Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be, or Maybe It Is

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carThere’s bad nostalgia, such as Donald Trump’s delusional belief that the United States was once great (perhaps for a good number of affluent white males but often not for other demographics). And there’s more positive nostalgia, which will be the subject of today’s blog post. More positive nostalgia in literature, that is.

One prime example is Goodbye, Mr. Chips, in which James Hilton tells the story of English schoolteacher Mr. Chipping. The novel, like many books with a nostalgic bent, is not without bad times and tragedy — but the overall feeling is warm, especially in the description of how Mr. Chips’ brief marriage helped make him a more tolerant and less conventional person and educator.

Fannie Flagg’s World War II-themed The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion (see image above) has various nostalgic elements — including the story being told from a vantage point decades after the 1940s and the remembrance of how women briefly had more prominent work roles during WWII — including operating a gas station without men and flying important missions as WASPs (Women Airfare Service Pilots). Also, as the title indicates, some of the novel’s aged characters meet one final time.

Ray Bradbury’s semi-autobiographical 1957 novel Dandelion Wine looks at a boy’s small-town Illinois childhood through the lens of a 1928 summer. That childhood is in some ways idyllic, but there are enough painful and mysterious things going on to keep the book from getting too sentimental.

Given how many people live in suburbs and cities these days, novels set in small towns or on farms or in the wilderness can almost seem automatically nostalgic — even if the books are not anywhere close to 100% happy. Examples include L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, among many others.

Novels that time-travel into the past can also provide plenty of nostalgia. The past is far from perfect, but things at least were or seemed slower-paced/less frantic/more technologically “analog.” Jack Finney’s Time and Again and Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand would be two examples.

Prequel novels also can be at least partly nostalgic by their very nature. For instance, at different points after his first Jack Reacher book was published, Lee Child wrote three Reacher novels set when Jack is younger than in that first book. Due to the usual Reacher-realm violence, The Enemy and The Affair and Night School are not very wistful, but they feel partly nostalgic because we’re seeing Jack in his earlier years — during which time he had his first romantic encounter and so on. (First love can be quite nostalgic.)

Last but not least, In Search of Lost Time is steeped in nostalgia — often of a melancholy nature. The very title of Marcel Proust’s opus, which I’ve only read part of, conveys a longing for the past.

Novels you consider very or somewhat nostalgic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about a controversial schools superintendent resigning — is here.

Current Novelists Published for Many Years

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Who are some living authors with the longest novel-writing careers, dating back to the 1970s or earlier?

I contemplated that this past week as I read In One Person, John Irving’s quirky and compelling 2012 book about sexual identity (among other things). It was his 13th novel since his first, Setting Free the Bears, was published a whopping 51 years ago — in 1968.

Starting her novel career around the same time was the now-as-popular-as-ever Margaret Atwood, whose initial fiction book (The Edible Woman) was released exactly a half-century ago — in 1969. The Handmaid’s Tale and many other novels followed.

A year later, The Color Purple author Alice Walker came out with her first novel: The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Also in 1970, Beloved writer Toni Morrison entered the novel realm with The Bluest Eye. And in 1971, Underworld author Don DeLillo’s first novel (Americana) appeared.

Stephen King? His debut novel Carrie was published in 1974, the same year A Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin produced his first novel: A Song for Lya. Salman Rushdie of Midnight’s Children fame and Russell Banks of Continental Drift fame? Their respective debut novels Grimus and Family Life were published in 1975. Anne Rice? She started big with 1976’s Interview with the Vampire. And Atonement author Ian McEwan? His debut novel The Cement Garden arrived in 1978.

Going back further, Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry earned his first novel credit in 1961 with Horseman, Pass By. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter author Mario Vargas Llosa’s first novel (The Time of the Hero) reached print in 1963 — the same year Joan Didion and Margaret Drabble entered the novel realm with Run, River and A Summer Bird-Cage, respectively. Drabble’s sister, Possession writer A.S. Byatt, saw her first novel The Shadow of the Sun released in 1964 — the same year as Joyce Carol Oates’ With Shuddering Fall debut. Cormac McCarthy started walking “The Road” of novel-writing in 1965, courtesy of The Orchard Keeper.

Who are your favorite living authors with long novel careers?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which has a Revolutionary War airports theme 🙂 — is here.

Nepotism in Novels

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Among the Trump administration’s many, many horrible aspects is the blatant nepotism of incompetent daughter Ivanka and incompetent son-in-law Jared Kushner “serving” in major positions.

So, how about nepotism in literature? The beneficiaries are often also not deserving of their positions, which makes them easy for readers to root against — though there are occasional examples of those characters having some talent. Increasing the un-sympathy factor is that nepotism beneficiaries frequently aren’t nice, frequently act entitled, and frequently are quite flush with unearned family money.

Novels — historical fiction or otherwise — with royal characters of course often feature such people. For instance, in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, there’s the weak-willed Louis XIII who obviously had a bunch of other Louis guys come before him. One of them, Louis XI, is in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Quentin Durward.

Then there’s Rufus Weylin, the son of a slaveholder in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred. He’s somewhat needy and unsure of himself as a boy, but grows into a mostly brutal and not especially smart master when he takes over the family plantation from his merciless father Tom.

Or how about the scenario in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novel Worth Dying For? In that book, Seth Duncan works for a Mafia-connected Nebraska trucking company run by his father and uncles that ruthlessly extorts business from surrounding farms and engages in human trafficking. The vile Seth continues his family’s low ethical standards by also abusing his wife.

Of course, participating in or taking over the family “business” doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. While there are plenty of differing views on nihilism and such in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, it seems okay that Arkady eventually assumes the management of his father’s modest Russian estate.

Another positive nepotism example is in One for the Money, the first of Janet Evanovich’s seriocomic Stephanie Plum crime novels. Stephanie gets a bounty-hunting job via her bail-bondsman cousin Vinnie, and ends up being quite good at that work (in One and the many subsequent Plum novels) despite some periodic bumbling.

Then there’s the complicated would-be nepotism situation in Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son. The wealthy Paul Dombey is so focused on his son, and the hope that the boy will eventually take over his shipping company, that he almost totally rejects/neglects his daughter Florence.

Before ending this post, I’ll add that in real life there are plenty of children and other relatives of novelists who became novelists themselves. But that’s another topic — discussed in this piece I wrote in 2011.

Examples of nepotistic characters you’ve found memorable?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which has a July 4th theme — is here.

Authors Who’ve Excelled at Fiction and Nonfiction

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There are many great fiction authors and many great nonfiction authors, but obviously a smaller number of authors who’ve written excellent books in both categories.

The skill sets for each category are similar in certain ways and different in others. Many novels contain at least some of the level of research we often find in nonfiction books, and obviously it helps any type of book to be well-written and interesting. But not every author can capably create fictional characters and fictional dialogue, or have the qualities (such as scholarly chops) to create top-notch nonfiction.

One who did excel in both categories was John Hersey, whose Hiroshima nonfiction book — originally a very long article in The New Yorker magazine — takes a riveting look at six survivors of the devastating atomic bomb unleashed on Japan by the U.S. in 1945. I finally got a chance to also read one of Hersey’s novels, and found A Single Pebble to be really compelling after thinking it started rather slowly. The book is about a young American engineer’s river voyage on a junk in China, and it has a lot to say about cultural differences, cultural misunderstandings, the “old ways” vs. the new, and more. (Hersey’s most famous novel is the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bell for Adano, which I haven’t read.)

More recently, we have Barbara Kingsolver — who has written many a memorable novel (including The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, The Lacuna, and Flight Behavior) but has also penned absorbing nonfiction books such as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life.

Another living author who has ably spanned the fiction and nonfiction worlds is Stephen King, who’s of course famous for dozens of best-selling novels but is admired by fellow wordsmiths for the advice in the partly autobiographical On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

Alice Walker has penned an almost equal number of novels and short-story collections (13, including The Color Purple) as nonfiction books (12, including Go Girl! The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure).

Zadie Smith has produced several novels, such as White Teeth, as well as essay collections, such as Feel Free.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction includes The Namesake novel, and she turned to nonfiction with works such as In Other Words — about her immersion in Italy and the Italian language.

Some deceased authors in addition to Hersey? Moving backward chronologically from the writers’ birth years:

James Baldwin toggled between categories with novels such as Go Tell It On the Mountain and nonfiction such as The Fire Next Time.

As did Richard Wright with works like the novel Native Son and the memoir Black Boy. (Wright is pictured at the top of this blog post with Zora Neale Hurston, who’s mentioned a few paragraphs below.)

John Steinbeck is famous for novels such as The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, but Travels With Charley — his uneven but great-in-spots chronicle of a cross-country road trip with his dog — is pretty well known, too.

George Orwell wrote three nonfiction books (with Down and Out in Paris and London having the highest profile) and six novels (of course including Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four).

Aldous Huxley? We have novels such as Brave New World and Point Counter Point, and nonfiction such as The Doors of Perception. (Yes, The Doors rock group named itself after that Huxley book, which in turn was named after a William Blake line.)

Dorothy L. Sayers is best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mysteries such as Gaudy Night, while also producing plenty of nonfiction — including the Christian theological book The Mind of the Maker.

Zora Neale Hurston is most remembered for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, but the author/anthropologist wrote nonfiction books such as Mules and Men, too.

Readers admire Edith Wharton for fiction classics such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, but she also penned popular nonfiction books such as Fighting France (a contemporary look at World War I) and The Decoration of Houses.

Mark Twain of course penned novels like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn while also writing nonfiction classics like The Innocents Abroad and Life on the Mississippi.

And Elizabeth Gaskell authored Cranford and other novels even as she was perhaps best known for her biography The Life of Charlotte Bronte.

I’ll end by saying (as a Facebook comment I just saw from Brian Bess noted) that some nonfiction books can have a lot of made-up elements — just as novels (and not just historical fiction) can include plenty of facts.

Which authors do you feel have written novels AND nonfiction books really well?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which discusses everything from the future reopening of an old movie theater to a cruel jail for immigrants near my town — is here.

How Some Protagonists Respond to Provocation

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White House occupant Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of a perfectly good nuclear agreement with Iran — an agreement Iran was honoring — and followed that up with intense economic pressure and military threats. So naturally Iran started to push back, though the almost-always-lying Trump administration is surely exaggerating the extent of that.

This reminded me of a number of scenarios in literature where a character is unfairly provoked to the point of she or he retaliating. Sometimes the retaliation is effective (providing readers with satisfying wish fulfillment); other times the retaliating party suffers (which frustrates readers even as that suffering scenario can often be more realistic).

One of the most famous provoked-to-retaliate novels is Billy Budd, in which the popular-among-his-fellow-sailors protagonist is badgered by the envious, nasty John Claggart. After Claggart falsely accuses Herman Melville’s kindly title character of trying to incite mutiny, a shocked Billy strikes John with no premeditation and accidentally kills him. But we don’t get a happy ending after that. (A photo from the Billy Budd movie is above.)

In modern fiction, we have Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Wrongly declared legally incompetent as a child, her appointed guardian Nils Bjurman sexually abuses her. Eventually, Lisbeth ruthlessly revenges herself on the sadistic Bjurman without killing him but in a way that deservedly ruins his life.

Sometimes in literature, abusive or otherwise despicable men ARE justly killed. That’s the case with the Karamazov father in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Ruth’s husband Frank Bennett in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. (If you feel it’s weird to put those two novels in the same sentence, Flagg’s sprawling book is quite deep amid its entertaining aspects.)

Perhaps the greatest revenge novel of all is Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, in which a false accusation puts young Edmond Dantes into a remote island prison for many years. After escaping, he dedicates his life to some epic payback.

Then there’s Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, in which Jessie Burlingame is treated shabbily by her husband before and during a sexual game he wants to play more than she does. Jessie, partly spurred by subconscious memories of also being abused by her father, kicks Gerald away and inadvertently gives him a fatal heart attack. The ensuing problem? Jessie is handcuffed to the bed, now alone in a remote lakeside house.

And various scenarios in various Jack Reacher novels have Jack minding his own business before being surrounded by a group of bad guys who feel they greatly outnumber Lee Child’s protagonist enough to give him a pounding. Reacher, who almost always welcomes the challenge, invariably wins convincingly.

Your favorite novels that fit this topic?

One final note: Iran is hardly an exemplary democracy, but neither is the U.S. under Trump and his cynical enablers in the Republican-controlled Senate, right-wing media, conservative corporate circles, and right-wing religious circles.

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which discusses a middle-school controversy and an endangered 1890s mansion — is here.

Authors From One Country Who Set Books in Another Country

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It’s of course interesting to read novels set in countries other than where the reader lives. And those books can be written from two main vantage points.

One is for a novel set in a certain nation to be written by an author from that nation. Such a book most likely offers a local protagonist, deep knowledge of the culture, and so on.

The second vantage point involves novels that are set (or partly set) in countries other than where the authors live. That can often (not always) mean a protagonist from the writer’s country, a more superficial knowledge of the other country’s culture, etc. A non-native character who visits or lives in another nation is usually not truly representative of that country, but there’s the potential positive of the sojourning protagonist being sort of a guide or surrogate who helps readers understand the other country from an outsider perspective.

This blog post will focus on the latter scenario, and an excellent example is Mexico — one of the long/heavily researched novels by American author James Michener (pictured), and a book I’m currently reading.

It stars Norman Clay, a journalist born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and American father who has lived in the U.S. for many years before returning to his native country to write a story about a rivalry between two very different bullfighters. We see Mexico, and learn a lot about its present and past, through Norman’s eyes. Several of the novel’s fully Mexican characters are more interesting than Clay, but he is a guide/surrogate that a good number of American readers might relate to most.

Then we have novels in which we see the U.S. through the eyes of English authors and characters — with two examples being Martin Chuzzlewit (Charles Dickens jump-started sagging serial sales by sending Martin across the ocean) and Paradise News (David Lodge’s Bernard protagonist is a fish-out-of-water visiting Hawaii).

France? English author Charlotte Bronte gave her perspective on that country by setting Villette there. And Scottish author Sir Walter Scott did the same in Quentin Durward — though his perspective was on the France of the 1400s, nearly four centuries before Scott’s novel was written.

Plenty of novels have focused on white people traveling to Africa, for better or often for worse. Two American authors who made that happen with from-the-U.S. characters include Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible and Paul Bowles in The Sheltering Sky.

We also have the interesting case of Buchi Emecheta, the Nigerian-born British author whose semi-autobiographical novel Second Class Citizen is about a Nigerian woman who moves to England. The book was published in 1974, when the author was already in England for 12 years, so we had at that time a British author writing about Nigeria (early in Second Class Citizen) and a Nigerian-born author writing about England (later in that novel).

There’s a similar cultural juxtaposition in The Kite Runner by Afghanistan-born U.S. author Khaled Hosseini, whose family left his native country when the future writer was 11. Hosseini’s novel starts in Afghanistan, moves to the U.S., goes back to Afghanistan, and finally returns to the U.S.

Not a novel, but a book that almost reads like one, is Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. In that travel book, Twain is a highly observant and drop-dead hilarious guide who gave American readers a look at various European and Mideast countries in the 1860s.

Your favorite novels that fit this topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which discusses a pretentious, overpriced hotel coming to my town — is here.

Literature’s LGBTQ Characters: an Update

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In honor of June 2019’s Pride Month, I’m going to revisit LGBTQ characters in fiction — LGBTQ of course standing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer.

I previously wrote about this topic in 2013 (a year before starting this blog) and mentioned a number of novels with openly, closeted, or maybe-they-are/maybe-they-aren’t LGBTQ characters in lead or supporting roles. Among those books were Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Colette’s Claudine at School, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady, Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

This blog post will mention some of the novels I’ve read since 2013 with LGBTQ characters.

Despite the cruel right-wing intolerance in the U.S. and elsewhere that’s setting back various kinds of human rights these days, LGBTQ people are generally more accepted in many places than decades ago. This is reflected in recent literature — where there are more LGBTQ characters (from both LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ authors), where these characters are usually treated more positively or at least more three-dimensionally than in the past, and where in many cases a big deal isn’t made of these characters; they’re one of the many parts of the human mosaic. That’s a good thing.

The five-person Lambert family that Jonathan Franzen focuses on in The Corrections (a great novel I also mentioned last week) includes daughter Denise, who’s had a bisexual life but is almost certainly lesbian. Her portrayal is satisfying and convincing partly because her sexual life is depicted as just one of many aspects of her — she’s also a conflicted daughter/sibling, a strong personality, very smart, a star professional chef, a hard worker, generous at times, unkind at other times, etc.

In Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy — which begins with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — the brilliant, abused, troubled, brave, vengeance-seeking Lisbeth Salander is bisexual. The most memorable character in those three riveting novels.

Among the many memorable characters J.K. Rowling has expertly created, from her Harry Potter series to her crime fiction, have been LGBTQ ones. For instance, in The Cuckoo’s Calling novel written under Rowling’s Robert Galbraith pen name, Guy Somé (pictured on the right in the above photo) is stereotypical in certain ways (he’s a fashion designer) but is depicted as a fairly complex person devoid of several other gay stereotypes.

The Secret History‘s Francis Abernathy is gay but that’s not overemphasized in Donna Tartt’s compelling debut novel. Her emphasis is more on the insularity and strangeness of the small group (including Francis) that protagonist Richard falls in with when he goes to college.

It’s not secret history that there’ve been LGBTQ people throughout time, and one example of this is in Philippa Gregory’s excellent novel Earthly Joys. Set in the 17th century, it features a master royal gardener (John Tradescant) who’s married to a woman but ends up having a same-gender sexual dalliance with a charismatic “bad boy” duke.

A novel that sort of/sort of not fits this blog post is Abigail Tarttelin’s excellent Golden Boy, which — like Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex — features an intersex character. The hermaphroditic gender confusion embodied in protagonist Max Walker has echoes of what transgender people face.

Your favorite novels featuring LGBTQ characters in lead or supporting roles?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which comedically compares my town in 2019 vs. 1796 — is here.