criminal charges by making a sell-out deal with Trump’s ghoulish Republican regime.

At a time of ever-growing economic inequality in NYC and the rest of the country, the charismatic Mamdani ran an energetic grassroots campaign that focused on freezing rents, making buses free, offering universal childcare, raising the inadequate minimum wage, and other pocketbook proposals — all to be paid for by raising the too-low taxes on the very rich.

Much of the very rich, of course, went bananas, and many of them during the primary backed Mamdani’s mayoral opponent Andrew Cuomo — the conservative-leaning former New York governor who resigned in disgrace four years ago after causing thousands of deaths by sending COVID patients into nursing homes and after being credibly accused of sexual harassment by 13 women who worked for the state. Plus, plenty of corruption in his administration. Many of those wealthy Cuomo supporters are now backing the aforementioned Adams, a right-wing Democrat who sat out the June primary and is now running as an “independent.”

Mamdani, who has an activist history, is also the rare American politician who supports equal rights for Palestinians and has publicly decried Israel’s genocide of innocent civilians in Gaza — drawing bogus accusations of anti-Semitism from people who wrongly equate being against Netanyahu’s far-right Israeli government with being anti-Semitic. In fact, Mamdani received many Jewish votes amid many votes from young people, Asian-American residents, etc. Also, Mamdani and Jewish mayoral candidate Brad Lander cross-endorsed each other — something they were able to do under the election’s ranked-choice system.

I should mention that I feel a connection to New York City because I lived in its Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens boroughs for a total of 16 years and worked in Manhattan for 30 years. My current town of Montclair is 12 miles west of NYC in New Jersey.

Anyway, on to some inspiring activist characters in literature!

There’s lapsed preacher Jim Casy, one of the memorable supporting players in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Casy tries to organize migrant workers after he tags along with the Joad family to California, where conditions for financially struggling newcomers are appalling.

Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds was clearly inspired by The Grapes of Wrath, though that 2021 novel is original in many ways. It tracks the radicalization of Elsa Wolcott, who’s part of a cast that also includes union organizer Jack Valen.

Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code (also 2021) focuses on a memorable trio of female British code breakers during World War II.

Another compelling historical novel is Leon Uris’ Mila 18 (1961), about the desperate Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis.

And Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) features the part-fictionalized sisters who opposed the regime of brutal Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo.

Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) has a supporting cast that includes radical lawyer Boris Max, who represents protagonist Bigger Thomas.

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments — the 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) — includes the Daisy character (birth name: Nicole) who infiltrates the repressive, patriarchal society of Gilead.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Dellarobbia Turnbow is an initially apolitical young farmer’s wife who joins the fight against climate change.

Then there’s the against-the-odds activism in these two classics: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

While activism occasionally succeeds, many other times it doesn’t — given the formidable/well-funded forces on the other side: powerful politicians, heavily armed military and police, giant corporations trying to increase their already-huge profits, bend-the-knee mainstream media outlets, etc. In fact, some of the fictional characters I mentioned in this post ended up being killed, making for riveting reading but very depressing reading.

Examples of activist characters in novels? Thoughts on this topic?

Misty the cat says: “When I groom myself near a window, it’s ‘A Groom with a View.'”

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

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

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

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

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my younger daughter’s June 26 high school graduation (again), a Township Council meeting, and more — is here.

Appointment with Disappointment: When Great Authors Misfire

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Uber Photography/Crown

Once in a while we’re surprised to read a not-great book by a great novelist.

My latest experience with this: Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty. The Australian writer is one of my favorite living authors (along with Margaret Atwood, Lee Child, John Grisham, Kristin Hannah, Elin Hilderbrand, Barbara Kingsolver, Val McDermid, Walter Mosley, Kate Quinn, and J.K. Rowling, to name a few). I loved Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, Apples Never Fall, The Husband’s Secret, and The Hypnotist’s Love Story — all A+ or A novels “in my book.” 🙂 Then came 2024’s Here One Moment, which I finished a few days ago.

Or, rather, struggled to finish. Here One Moment features an off-putting premise — a woman having a “mental episode” walks down the aisle of a packed in-flight plane telling passengers and crew members when and how they’re going to die. (Among the recipients of these unwanted predictions are children and 20-something adults informed that their lives will end in a few months or a few years — especially alarming news for young people.) Then, as the novel goes on, some of the seeming prophecies start to come true.

Another reason I wasn’t a huge fan of Here One Moment is that it jumps around to focus on quite a few characters, so it’s hard to get invested in them. Ambitious fiction, but scattered fiction. The only person who gets the full treatment is the supposed psychic, who has had a difficult life. So this repressed, not particularly likable woman is “humanized” more than the rest of the book’s cast.

Still, Here One Moment is very well-written, has some compelling sections, offers a “live life to the fullest because you never know when it might end” message, and does get better as it goes on. Also, I have to give some props to Moriarty for coming up with such a wild story line.

Despite the negatives, I’ll read the next Moriarty book when it’s published. No author writes a masterpiece each time; inspiration can come and go, life events can interfere, etc. And I should add that other readers might of course have different feelings about a novel; Here One Moment has a pretty high average of 4.3 stars (out of 5) on Amazon. Some of the 1- and 2-star reviewers who didn’t like the book sounded rather incredulous about all the positive ratings. 🙂

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of years-ago posts, there are other examples of past and present authors I love who’ve written what I consider not-great novels. Among them (with their disappointing books in parentheses) are Willa Cather (Sapphira and the Slave Girl), Wilkie Collins (A Rogue’s Life), James Fenimore Cooper (The Spy), the aforementioned John Grisham (Skipping Christmas), Stephen King (Cell), Jack London (A Daughter of the Snows), Carson McCullers (The Member of the Wedding), Herman Melville (Mardi), Richard Russo (Chances Are…), Erich Maria Remarque (Shadows in Paradise), Martin Cruz Smith (The Siberian Dilemma), and Edith Wharton (The Touchstone).

Sometimes the misfire is a debut novel as the author is trying to gain their creative footing. Sometimes it’s a final novel when the author is in ill health or perhaps low on ideas. Sometimes a disappointing novel happens in mid-career. And, again, people might differ and be fans of books others don’t like so much.

Any novels, written by favorite authors, that you weren’t thrilled about?

Misty the cat says: “The 5th Dimension sang ‘let the sunshine in’ in 1969, and it’s still here!”

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

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

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

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

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my younger daughter’s June 26 high school graduation and more — is here.