Sequels We’d Like to See

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After you read a great stand-alone novel or finish a wonderful series of books, do you wish the story would continue?

Of course, this isn’t possible if the author is deceased (though there’s the occasional ill-advised sequel by a different writer). And many novels don’t need a continuation — they ended perfectly. Still, one can dream, and this blog post will do that before it also asks which theoretical sequels you’d like to see.

When it comes to knowing what happens to cherished characters, readers this summer will get a chance at gratification (or disappointment) with the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman book featuring an older Scout and Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. But that’s a rare instance of wish fulfillment, so let’s return to imaginary sequels.

As some of you know, my favorite novel is Jane Eyre, and thinking of a follow-up to that book seems almost blasphemous. After all, Charlotte Bronte wrote other books after Jane Eyre‘s 1847 publication while choosing not to revisit her most famous work. But if the 1855-deceased Bronte had lived as long as her husband (Arthur Bell Nichols didn’t die until 1906), who knows what she might have done?

In a hypothetical Jane Eyre sequel by Bronte, I would love to read more details about the title character’s marriage. And if Jane’s two-decades-older husband eventually predeceased her, what would her life have been like? Remarriage? Becoming a teacher again?

Daniel and Mirah’s time in Palestine, where they were heading at the end of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, would also be something to see.

Worth reading, too, would be a chronicle of the later lives of the three memorable siblings (good and bad) in The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve read that Fyodor Dostoyevsky, if death hadn’t intervened, planned to write two more Karamazov books to complete a trilogy.

How would adult life work out for angst-ridden teen John Grimes, the semi-autobiographical protagonist in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain? If John ended up having something like Baldwin’s career, that would be impressive!

If there were a sequel to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, I’d be very curious to know what happens to disillusioned “fireman” Guy Montag and the outcast band of book lovers he joined.

The last Harry Potter book concludes with an epilogue that gives readers a glimpse of Harry, Hermione, and Ron as adults. It would be great to see that fleshed out, and there’s a chance it could eventually happen. But J.K. Rowling is certainly quite busy writing her non-magical novels.

If the authors were alive to write sequels, I’d also want to know whether Ravic the surgeon of Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph survives World War II and how Maria in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls fares after things go south for her lover Robert Jordan during the Spanish Civil War.

And I’d be curious to know what Isabel Archer — yoked to a ghastly marriage while still young in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady — ends up doing with her life. Isabel is smart, charismatic, and independently wealthy, yet wrestles with self-doubt and the restrictions and expectations women faced in the 19th century.

Days after I wrote the above paragraph, I reached a passage of The Master — Colm Toibin’s quietly engrossing novel about Henry James’ life — in which James’ niece Peggy asks her uncle if he intends to write a sequel to The Portrait of a Lady! Peggy is very dissatisfied with the momentous decision Isabel makes at the end of James’ 1881 classic.

Which novels would you like to see sequels to (in the case of deceased authors, theoretical sequels; in the case of living authors, sequels that are possible)? What would you like to see happen in those sequels?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Said to Some Authors: ‘Burb, Your Enthusiasm’

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Today’s post is about suburbia in literature, and to get you in the mood for that you might enjoy watching the band Rush perform “Subdivisions.”

Okay, welcome back! (Lyrics to that song are at the end of this post.)

For scores of years, the vast majority of fictional works were set in cities, rural areas, and isolated villages. But as time marched on, suburbs started to crop up in books — as they did in real life. And many authors made those leafy places quite “literature-worthy” as they depicted wealth, racism, gender roles, good marriages, bad marriages, happiness, dissatisfaction, conformity, “unhipness,” boredom, well-funded schools, cliques, gossip, the car culture, stressful commuting, lovely vistas, etc.

And then there’s the envy felt by suburbanites trying to “keep up with the Joneses” — a phrase first used in reference to the wealthy family in which Edith Wharton (nee Jones) grew up.

Heck, suburbia is where J.K. Rowling placed her first post-Harry Potter novel, The Casual Vacancy, which chronicles political intrigue, personal antagonisms, and family drama in the small English town of Pagford.

John Steinbeck used rural settings (often) and urban settings (occasionally), but his The Winter of Our Discontent has a suburban milieu (Long Island, N.Y.) as it addresses ethics and other matters.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake features a Bengali couple — Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli — who leave Calcutta, India, for a Boston suburb when Ashoke becomes an engineering student at MIT. Immigrants who are professionals, or studying to be professionals, often bypass cites and go straight to the suburbs when coming to America.

Other immigrants settle in cities and then see their descendants move to the land of lawns, as is the case in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. The second-generation couple Tessie and Milton Stephanides relocate their family from the Motor City to Grosse Pointe, Mich., after the 1967 Detroit riot sparked by police brutality, poverty, and segregated schools and housing.

The urban-suburban contrast is also part of many other novels. For instance, New Jersey wedding musician Dave Raymond becomes engaged to a nice but rather bland N.J. woman in Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones, but then badly betrays her during that engagement by having an affair with a Manhattan woman who is more artistic and edgy.

Patty Berglund in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom grew up in a wealthy New York City suburb, but she and her husband Walter become early gentrifiers in St. Paul, Minn. — where the Berglunds have the kind of nosy neighbors that can be found in many a suburb. So Patty is “home” in a way.

Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun is set in Chicago, but a major plot strain is the black Younger family’s plan to move to an all-white suburb. A representative from that racist burb tries to buy out the Youngers in order to keep the neighborhood segregated.

Technically, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run is also set in a city, but it’s a small city that’s kind of near Philadelphia, and protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom has aspects of the stereotypical 1950s suburban male. Star high school athlete who lapses into an ordinary life as he marries young, becomes a father young, becomes dissatisfied with his marriage, etc. — all while acting like a selfish and sexist jerk much of the time.

Another John — Cheever — wrote “The Swimmer” short story starring a man who one day has the odd idea of traversing his upscale suburb by swimming through one backyard pool after another. As Cheever describes Neddy Merrill’s unusual journey, he skillfully weaves in material about the suburb’s class differences, about whether or not wealth can bring happiness, about Neddy’s past, etc. The protagonist’s serial swim should take just a few hours, but much more time seems to go by. Cheever’s partly metaphorical tale is here.

By the way, I live in a suburb. On the positive side, my town of Montclair, N.J., has several business districts, dozens of ethnic restaurants, six train stations, a population about a third African-American, a welcoming atmosphere for gay couples, and many beautiful homes and trees dating back to the 1800s (I’m in a garden apartment complex myself). On the negative side, there are such problems as gentrification, politically connected developers building too densely, and rich “reformers” pushing for education stuff (like endless standardized tests) the vast majority of residents don’t want.

What are your favorite literary works set at least partly in the suburbs?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

Here are the lyrics to “Subdivisions” — written by Rush members Neil Peart (drums), Geddy Lee (vocals/bass/keyboards), and Alex Lifeson (guitar):

Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown

Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone

Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone

(Subdivisions)
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
(Subdivisions)
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out

Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth

Drawn like moths we drift into the city
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night

Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight

Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights

(Subdivisions)
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
(Subdivisions)
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out

Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Sea Literature Is a Sight for Shore Eyes

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As summer nears, thoughts might turn to cruise ships, sailboats, and other relaxing watercraft. But we’re here to talk about vessels and voyages in literature, where sea things are often more dramatic.

Whether fictional characters are atop an ocean or river, it can mean adventure, discovery, danger, isolation, discomfort, romance, and other stuff that keeps readers glued to a book’s pages. Hopefully, water-resistant glue.

Among the writers who immediately come to mind when discussing sea literature are Homer and Herman Melville. (Homer’s last name was not Melville.) I haven’t read The Odyssey, so I can’t say much about that epic poem, but I’ve read most of Melville’s work — and a huge portion of it takes place off land.

There’s obviously Moby-Dick, but also Typee and Omoo (sailing to and from islands), Redburn (semi-autobiographical chronicle of an educated sailor’s voyage to England amid a rough crew), White-Jacket (an also-semi-autobiographical novel set on a U.S. Navy boat), Benito Cereno (riveting slave-rebellion story), and Billy Budd (unforgettable shipboard court martial). With his frequent emphasis on the sea, Melville certainly differed from many other authors who situated only one or a handful of their literary output amid the waves.

In addition to drawing on his own sailing experiences, Melville might have been partly inspired to write Moby-Dick (1851) after reading Edgar Allan Poe’s only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Poe also turned to the sea for some of his riveting short stories, including “MS. Found in a Bottle” and “A Descent into the Maelstrom.”

Later in the 19th century came Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (most of which takes place on or near the Mississippi River that Huck and Jim take a raft to), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Alexandre Dumas’ The Last Cavalier (which includes a memorable historical-fiction moment depicting the shipboard death of Admiral Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar). There are ultra-compelling water scenes, too, in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda.

Around the time the 19th century became the 20th, Joseph Conrad wrote The Heart of Darkness (with its eerie voyage up the Congo River that would inspire the film Apocalypse Now) and Lord Jim (starring a young seaman whose abandon-ship cowardice colors the rest of his life).

After 1900, stories with some or many water elements continued to abound. For instance, Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf features a cruel and charismatic ship captain who makes life hell for his crew, and that same author’s Martin Eden stars a sailor-turned-writer who goes back to the sea for a fateful voyage at novel’s end.

There’s also Jim the retired ship captain who figures prominently in Anne’s House of Dreams — one of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables sequels. Another sequel — Jack Finney’s so-so From Time to Time that continues the story of that author’s haunting Time and Again — includes scenes on the Titanic. Speaking of that ill-fated ship, Robert Serling wrote Something’s Alive on the Titanic, a novel with a title that’s kind of hokey but with content that’s pretty absorbing.

A romantic river voyage for the ages ends Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, the title character of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree lives in a Tennessee River houseboat, a ship captain landing in circa-1600 Japan finds all kinds of intrigue in James Clavell’s Shogun, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex depicts a trans-Atlantic voyage of two Greek immigrants — a voyage to America so many immigrants made.

Also in post-1900 lit, a claustrophobic German submarine is the milieu of Lothar-Gunther Buchheim’s Das Boot, a shark wreaks havoc in Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the title character boards a ship to her native Greenland in Peter Hoeg’s mystery thriller Smilla’s Sense of Snow, and a shipwreck puts a boy and tiger in close proximity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.

Speaking of shipwrecks, let’s not forget Daniel Defoe’s 18th-century classic Robinson Crusoe.

What are your favorite literary works containing ships, sea voyages, water themes, and the like?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Some Fiction Contains ‘The Shape of Things to Come’

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Literature is occasionally prescient, and not just science fiction. It’s fascinating to see some of what authors imagined many decades ago come true, or at least partly true. That’s much more impressive than my prediction that this blog post will soon have a second paragraph.

One of my favorite prophetic moments in a novel is when Looking Backward describes an early version of a debit card. Edward Bellamy’s utopian time-travel book was published in 1888 — roughly 90 years before debit cards were introduced in the 1970s.

Then there are early sci-fi giants Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, both of whom wrote novels about flying to the moon. Verne’s speculative travel method in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) is a big space cannon, while Wells, in The First Men in the Moon (1901), posits a spherical ship made of a material called “cavorite” that negates the effects of gravity. But even informed authorial guesses only go so far; for instance, when Cavor and Bedford reach the moon in Wells’ novel, their experiences are, um, very different than Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s would be in 1969.

(Wells also authored The Shape of Things to Come, whose title is part of this post’s headline.)

Verne wrote another novel, Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) that had its veracity proven less than two decades later — in 1890. That’s when journalist Nelly Bly finished circumnavigating the globe in 72 days, even stopping in France to visit Verne!

Dystopian novels can also give us a glimpse of the future. George Orwell of course didn’t invent the idea of a vicious totalitarian state keeping its cowed population under surveillance while controlling the media and engaging in perpetual war, but he certainly crystallizes a lot of that in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Today, those onerous surveillance, media, and war scenarios are everywhere.

In Brave New World (1931), Aldous Huxley depicts a populace kept docile in a different way. Most people in that novel are too busy with drugs, consumerism, and other “pleasures” to think about more important things. Today, there are even more distractions — many of a digital nature — to keep lots of citizens too busy and entertained to be very aware of politics and of how economic elites are ruthlessly getting their way.

The subjugation of women by a sexist, hypocritical religious theocracy in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) certainly has all kinds of echoes in today’s Christian Right and Republican Party.

More than a century before Atwood’s novel, Anne Bronte’s protofeminist The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) presaged the time when many women would courageously leave abusive relationships rather than remain stuck in them.

Five years earlier, Georges (1843) featured a partly black title character — making partly black author Alexandre Dumas prescient in showing that an admirable, three-dimensional, non-stereotypical person of color could carry a novel. A fact, of course, that should never have been debatable.

Also prescient in a way was Wilkie Collins, who wrote a novel (The Woman in White) containing what may have been a closeted lesbian character (Marian Halcombe) — and saw that 1859 book become a bestseller. Nowadays, it’s thankfully a given that a prominent gay or lesbian character would not be a novel’s death knell.

Another 19th-century classic, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), was a proto-Zionist work despite its author not being Jewish. The novel, and the way its Jewish characters envisioned what became modern-day Israel, helped influence prominent Zionists such as Theodor Herzl.

Which characters, moments, inventions, and other content have you found prescient in literature?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

As Some ‘Reformers’ Disrespect Public School Teachers, It’s Nice Seeing Top-Notch Teachers in Fiction

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Teachers in literature! Most are smart, hardworking, and compassionate — like most real-life teachers we and our children had and have.

So it’s a shame that public school teachers aren’t more respected these days by many politicians, bureaucrats, and other bigwigs. For that reason, this blog post will offer an opinionated interlude before discussing some of fiction’s most memorable instructors.

One of my other writing pursuits is a topical humor column called “Montclairvoyant” that runs weekly in my hometown newspaper, The Montclair (N.J.) Times. An issue I’ve frequently focused on has been how education “reform” adversely affects teachers — and of course students, too.

This bipartisan “reform” began in earnest with President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative and continued with President Obama’s “Race to the Top” funding. “Race to the Top” basically bribed states to use the crummy Common Core curriculum (which doesn’t have enough emphasis on things like literature, art, music, etc.) and to increase standardized testing with exams such as the PARCCs. Those are the “Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers” tests given twice a year even to elementary school students whose college and career plans are far in the future.

Standardized testing has increased so much that, when prep time is factored in, weeks and months are spent on those exams at the expense of fun, creative, effective learning. So, teachers are losing lots of their autonomy, even though they know best what their students need. Meanwhile, test results are also used to evaluate teachers, even though teachers have no control over the socioeconomic factors that make it harder for some students to learn.

Why all this “reform”? Part of it can be explained by “following the money.” Selling the tests and other classroom materials to school districts enriches private corporations such as Pearson, and selling the computers on which the standardized tests are given enriches tech companies. Also, if students and public schools are seen as failing — which the results of confusing, badly designed, age-inappropriate tests can create a false impression of — some districts might find their public schools replaced by charter schools that make many dollars for hedge-fund guys and other rich people. (Charters get taxpayer money, but taxpayers have no say in how they’re run.)

And charter school teachers usually aren’t unionized — meaning “reform” is partly designed to lessen the influence of (or even break) teacher unions. Also, the teaching field includes many women and Democrats, so right-wing Republicans love to see educators and public schools harassed. Which makes it even more disturbing that certain prominent Democrats such as Obama are also committed to “reform” — even as they and their fellow “reformers” in the GOP often hypocritically send their own kids to private schools that don’t have to deal with the Common Core and endless standardized tests like the PARCCs.

Great news, though: Many public school parents are refusing to allow their kids to take the PARCCs. In my town, the refusal rate was a magnificent 42.6% during the first round of tests this year (despite the fact that our PARCC-supporting, now-former superintendent provided parents with little “opt out” info), and that figure will undoubtedly grow. This pushback happened through the efforts of parents and others — some unaffiliated, some who are members of the Montclair Cares About Schools organization, some who are among the members of the “Share Montclair” Facebook group, etc.

A link to a recent “Montclairvoyant” column.

Anyway, most people trust and like teachers much more than they trust and like the corporate-friendly bigwigs foisting “reform” on public schools. One of my favorite fictional teachers is none other than Anne Shirley in Anne of Avonlea, the first sequel to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Anne becomes a teacher while still a pre-college teen — and predictably things don’t always go smoothly. But she is as kind and imaginative in her Canadian classroom as she is in her personal life, and earns the love and respect of students.

Another beloved teacher is Charles Chipping of James Hilton’s novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips, who starts off as a rather rigid and conventional educator but warms up over the course of his many-decade career at an English public boarding school.

Also in England, there’s the innovative teacher Ricky Braithwaite who wins over his at-first unmotivated students in E.R. Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel To Sir, With Love — later made into the famous movie starring Sidney Poitier.

Jane Eyre was briefly a teacher as well, and a good one, after fleeing Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel. (Previously, she instructed one kid — Edward Rochester’s ward Adele — while governess at Thornfield.) Jane’s teaching approach was undoubtedly inspired, at least subconsciously, by the wonderful Maria Temple at the initially miserable Lowood institution Jane was forced to attend as a girl.

In American fiction, among the many admirable educators is drama teacher Dan Needham of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Great teachers abound in children’s books, too, with one of the best being the ingenious, enthusiastic Ms. Frizzle of The Magic School Bus series written by Joanna Cole and illustrated by Bruce Degen.

Of course, not all teachers are terrific. In J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster Harry Potter series, for instance, educators range from admirable (think Minerva McGonagall) to incompetent (think Gilderoy Lockhart).

Then there are teachers somewhere in the middle of the competence spectrum. Ida Ramundo means well in Elsa Morante’s History novel, but her classroom performance deteriorates as she becomes overwhelmed by various disasters while trying to survive in Nazi-occupied Rome.

The title character in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is an educator with charisma, but unfortunately she has fascist sympathies.

Also on the irresponsible side is young teacher Aimee Lanthenay, who has an affair with the student star of Claudine at School. But almost everything is played for laughs in Colette’s first novel, so the major ethical breach seems somewhat muted.

Who are the fictional teachers you remember most?

You’re also welcome to mention literature’s memorable professors (something I discussed in this 2012 post), or talk about America’s education situation in general.

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Greed Is Not Good, But It Can Help Make Fiction Interesting

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We live in an age of greed. Avaricious CEOs, bankers, hedge-fund guys, politicians, lobbyists, corporate lawyers, media moguls, sports-team owners, and others. Many don’t even do a good job for their huge salaries and other compensation. Many exploit their employees. Many price-gouge their customers. Many don’t pay their fair share of taxes. Many…make me think of greedy characters in literature.

Those fictional people can be painful to read about, but greed can drive a novel’s plot and help make the book compelling. Also, readers angry at the greed in a book can always slam it shut with a satisfying “thump” while saying: “That hurts, doesn’t it Mr. Fictional Rich Guy who I just flattened between the front and back covers.” Of course, Kindle users need an alternate plan when trying to crush covetous characters…

One of fiction’s countless greedy protagonists is attorney Mickey Haller of Michael Connelly’s cleverly plotted The Lincoln Lawyer, which I just read. Haller tends to charge a lot — and is very insistent on collecting that money — when defending clients who include many a bad guy. But he has a conscience beneath his materialism and cynicism, illustrating that at least some worshipers of the almighty dollar can also have their good points. Heck, even the profit-obsessed Scrooge experienced an epiphany in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Moving to an equally famous literary work, we have Jay Gatsby amassing a fortune in the bootlegging biz and then flaunting that wealth in a very public way to woo Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I suppose there are worse motives for making lots of money…

There are avaricious businessmen in Emile Zola’s work, too. Greedy coal-mine ownership leads to a dramatic strike in Germinal, and ruthlessly ambitious department-store magnate Octave Mouret is an early Wal-Mart type pushing small neighborhood stores out of business in Au Bonheur des Dames.

Money-grasping politicians also abound in literature, with one example being Tiny Duffy — the lieutenant governor from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men who’s quite comfortable with corruption and kickbacks.

Speaking of corruption, Joey Berglund in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom becomes a subcontractor in a scheme to supply spare parts for outdated supply trucks during The Iraq War. Greed doesn’t get much worse than when it involves war profiteering.

Heck, wealth-seeking characters commit crimes in many a novel. For instance, drug lord Plato orders the murder of anyone standing in the way of enlarging his fortune in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thriller 61 Hours. Indeed, greedy crooks — often of the white-collar variety — abound in thrillers, mysteries, detective novels, and other kinds of fiction.

Greed can also draw fictional characters out of their hometowns to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Some flocked to New Zealand during that country’s 1860s West Coast Gold Rush in Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. Others raced to the snowy north during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush that Jack London experienced personally and then included in works such as The Call of the Wild.

Or how about marrying at least partly because the spouse is wealthy? That was certainly one reason the vile Gilbert Osmond wed Isabel Archer in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, and why Morris Townsend wooed Catherine Sloper in James’ Washington Square. Also, the intended husbands’ income and “station in life” greatly determined the “romantic” choices made by social climber Undine Spragg in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.

A variation of the above is when, in the back story of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Elliot is pressured by her snobby/materialistic father and the status-conscious Lady Russell to not marry the man she loves: Frederick Wentworth, who is “beneath” the Elliot family’s financial level.

One potential facet of greediness is miserliness, and that’s certainly the case with Felix — father of the titular character in Honore de Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet. He is a wealthy man so tight with his lucre that he partly warps the life of his daughter.

Another miser is Silas Marner, but he’s a goodhearted man whose neurotic saving of most of his earnings stems more from being betrayed by a close friend than from any moral flaw. When Marner’s life takes a turn for the better in George Eliot’s novel, he is no longer fixated on money.

Then there are depictions of greedy Jewish characters that have led to accusations of anti-Semitism. Examples include Fagin in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Isaac of York in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and Shylock the moneylender in William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. Some of those characters are more nuanced than their literary reputations; for instance, Isaac has a kindhearted side — and Scott’s portrayal of Isaac’s daughter Rebecca is quite non-stereotypical for its time.

And what is slavery but a toxic mix of greed and racism? (Some biased cops in Baltimore and elsewhere know all about the latter.) We see this mix in novels such as Alex Haley’s Roots, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Alexandre Dumas’ Georges, Geraldine Brooks’ March, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, and in a chapter of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

Who are some of the greedy characters you remember most in literature?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Mismatches Aren’t Always ‘Mismatchy’

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In Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, married couple Shadow and Laura spend time together. Which is not surprising, except for the fact that she’s…dead.

Yup, relationships in literature can sometimes be strange, offbeat, unusual, unexpected, or improbable — making it seem, in comparison, like Felix and Oscar were kindred spirits in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. But drama or humor can abound when there’s interaction between people with very different situations, personalities, and demographics.

Most examples I’m about to give are nowhere near as extreme as Laura and Shadow’s “till death doesn’t do us part” union. But the relationships I’ll mention are still of the rather unlikely sort — albeit often positive.

For instance, there’s Queequeg and Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. A masterful black harpoonist and a fairly ordinary white seaman — raised thousands of miles apart in dissimilar cultures — who become pals after their quirky first meeting at a New England inn.

Or take the friendship that develops between elderly nursing-home resident Ninny Threadgoode and middle-aged visitor Evelyn Couch, who are not related and originally didn’t know each other in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Ninny and the stories she tells turn out to be life-changing for Evelyn.

Flagg’s novel partly looks back to distant decades, while Camille is set a short time after the death of Marguerite Gautier (“The Lady of the Camellias”). In Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel, an unnamed narrator and Marguerite’s former lover Armand Duval meet/interact in a non-ordinary way as the story of the late Gautier unfolds.

Another “diva” of sorts is opera singer Roxane Coss of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. When Roxane is among a group of people taken hostage for months, she has an affair with opera-loving, married businessman Katsumi Hosokawa — a pairing that could only happen in such an artificial situation.

Or how about the relationship in Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son? Beleaguered but resourceful protagonist Pak Jun Do ends up audaciously appearing at the doorstep of a famous North Korean actress (Sun-moon) to replace her military husband (Commander Ga).

Fictional relationships rarely get as unpredictable as that of married couple Henry and Clare in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. Henry bounces around in time, always staying an adult as he randomly encounters Clare when she’s a kid and when she’s a grown-up.

Back in the friendship realm, an against-the-odds bond develops between Kiki and Carlene in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty — unusual not because those two women are from different countries (the U.S. and England) but because their less-than-ethical husbands (one a white liberal and the other a black conservative) are bitter rivals in academia.

Then there are unusual work pairings, some of which can almost be friendships as well. For instance, in Charles Portis’ True Grit, Mattie Ross hires Rooster Cogburn to find her father’s murderer, and those totally opposite characters (female/male, young/older, straitlaced/dissolute, etc.) end up feeling a fondness and respect for each other.

Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are also friends in a way — even though Jeeves is the (much smarter) butler and Bertie is his employer in P.G. Wodehouse’s novels and short stories.

Humphrey van Weyden and Wolf Larsen are far from buddies in Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, but their relationship is fascinating as it evolves. The physically weak Humphrey is rescued from the water, and forced to stay and work on the boat captained by the strong, bullying Larsen…until the tables start to turn.

Some other seemingly mismatched relationships: English captain John Blackthorne and Japanese translator Mariko, who become lovers in James Clavell’s Shogun; lower-class white kid Huck and escaped black slave Jim, who develop a friendship in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; “deformed,” goodhearted Quasimodo and beautiful, compassionate Gypsy dancer Esmeralda in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame; and Nino and Giuseppe, half-brothers many years apart in age who share an affectionate but sporadic bond (Nino is not very responsible) in Elsa Morante’s History.

Also: white woodsman Natty Bumppo and the Native American Chingachgook, close friends in James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking” novels at a time when most settlers treated Native Americans horribly; brilliant, young, computer-hacking “punk” Lisbeth Salander and brilliant, middle-aged, somewhat-more-conventional journalist Mikhail Blomkvist, who have a complex relationship in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, etc.); and Dorothy, The Scarecrow, The Tin Man, and The Cowardly Lion in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Also: mismatched college roommates Walter Berglund (a friendly “nerd”) and Richard Katz (abrasive indie rocker) in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom; Professor Virgina Miner and non-intellectual Chuck Mumpson, who become attracted to each other in Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs; writer Paul Sheldon and his psychopathic fan, Annie Wilkes, who torments Sheldon in Stephen King’s Misery; religious, dying teen loner Jamie and popular, rebellious teen Landon, who have a poignant relationship in Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember; and Jackie Kapp, a jeweler from an immigrant family who gets to know famous New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson in Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant.

When it comes to far-fetched relationships, animals can be involved, too. For instance, there’s Pi and Richard Parker the tiger, thrust uneasily together after a shipwreck in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi; lonely lower-class farmer Link Ferris and high-class collie Chum in Albert Payson Terhune’s His Dog; and Mrs. Murphy the cat and Tee Tucker the dog, pals who talk to each other in Rita Mae Brown’s mysteries.

What are some of the most unusual relationships, friendships, and other pairings in literature?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

When Prose Is VERY Praiseworthy

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One reason we read literature is to enjoy writing that’s beautiful, flowing, evocative, and other good things.

Prose doesn’t have to be exceptional for us to like a fictional work. If the plot and/or characters are compelling, an adequate writing style can be perfectly…adequate. But a wonderful way with words sure is a nice bonus, whether those words are used to describe positive or negative scenarios.

So, I will discuss various authors and novels known for high-quality prose — including a beautifully written book I just read that’s not as well known as it should be outside its author’s home country. The Leopard was Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s only novel, and — in yet another example of publisher stupidity — it was rejected while the author was alive. But after The Leopard was posthumously released in 1958, it became Italy’s best-selling novel ever.

The book, set in 19th-century Sicily as Italy’s aristocracy declined and the country’s unification took place, has historical appeal and an engrossing cast headed by a charismatic prince (“The Leopard” of the title) who possesses a mix of admirable and less-admirable traits. But it’s the knockout quality of the prose that’s the chief attribute of the melancholy novel. Paragraph after paragraph of the writing is lovely, rich, deep, elegant, and more. A passage from a ballroom scene:

“They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor…”

One might not immediately think of dystopian literature as a place for gorgeous writing, but there’s also plenty of stunning prose in Ray Bradbury’s sobering Fahrenheit 451 — a novel that ironically depicts the burning of books filled with graceful verbiage. A passage about “fireman” Guy Montag when he starts to have doubts about what he does for a living:

“He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy.”

I won’t continue to slow down this column with excerpts, but will instead just name more authors and novels with exceptional prose. F. Scott Fitzgerald is an obvious example — in works such as The Great Gatsby (which includes one of the best closing lines in literary history), Tender Is the Night, and the unfinished The Last Tycoon.

There’s also Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose superb prose portrays romance in Love in the Time of Cholera and tackles just about everything in One Hundred Years of Solitude; and Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time thrills some readers more than others, but contains language most agree is exquisite.

Or how about the often challenging yet lyrical writing of William Faulkner, or the almost biblical prose of Faulkner semi-disciple Cormac McCarthy? The latter, in works such as The Border Trilogy novels and The Road, is almost incapable of writing an average sentence.

Mary Shelley’s writing can also be a bit dense, yet extraordinarily evocative in the novels Frankenstein and The Last Man. The same with A.S. Byatt in her multilayered masterpiece Possession, and with expert wordsmith Henry James — especially in The Portrait of a Lady and many of his other mid- and late-career works. Toni Morrison artfully mixes the colloquial with the highly literary in novels ranging from Sula to Beloved.

Edith Wharton offers very smooth prose in books like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, while James Hilton casts a writing spell in Lost Horizon and other titles. Erich Maria Remarque’s writing is also off the charts in All Quiet on the Western Front, Arch of Triumph, The Night in Lisbon, etc.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky? Obviously, it’s hard to beat the breathtaking way he crafted books such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

Another 19th-century classic, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, inspired Jean Rhys’ 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea “prequel” that reads like a lush fever dream.

Perhaps the best 19th-century stylist of them all was George Eliot, whose magnificently composed novels included Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, and Adam Bede.

Then there are authors known for very good prose who, in one novel, got their eloquence into an even higher gear. Examples of that would include Willa Cather in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Robert Louis Stevenson in his incomplete last work Weir of Hermiston.

Of course, there are other authors who write brilliantly in a spare way — such as Ernest Hemingway in the literary-fiction realm and Lee Child in the thriller genre (I just read Child’s Jack Reacher novel One Shot, and…wow! Riveting). But terse authors are another subject…

Before ending this piece, I should mention that some gifted authors overdo the florid prose — showing off their writing chops to such an extent that it might distract from a book’s overall appeal.

Which authors and novels do you feel are exceptional in putting words together?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

Fiction’s Best Moms and Dads

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They’re kind, warm, patient, honest, tolerant, unselfish, reliable, entertaining, good listeners, occasionally firm but not smothering, and other positive things. Politicians? Not a chance. We’re talking about…great parents!

And who are the best mothers and fathers in literature? This blog post will name some of them — and all are members of the PTA: Parents to Admire.

Let’s start with that 3M person herself: Margaret “Marmee” March of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She’s almost perfect — which is a bit unrealistic but impressive. She holds her family of four daughters together through thick and thin while dad is away during the Civil War or musing philosophical thoughts. Marmee also has an even disposition (after some hot-tempered younger years), gives good advice, is not materialistic, engages in charitable efforts, and believes girls should be thoroughly educated — not a typical 19th-century attitude.

Another memorable mother from 19th-century fiction is Hester Prynne of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Even as she deals with her social-outcast status, she is a great single parent to Pearl — and allows her daughter to be a free spirit.

It’s hard to top the love and courage of the enslaved Eliza, who, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, makes a harrowing escape to the North with her young son Harry to spare him from being sold to a crueler master.

The brave and self-sufficient Helen Huntington also has the safety of her son in mind when she flees an abusive marriage in Anne Bronte’s early feminist classic, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Ma Joad of The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the supreme female creation of an author, John Steinbeck, mostly known for his male protagonists. The compassionate Ma (I don’t think her first name is mentioned in the novel) has a deep reservoir of toughness and leadership qualities she will need as the Joad family gets into increasingly difficult straits.

In Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Lee is a servant/housekeeper rather than a biological parent, but he’s essentially a father — and a darn good one — to the Trask sons.

Another non-parent who’s basically a parent is orphan Denise Baudu, who becomes a substitute mother to her two younger brothers in Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames.

Matthew Cuthbert, the adoptive dad of former orphan Anne Shirley in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, is shy and and socially awkward. But he is a sweet, gentle soul who gives Anne what she needs emotionally — and sometimes practically (we’re talking puffy-sleeved dresses here!). Matthew’s sister Marilla (Anne’s adoptive mother) is initially a tough cookie as parents go, until…

As fictional fathers go, few can match widowed lawyer Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Integrity is practically his middle name, and he mixes lots of low-key love and lesson-giving when parenting his daughter Scout and her older brother Jem.

A great single dad of more recent literary vintage is Subhash Mitra, of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, who becomes a dedicated father to his niece Bela after his activist brother Udayan is murdered by police (before Bela is born).

Then there are Molly and Arthur of the large Weasley household in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Those two parents are rather eccentric and disorganized, but somehow the family dynamics work. Molly and Arthur are also fun, smart, curious, and brave — all of which rubs off on their children.

I’ve of course just scratched the surface here. Who are your favorite great parents in literature? (And, if you’d like, you could also name the most memorable bad parents. 🙂 )

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.

An Appreciation of Social Justice Literature

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Reading literature is often an escapist break from life’s grim realities — such as that appalling (now somewhat amended) new Indiana law allowing conservatives to deny service to gay customers under the guise of “religious freedom.”

But literature with a strong social-justice component can also be enjoyable, because fiction of that kind not only addresses festering problems but can also feature memorable characters, great stories told in a non-preachy way, and some humor. All that is often found in the work of authors such as Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Grisham, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and Emile Zola, among others.

I’ll add Jhumpa Lahiri to that list now that I’ve finished her 2013 novel The Lowland. The two previous works of hers I read — the short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies and the novel The Namesake — had some sociopolitical context but mostly chronicled the personal lives of their protagonists. The Lowland also focuses on a small number of specific characters — in a compelling (and melancholy) way — but devotes plenty of pages as well to India’s communist Naxalite movement against poverty and the government’s brutal response that includes the cold-blooded police murder of Lahiri’s fictional Udayan character. Udayan’s posthumously born daughter Bela also becomes an activist of sorts.

Famous novels with lots of sociopolitical context include — among many others — Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (anti-slavery), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (which exposed horrendous conditions in the meatpacking industry), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (which addressed severe economic inequality), Emile Zola’s Germinal (which chronicled exploitation of the working class — specifically miners), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (which envisioned a dystopia even more sexist and patriarchal than we have in real life), and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (which looked at homophobia during a time when the kind of anti-gay attitude displayed by some Indianans was much more the norm).

Those novels’ authors all wisely focused on how specific characters were affected by the prejudice, oppression, and other nasty things society flung their way.

Speaking of dystopian novels a la The Handmaid’s Tale, that genre is usually sociopolitical by its very nature. The question of “liberty and justice for all,” or lack thereof, is an undercurrent in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, and various other dystopian novels.

Barbara Kingsolver alone has tackled many important issues while creating three-dimensional characters who readers like or dislike. The Poisonwood Bible (evangelicalism, colonialism), The Lacuna (McCarthyism), Flight Behavior (climate change), etc.

The area of mental health? Addressed in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, among other novels.

Anti-war fiction also mixes wider issues with the stories of particular protagonists. To name just four powerful books: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die — the last being one of the most heartbreaking novels set in wartime you’ll ever read.

There are also literary works that are not war novels per se, but depict or reference armed conflict in some chapters. Examples include Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.

And then there are novels that depict the religious intolerance and hypocrisy that have such an impact on society — including nowadays in Indiana. Elements of that can be found in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (as practiced by Mr. Brocklehurst), James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain (Gabriel Grimes), and other works.

By the way, I’ve visited Indiana many times (my wife used to live there), and it’s a state with lots of great places and people. As with many other states, a minority of narrow-minded “leaders” and residents make things troublesome for everyone else.

What are some of your favorite novels with sociopolitical elements?

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else.)

—

For three years of my Huffington Post literature blog, click here.

I’m also writing a literature-related book, but still selling Comic (and Column) Confessional — my often-funny memoir that recalls 25 years of covering and meeting cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), columnists such as Ann Landers and “Dear Abby,” and other notables such as Hillary Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Walter Cronkite, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in Montclair, N.J. — where I write the award-winning weekly “Montclairvoyant” humor column for The Montclair Times. You can email me at dastor@earthlink.net to buy a discounted, inscribed copy of the book, which contains a preface by “Hints” columnist Heloise and back-cover blurbs by people such as “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson.