A Big Convention of Unconventional Characters

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What do many novels — great or otherwise — have in common? Words, sentences, paragraphs, and…unconventional protagonists.

Sure, there are some novels starring conformist characters, such as businessman George Babbitt of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt. But for that approach to truly work, the writing has to be outstanding — and perhaps satirical, too. Because conventional can obviously be boring, and offers a smaller canvas for the dramatic conflict most fiction needs.

Protagonists can of course be unconventional in all kinds of ways. There are the loners and/or the political rebels and/or the non-materialistic and/or the brilliant and/or the courageous and/or the jarringly evil and/or those ahead of their time and/or those possessing unusual skills and/or the people who avoid traditional gender roles and/or…etc.

There are so many unconventional characters in literature that I’ll mention/discuss only a couple dozen or so before asking for your examples.

I finished Steppenwolf last week, and its Harry Haller protagonist is definitely a misfit kind of guy. Divided personality (the human side and the supposed wolf side), very learned, keeps to himself (at least in the first part of the novel), despises conformity (yet craves a bit of it), looks down on popular culture, has pacifist views, etc. Indeed, Hermann Hesse’s gripping and at times hallucinatory novel is in part a meditation on whether a round peg like Harry can fit in the square hole of conventional life. Steppenwolf‘s Hermine character is also highly original: a lover of pleasure yet as despairing and as brainy as Harry. Indeed, the heavily symbolic book implies that Harry and Hermine are versions of each other.

One of the many reasons the Bronte sisters’ novels are so compelling is their unconventional protagonists. The title character of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is independent, self-reliant, highly principled, and has little interest in small talk, fine clothes, etc. Heathcliff and Catherine of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights are forces of nature who act much more tempestuously than the average person. Helen Huntington in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall does something few women did in her time when she leaves an abusive marriage.

A fictional Anne, the admirable Anne Elliot of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, is about as level-headed and mature a person as one will meet in literature — and interesting to boot. She possesses even more depth than most of the other people in Austen’s memorable character gallery.

Jumping to later fiction of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, we have Hester Prynne, who maintains an almost unearthly dignity when unwed motherhood makes her a Puritan pariah in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850); the deeply unhappy, anti-establishment painter Claude Lantier in Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (1886); and Lambert Strether, who allows himself to shed provincial Americanism when sent on a delicate mission to France in Henry James’ The Ambassadors (1903).

Also: Renee Nere, who insists on her own music hall career and questions the institution of marriage in Colette’s The Vagabond (1910); Ellen Olenska, who leads a somewhat bohemian life in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920); and Valancy Stirling, who thrillingly rebels against the narrow-minded expectations of her mother and extended family in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle (1926).

Also: Joe Christmas, the wandering, mysterious, conflicted orphan in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932); the unnamed, not-so-pious priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940); Winston Smith, who tries to buck the totalitarian tide in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); and the unnamed narrator who lives an amazing and harrowing life in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).

Also: Scout Finch, the Alabama tomboy who reads avidly and disdains dresses in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960); Molly Bolt, the fun and defiant young woman dealing with her lesbian identity and homophobia in Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973); the brainy, eccentric, obnoxious Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980); and the enamored, obsessed Florentino Ariza in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).

Also: Dr. Rowan Mayfair, the brilliant neurosurgeon with a troubled, supernatural family history in Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour (1990); Judy Carrier, the whip-smart, harried, insecure attorney in Lisa Scottoline’s The Vendetta Defense (2002); the gender-confused Cal/Calliope in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002); the super-intelligent, understandably bitter computer hacker Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and its sequels; and the quirky, delightful secretary Violet Brown in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna (2009).

Then there’s Mark Watney, whose ingenuity and humor make that stranded astronaut such a distinctive character in Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011), which I just finished reading. (More on that book next week.)

Who are your favorite unconventional protagonists or unconventional secondary characters in literature? And, if you’d like, you could mention novels that are compelling even with protagonists of the conformist, unimaginative, docile variety!

(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.)

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.

Famous Novelists of Yesterday Who Are Underappreciated Today

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Some deceased authors are more famous, as famous, or nearly as famous as they were when alive. Just a few among the many in this group would be Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf.

The reasons for their enduring popularity can include the quality of their work and/or having had outsized personalities and/or writing in a universal enough way that what they penned back then still strongly resonates today. (And, heck, it doesn’t hurt that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four inspired the widely used term “Orwellian,” and that Woolf’s name became part of the title of a famous play.) Whatever the reasons, some long-dead authors are still remembered for a number of books apiece — and remain widely read.

But then there are deceased authors nowhere near as famous as they used to be. In many cases, they’re remembered chiefly for one or two novels while the rest of their canons have largely faded from public consciousness.

Why? Tastes changes, and not all writing ages well — some of it can eventually seem old-fashioned and too “of” a bygone era. Also, many past authors were “merely” great rather than GREAT great. But often there’s no easy explanation for why certain authors fall out of favor. Their writing may be wonderful and even timeless, yet they no longer get as much love as they deserve.

Sometimes, critics are at least partly to blame. For instance, the somewhat-faded luster of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper might have something to do with them both being slammed to an unfair degree by the influential Mark Twain.

Scott is still widely known for Ivanhoe and perhaps Rob Roy, but many of his other novels are barely remembered even though some (like Old Mortality and The Heart of Midlothian) are better than the two more famous ones I just mentioned. Cooper still gets present-day props for The Last of the Mohicans (the Daniel Day-Lewis movie adaptation helped 🙂 ), even as the other four of his “Leatherstocking Tales” and the rest of his plentiful canon have mostly faded to a Wikipedia list.

Colette is now mostly recalled for Gigi, but she wrote many better novels — including The Vagabond. When hearing Willa Cather’s name, you might think of My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop, but that accomplished author wrote a number of other great novels now undeservedly obscure. Mary Shelley remains justifiably famous for Frankenstein, but she wrote a half dozen more novels (including the amazing apocalyptic work The Last Man set in the year 2092) that most people would now be hard pressed to name.

Erich Maria Remarque also remains justifiably famous for All Quiet on the Western Front, but his other novels — some of them extraordinary, like Arch of Triumph and The Night in Lisbon — are not on the tip of most current readers’ tongues. Same for Aldous Huxley, with millions of people aware of Brave New World even as his excellent non-futuristic novels (such as Point Counter Point) are mostly forgotten.

I could go on and on. Other deceased authors who I think don’t get full kudos these days include Honore de Balzac, Anne Bronte, Erskine Caldwell, Theodore Dreiser, James Hilton, Sinclair Lewis, Bernard Malamud, W. Somerset Maugham, and Emile Zola, to name a few.

Of course, each author has her or his “story” explaining why they’re not better known. For instance, the very talented Anne Bronte was overshadowed by her even more talented sisters Charlotte and Emily.

Balzac and Zola remain literary stars in their home country of France and certain other places but are not as widely read in the U.S. Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon are still kind of famous (again, film versions helped) but few people could identify Hilton as the author of those two novels or name his other quality books (such as We Are Not Alone). The movie versions of Elmer Gantry and The Natural have helped Sinclair Lewis and Bernard Malamud remain somewhat known these days, plus the religious hypocrisy Lewis exposed in Elmer Gantry still strongly resonates in the 21st century.

Then there are authors who were famous for part of their lives before falling into obscurity that they were rescued from only years after they died. Herman Melville is one prime example, and another is Zora Neale Hurston — whose writing returned to the public eye with a big assist from Alice Walker.

Who are some deceased, once-famous authors you feel aren’t known as much as they should be these days? And, if you’d like, you could also mention great authors (past or present) who have NEVER gotten the recognition they deserve.

(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.)

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.

‘The Goldfinch’ and Other Modern Masterpieces

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Are the days of very ambitious novels over? Some readers think so.

They lament that we no longer have sweeping, sprawling, often-lengthy classics like Moby-Dick (Herman Melville), War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy), Middlemarch (George Eliot), The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky), Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham), East of Eden (John Steinbeck), Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak), One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), History (Elsa Morante), and other amazing works.

Why? Those who feel the classic-novel days are finished might blame such things as anti-intellectualism (which became accentuated under the Reagan presidency of the 1980s), shorter attention spans (symbolized by MTV’s emergence in the ’80s), and the many media distractions of the digital age (which flowered starting in the 1990s with the Internet and in the 2000s with social media).

But amid the fun, shallow, and/or escapist novels published from the 1980s on (heck, there were fun, shallow, and/or escapist novels before that, too 🙂 ), there are also a number of jaw-dropping works in our modern era that are as good or nearly as good as literature’s long-ago masterpieces. These hyper-ambitious novels ask (and often answer) the big questions about life, death, love, family, friendship, art, religion, politics, violence, injustice, oppression, and more — while simultaneously offering lots of memorable characters and entertainment.

I thought of that last week after finishing Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch — an impressive, riveting, very readable, almost-Dickensian novel that might well be considered an all-time classic a century from now. Partly a coming-of-age novel, partly a thriller, partly a howl against the seeming meaninglessness of existence, partly a funny satire of upper-class frivolity, and wholly written like a dream, The Goldfinch is 771 pages of literary firepower. It’s the story of Theo Decker, and how being at the site of a terrorist attack that kills his mother profoundly affects his (ill-fated but not completely ill-fated) life — which becomes strongly connected to the renowned “The Goldfinch” painting he dazedly takes before stumbling out of the bombed museum.

In addition to Tartt’s 2013 book, there are various other late-20th-century and early-21st-century novels with transcendent, go-for-broke content. From the start of the 1980s on, I would include in that group Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, among others.

I would also include wildly popular series such as J.K. Rowling’s seven Harry Potter books — and perhaps Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games and its two sequels, and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels.

Do you agree or disagree with the premise that there are some recent/relatively recent novels as great or almost as great as literature’s older iconic works? What are some novels, from the 1980s on, that you feel are the most ambitious and memorable?

(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.)

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.

Literature’s Surprising Turns, Turns, Turns

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Have you ever read a novel in which the story is chugging along until the book takes a very unexpected turn?

That’s a good or bad thing, depending on the nature of the turn and how it’s handled. Surprises can be welcome and “un-boring,” but sometimes an author completely jumps the shark.

My latest encounter with a veer in the fiction sphere occurred while reading Three Junes last month. That Julia Glass novel starts off focusing on the Scottish dad Paul, a newspaperman who’s sort of interesting but not exactly Mr. Charisma. Then the second section of the book abruptly shifts to Paul’s oldest son Fenno, a gay man who left Scotland for a life in New York City. While he’s also not very dynamic, Fenno’s life and choices and interactions are more compelling to read about than Paul’s. Then, as we become used to Fenno being the protagonist, Three Junes puts the spotlight on Fern, an interesting artist type who we first met when Paul was traveling in Greece.

Going back many, many Junes — to the 19th century — we have Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit suddenly sending the English title character to America. Reportedly, Dickens did this at least partly because sales of the serialized novel’s initial installments were not going as well as those of his earlier books.

Lee Child is an Englishman who moved to America, and I experienced one of the biggest surprises of his Jack Reacher novels in Running Blind. Reacher is known as a drifter without a home or car who wanders around the U.S. after leaving the military, so it was no surprise that he happened to be in Manhattan when Running Blind began. But instead of checking in to yet another hotel, he shockingly drives to his own house in upstate New York. Turns out he inherited it from a man who was sort of a surrogate father — although Reacher does not stay domesticated for long.

Speaking of long, seeing the backstory of the Mayfair women unfold a number of chapters into Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour is not an initial surprise but then becomes one when that backstory goes on for several hundred pages. But the 300-year history is so fascinating and well told that it’s riveting to read.

Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy surprises early on when there’s virtually nothing about Rob Roy for many pages. Instead, the focus is on the character Frank Osbaldistone. In this case, my first seeing the Rob Roy movie — which put the spotlight on the title character from the start — contributed to the puzzlement.

A similar situation involved seeing the Field of Dreams film before reading the Shoeless Joe novel it was based on. I was going “what?” when J.D. Salinger showed up in the W.P. Kinsella book; he was eliminated from the movie under legal threat from the reclusive author.

Then there’s John Steinbeck’s novel-play hybrid Burning Bright, which first focuses on several circus characters. The second part disorients readers by featuring the very same characters as farmers before the third part raises our eyebrows again when the identical cast turns into a bunch of sailors.

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin startles readers when it begins toggling between the novel itself and a fantastical/fascinating novel within the novel.

Last but not least, a number of John Irving’s novels grab your attention with odd plot twists.

What are some fictional works that take unexpected turns?

(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.)

WordPress sends each of its bloggers an annual report that mentions which people posted the most comments, how many countries visitors came from, the total number of views, which columns were the most popular, etc. Here’s the 2015 report for this blog.

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.

A Look at Intoxicating Literature

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Drinking is an important “device” in many literary works. It can feel like real life, it can be fun, it can be dramatic, it can be disastrous. And one reason why the quaffing of adult beverages is often conveyed so believably in fiction is that some authors have had plenty of personal experience with it. 🙂

Few novels are as drenched in alcoholism as Emile Zola’s The Drinking Den, in which booze sends a hardworking former teetotaler (Gervaise Macquart) into a horrible downward spiral. Liquor also plays a big role in the grim descent of Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

Then there’s Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in which Helen escapes an awful marriage to the hard-drinking Arthur Huntington — taking their young son with her. (The last straw for Helen was Arthur encouraging the boy to imbibe.) Leaving one’s husband was quite a proto-feminist act for a novel published in 1848, when wives were basically expected to accept whatever abuse their “worser half” dished out.

Another alcoholic is Crime and Punishment’s Semyon, who’s a pathetically interesting character in his own right but more importantly the father of Sonya — the woman who becomes so important to protagonist Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel.

Plus Huck Finn’s father, whose drunkenness and destitution shape his son and are transcended by his son in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Often, drinking can be part of a memorable single scene in a novel. The wild banquet in Honore de Balzac’s The Magic Skin is vividly described, and is representative of Raphael de Valentin’s dissolution. An intense tavern scene in George Eliot’s Silas Marner features the loner title character in a state of agitation after being robbed. Anne and Diana getting soused with currant wine the girls thought was raspberry cordial is pretty darn funny in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

Then there are novels in which characters are employed serving drinks. In Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare, village barmaid Heidi is actually an undercover agent for the Allied forces in World War II Germany. Julia Glass’ elegiac Three Junes has Maureen working as a barkeep when she meets Paul — after which the Scottish couple have a less-than-idyllic marriage. One of their sons moves to America, where Fenno mostly resists the gay bars of 1980s Manhattan as the AIDS scourge hits.

And the star of Grail Nights is a New Orleans bartender named Sheila whose place of business is a perfect locale for author Amanda Moores to spin one interrelated tale after another as the protagonist interacts with different people — creating a “short-story cycle as novel” a la Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. (Ms. Moores is the wife of jhNY — who, as you know, regular posts great comments here. He tells me that 100 copies of Grail Nights have been printed, signed by Ms. Moores, and numbered — and that about a dozen of those copies are being offered free to readers of this blog. If you’re interested, email me at dastor@earthlink.net and include your mailing address. I’ll give your address to jhNY, and he’ll send you the book. No postage costs, either. I read Grail Nights a couple of weeks ago, and found it enthralling and beautifully written. Plus jhNY provided the artwork for the front and back covers — with the design of the book handled by Roger Lathbury.)

Speaking of short stories, intoxication is a major factor in the macabre Edgar Allan Poe classic “The Cask of Amontillado.”

And there are countless other fictional protagonists who turn to drink when beaten down by tragedy, poverty, bigotry, disappointment, and life in general. But there are also many characters who enjoy beer, wine, or spirits in moderation — alone or in a social setting.

What are some memorable literary works you’ve read featuring alcoholics, drinking themes, and/or drinking moments?

(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.)

I won’t be posting a column on Dec. 27 because of a trip, but will occasionally check the blog that week to respond to comments. Back with another column on Jan. 3!

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.

If You Were Trying to Convince People to Read Fiction, What Would You Say?

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Most people who follow this blog are avid fans of literature. But we all have family and friends who don’t read any or much fiction — unless they stumble across a Donald Trump speech. 🙂

Everyone has their own interests and time constraints, so I never harangue the book-averse for not reading more novels. You’re probably the same way. But what if you hypothetically took aside people who don’t read literature and tried to convince them to do so? What would you say? What arguments would you use? (And I don’t mean threatening to smack them with a hardcover copy of War and Peace.) This column will consist of my hypothetical talking points, and then I’ll ask for yours.

I would tell the book-averse that reading fiction is fun and entertaining — as well as relaxing in some cases and exciting in other cases.

Educational, too. You learn about different locales (in the U.S. or abroad or even outer space), you learn about different cultures, and you learn about different time periods. You also learn about things that are a little harder to pin down — such as the variety of human emotions.

Literature can also be comforting. There’s something soothing about letting your mind go to another mental place, and about realizing that people from thousands of miles away or centuries ago might have similar thoughts as you. Part of this can involve learning from history so we’re not doomed to repeat it, to paraphrase the famous phrase attributed to George Santayana — whose writing included fiction.

Not soothing but also very important is how literature can take us OUT of our comfort zone and challenge us to look at things in a different way than we’re accustomed to.

Can you get all of the above from, say, watching TV programs or movies? Some of it. Yet images on a screen SHOW you things; you don’t use your imagination as much as you do when seeing things only in your mind’s eye when reading.

On a more prosaic level, reading fiction will give you interesting things to talk about (at parties and elsewhere) — including lines like: “Harumph — I just saw yet another film not as good as the novel it’s based on.” 🙂

And reading literature means you’re monetarily supporting some very creative author minds. Not to mention helping independent bookstores, if that’s how you roll when shopping for fictional works.

When hypothetically trying to convince people to read literature, it wouldn’t hurt to urge them to start with popular page-turners — and then hope those readers eventually throw some older or modern classics into the mix.

I realize much of what I said in this piece is obvious, but…okay, okay…books are also good for propping up the legs of uneven tables. Unless you use a Kindle, which might not do as well in that table-leveling capacity…

What would you tell literature-avoiding family members or friends to try to get them in fiction-reading mode?

(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.)

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.

A Transportation Compilation

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It’s the holiday season, and that often means traveling in planes, trains, and automobiles — to reference the title of a 1987 movie.

Well, I once wrote about cars in literature, so I’ll focus this post on fiction’s planes and trains — and throw in a few buses, too!

Of course, lots of literature has characters taking incidental flights or railroad rides to get somewhere, but this piece will focus on plane or train appearances that are important to the story. And I’ll keep in mind that fiction published before a certain 1903 invention by the Wright Brothers featured more trains than planes. I wonder why? 🙂

Emile Zola’s riveting 1890 novel The Beast in Man practically stars a train. Driving that majestic locomotive is troubled Jacques Lantier — whose train and life both end up crashing. Speaking of 19th-century literature, a train also plays a VERY major role in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

Tracks continued to appear in 20th- and 21st-century fiction. For instance, a train wreck in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake causes a survivor to name his son Gogol, because that’s who the father was reading when the accident occurred. Also, authorities covered up their massacre of many banana workers by secretly carrying the bodies away by rail and tossing them in the sea — a real-life 1928 atrocity devastatingly recounted in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. And it’s hard to forget Agatha Christie’s mystery classic Murder on the Orient Express.

On a less grisly note, the Hogwarts Express is a big player in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. That train takes students from London to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and it’s where Harry first meets his pals Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley — not to mention Draco Malfoy, the Slytherin boy with whom he’ll have many tangles over the course of seven books.

In Darryl Brock’s page-turning baseball novel If I Never Get Back, a train figures prominently when 20th-century protagonist Sam Fowler travels back in time to 1869. Later in the book, Sam meets Mark Twain on another train and then eventually takes a long, arduous 19th-century rail trip from Cincinnati to the West Coast. If only Sam could have flown…

Heck, if only the Bundren family could have flown when transporting the coffin of wife and mother Addie to her grave. But not having a harrowing land journey would have made for a much different As I Lay Dying, the tour de force novel by William Faulkner.

Which leads us to planes.

A past flight mishap in Alaska is one reason why the title character in Stanley Elkin’s The Rabbi of Lud doesn’t want to leave his New Jersey town despite the fact that it’s mostly “populated” by the buried dead (not Addie Bundren, though). Larry Darrell in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge seeks the meaning of life after being traumatized by his World War I pilot experiences. Wally Worthington’s military plane is shot down in John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, and his being injured and missing for a long time has a profound effect on the plot and other characters.

Then there’s Richard Matheson’s iconic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” story — perhaps best known as a Twilight Zone episode starring a pre-Star Trek William Shatner — that will make anyone terrified of looking out a plane window. And Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling’s brother Robert Serling wrote several novels with aviation themes, including The President’s Plane Is Missing and Stewardess.

Plane rides are also important in several Jack Reacher novels. Without Fail, for instance, has an airborne Reacher getting a chance to talk with America’s vice president-elect after Jack and others are assigned to protect him from very real assassination attempts.

Reacher and other forms of transportation? There’s a suicidal New York City subway scene in Gone Tomorrow you won’t soon forget. And Lee Child’s drifter protagonist has ridden quite a few buses — in 61 Hours, for instance. Which reminds me of John Steinbeck’s quirky novel The Wayward Bus.

Planes, trains, and buses of course also appear in many children’s books — such as Richard Scarry’s A Day at the Airport, The Little Engine That Could (of which the best-known version is by “Watty Piper”), The Railway Series (by Wilbert Awdry and Christopher Awdry) that stars Thomas the Tank Engine of later television fame, and The Magic School Bus books (by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen) that also got the TV treatment.

Of course, one could emulate the great band Rush and fly without being on a plane, but I don’t recommend it without a good special-effects person. Watch this very ’80s video and see. 🙂

What are you favorite fictional works featuring the transportation modes I mentioned?

(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.)

On Dec. 5, Brian Bess kindly posted a review (unsolicited!) of my 2012 memoir Comic (and Column) Confessional. As readers of this blog know, Brian frequently posts excellent comments here — and his book reviews are equally terrific!

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.

Seeing or Not Seeing Authors’ Lives in Their Books

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When we read fiction, how much do we see of an author’s life situation, personality, emotions, and neuroses? Her or his happiness or unhappiness?

In a way, all fiction is somewhat autobiographical, because the content is emerging from and filtered through the author’s brain. Even “neutral” facts can be given a spin that’s individual to each writer. Yet it’s interesting how much or how little a particular literary work reflects its author’s psyche.

Case in point: Edgar Allan Poe was often depressed, haunted, frustrated, and broke — with much of his brilliantly disturbing work reflecting that state of mind. Similar situation for another accomplished horror writer: the Poe-admiring H.P. Lovecraft.

But we’re not just talking about masters of the macabre. The fact that Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath had bouts of depression is apparent in their writing, whether directly or indirectly. For instance, there’s something of Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway‘s suicidal Septimus Smith character.

Also, the melancholy of loner protagonist Lucy Snowe in the melancholy Villette novel is clearly a reflection of Charlotte Bronte’s devastation at having lost her siblings Emily and Anne.

Then of course there’s Fyodor Dostoyevsky — whose near-execution, imprisonment, health issues, and money problems profoundly influenced his darkly transcendent writing.

And Erich Maria Remarque’s traumatic World War I experiences, departure from Germany after the Nazis publicly burned his anti-war novels, and devastating knowledge that the Third Reich beheaded his youngest sister Elfriede (partly to punish Erich) all had a major impact on his riveting, heartbreaking novels.

Having a mentally husband may have been one of the factors indirectly contributing to the downbeat nature of some of Edith Wharton’s great novels.

L.M. Montgomery also had a mentally ill husband — and sued her publisher AND became somewhat tired of writing the many Anne of Green Gables sequels her adoring readers wanted. Yet while Montgomery included harsh realities in her novels, many of the chapters were quite sunny. Obviously, countless authors write at least somewhat about how they (and their readers) would like life to be — putting wish fulfillment in the pages they produce.

Another example of that would be Jane Austen, whose life wasn’t as cheery as that of the couples experiencing happy endings in her novels. Yet Austen was of course not totally sentimental in her books; some of her characters never became content, and she often depicted sadness, death, hypocrisy, materialism, and other negative things.

Then there are authors who seem happy — with some of those writers creating upbeat work and others going darker. An example of the latter would be Stephen King, who’s rich and famous and seemingly well-adjusted yet continues tapping inner demons to write his scary/spooky stuff. But, like almost everyone, King’s life has not been without difficulties — including early struggles to get published, being wrongly considered just a mass-market writer when he also has some literary chops, and getting badly hurt in 1999 when a vehicle hit him as he walked.

Charles Dickens’ adult life was also full of wealth and success, but the author never forgot the childhood trauma of having his father and other family members thrown into debtors’ prison. All of which could help explain the mix of hilarity and calamity in many of Dickens’ novels.

Finally, we can’t forget how the racism, sexism, and/or homophobia experienced by various authors sparked legitimate anger that often showed up overtly or covertly in their work. Think of novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, and many others.

Who are your favorite authors whose personalities, feelings, life situations, etc., match or don’t match their fictional works? What are some of those works?

Thanks to “Clairdelune” for inspiring the idea for this column!

(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.)

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.

Dysfunctional Families in Literature

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As Thanksgiving Day nears, thoughts turn to tender family bonds. People will gather with those dear to them, and be bathed in the love emanating from their parents, siblings, children, and various relatives.

Yeah, right.

Ideal, heartwarming, Norman Rockwell-ish Thanksgiving gatherings do exist — and it’s wonderful when they happen. But many a family resides in the dysfunctional spectrum, so I’ll perversely mark Turkey Day 2015 by discussing fictional kin that put the flaw in flawed — and not just on the fourth Thursday of November.

Dysfunctional families in literature are hard to resist for several reasons. Reading about negative dynamics is often more interesting and dramatic than reading about positive stuff. Leo Tolstoy kind of addressed that when he opened Anna Karenina with this line: “All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I don’t agree with the first part of that sentiment, but…

Also, we might have a satisfying feeling of superiority if our real-life families are (allegedly) more together than the train-wreck households we see in some novels. And we might learn something from literature about how to avoid or reduce dysfunction in our own clans.

What causes real or fictional families to live lives of not-so-quiet disapprobation? The reasons can include financial stress, mental issues, medical problems, drunkenness, drug addiction, infidelity, tragic events, sibling rivalry/jealousy, couples being mismatched, parents raised by problematic parents who repeat the pattern by problematically raising their own progeny, parents who want their children to be like them rather than let them be themselves, parents who are too strict, parents who play favorites with their kids (perhaps for sexist reasons), and so on.

Families that range from troubled to totally cray-cray abound in quite a few older novels now considered classics. Among those books are Honore de Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Herman Melville’s Pierre, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Emile Zola’s The Drinking Den, Henry James’ Washington Square, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain.

Dysfunctional families also frequent a number of more recent novels, including Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland.

With the rise of modern psychology, novelists these days have even more tools to depict and dissect troubled relationships and try to address the Rodney King-like plea of why we can’t just get along.

Heck, some households this week might even spar about roast turkeys vs. Tofurky vegetarian roasts. 🙂

Which of literature’s dysfunctional families have you found memorable?

(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.)

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.

Literary Fiction vs. Popular Fiction: a Big or Not-So-Big Divide?

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Fiction is often described as either “literary” or “popular.” But the lines are often blurry between those two categories — and between authors associated with each category.

I read and love fiction in both categories, and I’m sure most of you do, too. Actually, many a novel is both literary and mass-audience-oriented — making the so-called divide rather artificial (snobbish?) and perhaps unnecessary. Even books that are clearly in one category or the other might be by authors who wrote different works that belong in the opposite category.

Before I get into specific titles, I want to discuss the difference between literary and popular fiction — when they are indeed different. Popular fiction of course often sells better (though not always), but what about the content?

I’m generalizing here, and there are many exceptions, but the best literary fiction has excellent prose, psychological complexity, characters who are finely drawn and nuanced (not totally good or bad), some challenging aspects (such as stories that don’t unfold chronologically), and frequently ambiguous endings, among other elements.

Popular fiction might or might not be very well-written; is often linear, fun, plot-oriented, action-packed, and sentimental; might confirm a reader’s worldview rather than question it; and so on.

Genre fiction such as mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, thriller, and romance novels often get placed in the popular category even though some specific books in those categories have plenty of literary moments.

I would add that many book lovers intuitively know the difference between literary and popular fiction when they see it, even if they can’t always articulate the specifics defining each category.

This topic occurred to me as I’ve been reading Anne Rice for the first time this month. Rice is considered a popular-fiction writer, but her 965-page The Witching Hour has many passages that feel literary. One of many examples from the novel: “When the sun had vanished, a great fiery layer lay upon the horizon from end to end of the world. That lasted perhaps an hour and then the sky was but a pale pink and at last a deep blue, blue as the sea.” Plus The Witching Hour interestingly bounces around in time — including an extended section that starts in 1689 and takes readers through 300 years of the Mayfair family and how some of its women seemingly possess supernatural powers.

Stephen King is another prominent author who comes to mind when discussing a mass-audience approach, but the guy clearly has literary chops, too. For instance, his From a Buick 8 is a writing gem that’s popular fiction yet transcends popular fiction.

Among the many other novels I feel straddle the popular/literary divide are Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Colette’s The Vagabond, Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Erich Maria Remarque’s The Black Obelisk, Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye, James Clavell’s Shogun, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, and most fiction works by Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, and John Irving, to name a few boundary-crossing authors.

In countless cases, authors get deeper and more literary as their careers go on. Herman Melville first penned mass-audience novels like Typee before entering heavier territory with novels such as Moby-Dick and short stories such as Bartleby, the Scrivener. Robert Louis Stevenson was known for popular fiction like Treasure Island and popular/literary hybrids like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before becoming quite literary with his exquisite final unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston.

One can also see how authors’ later writing matured when comparing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit with his subsequent The Lord of the Rings, and when contrasting J.K. Rowling’s first two Harry Potter books with the more complex installments that followed.

Of course, there are terrific popular-fiction authors (such as Lee Child and John Grisham) who offer readers only the occasional literary flourish. And there are iconic literary authors (like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison) who are almost never boring amid their brilliance — meaning they’re sort of popular-fiction writers, too.

What are your thoughts about the literary fiction/popular fiction divide? What is it about the content of a novel that places it in either category? Which literary-fiction authors write/wrote some popular fiction? Which popular-fiction authors write/wrote some literary fiction? Or combine the two approaches in one novel? What are some of those hybrid novels?

(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.)

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.