Liars in Literature

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Just as suspended NBC (Not Being Candid) anchor Brian Williams should resign or be fired for lying, I’m resigned to and fired up about seeing liars in literature. They’re annoying, but can make for interesting characters. And their fibbing can drive many a plot.

Why do they lie? What are the consequences for them and others? Can lying sometimes be a good thing? I’d be lying if I said this paragraph didn’t contain three questions. 🙂

Fibbers include not only people representing themselves, but also politicians (“Saddam has WMDs!”), corporations (“our dangerous products are safe!”), law enforcement (“that unarmed black man has a gun!”), the media (Brian Williams again), and so on.

One of the most iconic books featuring falsehood-telling people and institutions is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, many novels that focus on dystopian societies and dictatorships are all about depicting “The Big Lie” and the citizenry being “sold” a fabricated reality.

Mysteries and detective fiction also rely on lies and misdirection (aka “red herrings”) to create suspense. For instance, the killer “hiding in plain sight” in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is certainly not truthful as victims multiply. A.S. Byatt’s more literary mystery Possession contains 19th-century lies and secretiveness that reverberate into the 20th century.

In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, white woman Mayella Ewell lies under oath because she’s scared of her brutal/racist father and can’t publicly admit in 1930s Alabama that she liked black man Tom Robinson. Her false testimony leads to tragedy — with the lie of white superiority creating the climate for what happened.

Lies also send the innocent Edmond Dantes to prison in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo — and having been framed makes Edmond’s subsequent vengeance as visceral as any in literature.

Of course, lying is practically a prerequisite for married people when they have affairs. Among the countless protagonists in that situation are the title characters in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Severine in Emile Zola’s The Beast in Man, Mattie’s husband and father in Anne Lamott’s Blue Shoe, and Dave Raymond in Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones (Dave is actually engaged, not married, when he cheats in that novel).

Then there are lies told by married characters who want to marry someone else, as is the case with Edward Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Godfrey Cass in George Eliot’s Silas Marner. Also in Eliot’s novel, Godfrey hides the existence of a daughter, and Silas’ treacherous “friend” William lies in a way that devastates Marner for years.

Some married characters lie by omission about their pasts. For instance, in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, the husband of Isabel Archer doesn’t tell her about a relationship he had with someone Isabel knows well (or thought she knew well).

In Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Briony’s accidental and deliberate lies devastate the lives of her older sister Cecilia and the man (Robbie) who Cecilia loves.

Yet another kind of family-related falsehood occurs in M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans when island residents Isabel and Tom Sherbourne keep a baby who washes up in a boat rather than report the find to authorities. Their claim that “Lucy” is their biological child inevitably gets publicly outed as the lie that it is.

Among the examples of necessary lies is the surgeon in Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph using the fake name of Ravic to shield his identity after escaping Nazi Germany for Paris.

In the area of plays, among the most famous liars are Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello and the title character in Moliere’s Tartuffe.

Which liars in literature have you found the most memorable?

Here’s a concluding thought by no means original to me: It’s interesting that Brian Williams seems to be the only prominent person punished for lying about the Iraq War. Not George W. Bush, not Dick Cheney, not Donald Rumsfeld, etc. — all fiction creators extraordinaire with lots of real-life blood on their hands.

(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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

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 New York City and 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.

This Blog Post Is On The House

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Fictional characters are female, male, black, white, poor, rich, nice, not nice, and…four-walled?

Yes, houses can be memorable enough to almost seem like characters. In fact, some literary works even have “house” in their titles: The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende), The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne), The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson), The House on the Strand (Daphne du Maurier), House of Sand and Fog (Andre Dubus III), The Professor’s House (Willa Cather), Little House on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder), and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Edgar Allan Poe), to name just a few.

I thought of the idea for this post while reading a nonfiction book: Cathy Turney’s just-published Laugh Your Way to Real Estate Sales Success. I have absolutely no desire to be a Realtor, but I was interested in the book because Cathy is a friend and because my house got sold last year. Given that I usually read fiction, I couldn’t help thinking of houses in literature as I read about real-life California houses in Cathy’s funny and informative book.

The California dwelling in House of Sand and Fog is a relatively modest one, but the fight over its ownership is major. That disastrous battle is between a former Iranian military man and a former drug addict — the latter finding an ally (and lover) in a married, ethics-challenged sheriff who may find himself in The Big House (jail, not the University of Michigan’s football stadium).

The Haunting of Hill House is understated as horror novels go, but the abode in that novel is quite a spooky place that seems to almost have a mind of its own. As for “The Fall of the House of Usher,” well, I think the title gives you a clue about what happens to that dwelling. But not before some macabre moments.

In Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor, the brilliant/eccentric Frieda Haxby Palmer is rather a mystery to her children and grandchildren as she abandons her former life to live in a rambling, rundown former hotel by the sea.

The dwelling in Morag Joss’ Half Broken Things is a fancy mansion being taken care of by a house-sitter. Then things get psychologically weird as Jean has others move in — including a “son” who is not really her son and a pregnant “daughter-in-law.” They create a kind of family until…

Another impressive structure is Thornfield Hall — a house in which Jane Eyre finds mystery, happiness, and heartbreak in Charlotte Bronte’s novel. One of the strongest scenes is near the end of the book when Jane returns to the grounds of Thornfield Hall after many months, slowly moves into position to catch a full view of its impressive facade, and…

The awe-inspiring, seemingly impregnable mountain castle in Where Eagles Dare is being used as a Nazi headquarters in Alistair MacLean’s novel, but the book makes several references to the castle’s history as a private residence for “one of the madder of the Bavarian monarchs.”

On a more positive note, the castle of L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle is an idealized structure of Valancy Stirling’s imagination. But the beleaguered character does eventually find a wonderful home and relationship; the question is whether she’ll live to enjoy both. In Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, the structure of the title is a lovely refuge for Anne Shirley — though the orphan girl’s life certainly holds some challenges after she arrives there.

Literature offers more modest dwellings, too. For instance, Hagrid’s hut is just a small place on the grounds of Hogwarts in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Yet Harry, Hermione, and Ron often visit — and some interesting and important things happen in or near that diminutive dwelling.

There are also huts in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, a lighthouse keeper’s basic cottage on remote Janus Rock (off the southwest coast of Australia) in M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans, and the opium den (operating during New Zealand’s 19th-century Gold Rush) that I think doubles as a minimal residence for its proprietor in Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries.

Many other novels depict impoverished characters living in ramshackle homes — including the shacks and shanties of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, the slave dwellings of Alex Haley’s Roots and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the Jim Crow-era housing of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. (Say, will there ever be a second book by Ms. Lee? 🙂 )

One of the more singular homes in literature lies in the middle of a colonial New York lake in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. Tom Hutter lives there to try to protect himself from the Native Americans he and most other white men have been treating so badly.

What are the houses you remember most in literature? Mentions of apartments and other dwellings are welcome, too.

(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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

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, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and 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.

Living Together Without the Romance

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When one thinks of adults residing in the same household, the first people that come to mind are couples who are married or living together.

But there are other grown-up groupings: parents with adult children at home, parents with their parents in spare rooms, siblings sharing an abode, people taking care of ill relatives, unrelated adults renting an apartment together, servants or nannies residing on the premises, refugees clumped together during a war, and so on. Those kinds of household arrangements in literature are the subject of this blog post.

Why those arrangements? They’re done for reasons such as economics, love, neurosis, or tradition (for instance, in “the olden days” adult women often stayed home until they married). In real life, the situations of adults non-romantically living together can often be mundane; in the heightened world of literature, those arrangements are frequently depicted in more dramatic fashion.

Take Washington Square. In Henry James’ novel, things get rather interesting as rich, unkind Dr. Austin Sloper opposes his at-home daughter Catherine’s relationship with the not-very-solvent Morris Townsend because he suspects the charismatic Morris wants to marry the uncharismatic Catherine for her inheritance. (There’s a reason why the movie version of the book is called The Heiress.) Meanwhile, Dr. Sloper’s also-at-home sister Lavinia Penniman supports the possible marriage in her meddlesome, irritating way because she finds the whole scenario vicariously exciting.

James’ pal Edith Wharton offers another niece-aunt dynamic in The House of Mirth, which features the not-wealthy Lily Bart uneasily living with her wealthy but ungenerous Aunt Julia. When the aunt dies, Lily’s financial problems are seemingly over — until she learns that Julia mostly wrote her out of her will because of an alleged “scandal” for which Lily is not really to blame.

Adult daughters living with widowed fathers are memorably depicted in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Emma. Anne Elliot is a together person from the start of Persuasion, with an unlikable dad. Emma Woodhouse grows as a person in Emma, with a likable but hypochondriacal dad.

Also in 19th-century Brit lit, George Eliot’s dramatic Daniel Deronda features various non-romantic living arrangements. After Daniel saves her, Mirah Lapidoth lives with the family of Daniel’s friend from school days. Meanwhile, Mirah’s brother Mordecai lives with a different family. Later, after Mirah and Mordecai find each other following years of separation, they share a household as siblings.

The Bronte sisters are part of this discussion, too. The title character in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre becomes the governess to Edward Rochester’s “ward” Adele at Thornfield Hall. (Though that situation eventually turns into a romance.) In Emily’s Wuthering Heights, servant Nelly Dean is the crucial narrator who lives with a number of the novel’s tempestuous and/or sickly adult characters.

Moving to 20th-century fiction, we have siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert sharing a residence when they seek to adopt a boy to help on their farm. Instead, they end up with the delightful Anne Shirley in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has the mysterious Radley family, including mentally challenged adult son Boo, in the same house. Then there’s the impoverished Ewell family dwelling — where the adult Mayella lives with her siblings and drunk, abusive father Bob. Boo and Bob “meet” during the novel’s famous conclusion.

In Elsa Morante’s History, Ida and her lovable son Giuseppe have to live in a shelter with many other adults and kids because of the ravages of war in 1940s Rome.

Cost-conscious college students and young adults sharing the same room or apartment appear in numerous fictional works, including Margaret Atwood’s debut novel The Edible Woman. Protagonist Marian shares a Toronto apartment with Ainsley — and the depiction of their interesting, at-times funny friendship is an early example of Atwood’s novel-writing skill.

What are your favorite literary works featuring adults (other than spouses/romantic partners) living 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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

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, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and 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 Reflects Our Digital Age

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I love pre-20th-century fiction, but I’m going to ignore it today. That’s because I’ll be talking about literature featuring computers, email, cellphones, social media, and other manifestations of modern technology.

It’s a subject Jane Austen probably didn’t discuss on a smartphone, Charlotte Bronte probably didn’t text about, Mark Twain probably didn’t tell a Facebook friend about, and Tolstoy probably didn’t tweet about. Heck, the War and Peace cast has more than 140 characters…

Digital devices can appear casually in literature — a character writing something on a laptop, another character taking a photo with an iPhone, etc. — or they can be important to, or even central to, the story line.

Modern technology can certainly affect a plot. For instance, mystery authors of decades ago took advantage of the fact that potential crime victims might find themselves in very isolated situations. Now, potential victims could very well be toting a smartphone that could help them avoid mayhem.

While we might think tech began appearing in lit when the Internet became a mass phenomenon during the 1990s, computers of course were found in fiction — and particularly science fiction — well before that. A prime example is Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — in which HAL the computer plays a memorably important role. Computers are also in decades-ago books aimed at young readers, with one example being 1958’s Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Jay Williams and Raymond Arbrashkin. Man, that homework-helping computer was HUGE!

But the digital age especially permeates literature of the past 10-20 years. This is mightily apparent in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and the two other Stieg Larsson novels that feature major computer hacking by Lisbeth Salander, online research by her and others, and investigative stories and investigative books written on laptops. Tech stuff is almost as important as the human element in driving the story lines of Larsson’s page-turning trilogy.

Modern technology is also prominent in Lee Child’s riveting series of Jack Reacher crime thrillers. Worth Dying For, to name one title, has a pivotal scene where Reacher goes outside to retrieve a cellphone he had earlier grabbed from a bad guy — only to find himself in mortal danger from that bad guy’s just-arriving “boss.” Later, a cellphone conversation plays a crucial role in the 2010 novel’s shattering climax.

J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy (2012) includes cellphones, texting, and computers, too — making for a digital landscape that’s at first a bit jarring after reading Rowling’s magic-filled but almost tech-free Harry Potter series.

Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) opens with transcripts of emails that “introduce” readers to various characters. We learn something about Jerome Belsey (the emailer who’s staying with the Kipps family in England), about the Kipps (who will figure prominently in the novel), and about Jerome’s Massachusetts-based father Howard (including the fact that he’s too distracted, embarrassed, and self-involved to answer emails). Later in the novel, Howard the professor is very reluctant to switch from an overhead projector to PowerPoint — which symbolizes his becoming a has-been. (Not that he was ever much of a “was-been.”)

On a more positive note, Dellarobia Turnbow getting a job that includes some computer work is one example of how that rural, working-class, former stay-at-home mom gains confidence in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012). Also in that novel, computer modeling and online research help scientist Ovid Byron learn about the way climate change is hurting the monarch-butterfly population.

Another 2012 novel, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, includes a satellite-technology element crucial to the effort to try smuggling a prominent North Korean actress out of that authoritarian country.

Moving to the apocalyptic, we have Stephen King’s Cell (2006), in which cellphones don’t come off well. Neither does that novel; it’s one of King’s few mediocre efforts in the wireless or pre-wireless eras of his glittering career.

Last but not least, digital devices can also be a vehicle for humor. In Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company, for instance, protagonist Daniel Pecan Cambridge muses that his name is “D-control/spacebar” in the computer records of his therapist Clarissa — who, incidentally, once had her cellphone battery die at the same time her car battery died. What are your favorite literary works with modern-technology 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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

— 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, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and 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.

Sports in Literature

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Just as there are double plays in baseball, there are two ways to talk about sports in literature. One is to discuss sports fiction itself, and the other is to discuss non-sports fiction that includes some athlete characters. This post will do both — the blog equivalent of a two-point conversion in football?

Heck, I’ll also mention literature that’s not sports-oriented and doesn’t have athletes in the cast, yet mentions sports in other ways — for instance, via a character who’s a sports fan. So this post will actually be sort of like basketball’s triangle offense or a hockey player’s three-goal hat trick.

I think you get the idea why the metaphors I overdid in the above paragraphs are not an Olympic event… 🙂

Among the non-sports novels with athlete characters are Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (which includes former college basketball player Patty Berglund), John Irving’s The World According to Garp (wrestler T.S. Garp), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (golfer Jordan Baker, inspired by real-life golfer Edith Cummings), and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire (boxer Paolo Roberto, based on real-life boxer…Paolo Roberto).

Football is the most popular pro sport in the U.S. while soccer (aka football) is the most popular elsewhere, but baseball novels often first come to mind when thinking about sports fiction. Some of the most famous titles in this category include Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (a very literary baseball book), Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (turned into the Broadway play Damn Yankees), and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (turned into the movie Field of Dreams, minus the novel’s J.D. Salinger presence).

Kinsella’s baseball novels also include the offbeat Magic Time and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

Among other notable baseball titles: William Brashler’s The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (starring a 1930s team of African-American players competing before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s racist color barrier), Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back (time-travel plot with a Mark Twain appearance), John Grisham’s Calico Joe (good but not as much of a page-turner as the author’s legal thrillers), and E.R. Greenberg’s The Celebrant (Jewish fan admires and befriends New York Giants pitching legend Christy Mathewson).

In addition, there are many lesser-known baseball novels aimed at kids and teens. One of my favorites way back when was Dick Friendlich’s Relief Pitcher — about a Major League infielder who is injured by a showboating rookie teammate, goes to the minors, returns to the Majors as a pitcher for another team, and ultimately takes the mound to face the showboater at a crucial pennant-race moment.

Another memory from my youth is “The Mighty Casey” — a terrific Twilight Zone episode, starring a robot pitcher, that was adapted into a print tale for Rod Serling’s Stories From The Twilight Zone collection.

There are nowhere near as many football novels as baseball ones, but perhaps the most famous gridiron fiction is Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty.

Why is some sports literature so riveting and popular? That kind of fiction is almost inherently dramatic — teams win or lose, underdogs sometimes triumph, egos clash, athletes do great or bumbling things, and those with mediocre talent might work hard enough to excel while those with immense talent might coast. Also, athletes flourish for a while and then fade because of age or injury — which can make for poignant scenarios.

Sports also get mentioned in literary works that are not really about sports and don’t have athlete protagonists. Zadie Smith’s On Beauty refers to a “cricket-club tie” worn by Monty Kipps that serves as another reminder of how that conservative academic possesses many more talents than his more liberal but equally annoying academic rival Howard Belsey. Don DeLillo’s Underworld recounts New York Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson’s famous 1951 home run — a real-life event that helps place part of that novel in a certain era and has an impact on the book’s plot and fictional characters. Also in the 1950s, young Irish woman Eilis Lacey experiences “America’s pastime” (like many recent immigrants did before) when accompanying her U.S. boyfriend to a Brooklyn Dodgers game in Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn.

What are your favorite literary works about sports, your favorite literary works that are mostly not about sports but have athlete characters, or your favorite literary works that just mention sports?

If you’d also like to mention your favorite nonfiction sports books, please do! Among mine are David Maraniss’s When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi (about the legendary Green Bay Packers football coach), Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (which depicts the Yankee great as anything but great as a person), Jane Leavy’s Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (about the iconic Dodgers pitcher), Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer (about the Dodgers when in Brooklyn), George Plimpton’s Paper Lion (in which the author “plays” quarterback for the Detroit Lions), and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four (one of the first books to depict — in an often humorous way — pro athletes as warts-and-all human beings rather than whitewashed, mythic figures).

(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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

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, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and 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.

Authors as Landscapers

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The most crucial elements of most literary works are the characters, plot, and quality of prose. But another important element is the landscape: where things happen, what that place looks like, the mood that locale might create, and how that place might affect what’s going on with the characters and plot.

And when some of that aforementioned prose is used to describe “the scenery,” the description can be quite evocative in the right authorial hands.

Landscape is a key part of Lee Child’s 61 Hours, a Jack Reacher crime thriller I just read. Reacher unexpectedly finds himself stuck in a bone-chillingly cold South Dakota town — and the bleak, wide-open spaces in and near that town help establish the novel’s spare, tense, scary, lonely, downbeat vibe.

South of South Dakota — in Oklahoma — is where John Steinbeck depicts the parched, dust storm-decimated farm country the impoverished Joads are forced to leave in The Grapes of Wrath. When they finally arrive in California after an arduous journey, they are struck by the Golden State’s lushness and beauty — only to find that the oppressive rich control just about everything.

That contrast of beauty and misery also crops up in Herman Melville’s first novel Typee, in which the protagonist is stranded on a gorgeous South Seas island where some ensuing events turn ugly. (Another contrast is the fact that the good but not great Typee sold many more copies than Moby-Dick during Melville’s lifetime.)

Then there are the rolling, moonlit, windswept moors in Wuthering Heights that do so much to help create the novel’s wild, eerie mood. When Emily Bronte’s characters trudge through that terrain, their destinations usually aren’t happy ones.

Rivers? Literature has a few, with perhaps the most famous being the mighty Mississippi in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Also memorable is the Tennessee River in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, whose titular protagonist lives in a houseboat. The Tennessee is lovely in parts, but also speaks to the poverty and despair of some characters — as when a suicide victim is pulled from the water.

Mountains? Glad you asked! In Lost Horizon, various characters are flown to (the fictional) Shangri-La amid Tibet’s majestic peaks. That towering, remote, dream-like setting is a big reason why many readers find James Hilton’s novel so mesmerizing. Even more towering are the peaks in H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

Swamps? Mentioned in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Jungles? Parts of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. The desert? Um…Desert by J.M.G. Le Clezio.

Changes in scenery when traveling? A good example, in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, is when Brit-living-near-Boston Howard revels in the no-snow look of England when he goes there during the winter.

A landscape can of course be urban, too. In The Marble Faun, Rome is almost a living, breathing character as Nathaniel Hawthorne describes its beautiful but hectic 19th-century present and its beautiful but spooky ancient past. The excitement and claustrophobia of a big city like Chicago comes through in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. An amazing visual image in Jack Finney’s Time and Again is the Statue of Liberty’s torch-holding arm in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park, where that arm was actually displayed from 1876 to 1882 — before the full statue arose in New York Harbor.

Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand shows an English town’s landscape in both the populated 1900s and less-populated 1300s, depending on the century protagonist Dick Young mentally occupies in his drugged mind.

Other time-travel novels, such as H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, hauntingly picture future civilizations with architecture in partial or full ruin.

Science-fiction books, such as Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, feature the unfamiliar yet at times sort of familiar landscapes of other worlds besides Earth.

There are also devastating views of battlefields — during and after the fighting — in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, and many other novels.

Landscapes in literature can also convey a strong sense of nostalgia, as with James Fenimore Cooper’s descriptions of New York’s unspoiled 18th-century woods in novels such as The Deerslayer. Some of those forests were already getting cut down when Cooper was writing in the 19th century — and undeveloped areas are of course much more scarce today.

What are some of your favorite fictional works featuring memorable landscapes?

(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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

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, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and 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.

It’s Hard Being Indifferent to Characters This Different

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Literature is filled with memorable characters, but which are the most original?

There are probably almost as many answers to that question as there are readers, so I’ll give you some of my picks and then ask for yours.

By original, I mean characters who have a rare set of skills, or possess an unusual combination of personality traits, or have done amazing things, or are unusually good, or are unusually evil, etc. They’re so original that it’s hard to find similar protagonists in literature, and so original that it’s difficult to find real-life people like them.

Given that I just finished reading Stieg Larsson’s riveting “Millennium Trilogy,” I’ll start by naming Lisbeth Salander — whose one-of-a-kind nature especially blazes forth in book two: The Girl Who Played With Fire. The 20-something Salander is under five feet tall and weighs less than 100 pounds, yet she can take care of herself against much larger bad guys — fueled by rage against all the wrongs done to her by men in high places. She’s antisocial, stoic, resourceful, a brilliant computer hacker, and more. Original enough?

Another 21st-century novel, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, features a North Korean character whose name is reminiscent of the generic “John Doe.” But Jun Do has a non-generic set of abilities. He’s a kidnapper (involuntarily), a radio operator, a learner of English, a hard worker on the lower rungs of society, and a survivor extraordinaire as he deals with physical and mental pain and deprivation. Then, to top it off, he audaciously manages to become a bigwig under a different name in an already existing family — and even gets his “wife” to watch…Casablanca!

Despite his part-African ancestry, French author Alexandre Dumas rarely featured black characters in his novels. One exception is the titular hero of Georges, which in some ways is a precursor book to The Count of Monte Cristo. The multidimensional Georges is cultured, educated, and has many hobbies and skills. His skin color allows him to pass as white, but he’s so outraged by racial injustice that he becomes a fierce military man leading a revolt against slavery on what’s now the island of Mauritius.

(As an aside, there are many similarities between The Count of Monte Cristo‘s Edmond Dantes and Lisbeth Salander. Both are falsely accused, both become rich, both are out for revenge, and both are very capable of exacting that revenge.)

Another 19th-century novelist, Jane Austen, gives us the impressive Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Anne is kind, smart, mature, cool in a crisis, adept at dealing with a difficult father and difficult siblings, and in love with a man — Frederick Wentworth — who’s self-made rather than born rich. While sad and frustrated for many years about her thwarted relationship with Wentworth, Anne doesn’t give in to despair despite being “old” (27) for an unmarried woman of her time.

Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back stars Sam Fowler, a 20th-century man thrust back in time to 1869 — where he joins the legendary Cincinnati Red Stockings. Sam is only so-so at baseball, but he has some boxing ability and lots of entrepreneurial instincts — even “inventing” the ballpark hot dog! And when he gets sick of America’s crappy 19th-century cuisine, he visits a Chinese neighborhood to pay a random resident to cook him some decent food. Sam also falls in love with the widowed sister of one of his Red Stockings teammates, and gets involved in major intrigue after meeting Mark Twain.

A few other nearly unique characters: Mattie Ross, the religious, fearless, stunningly mature 14-year-old who seeks to avenge her father’s death in Charles Portis’ True Grit; Wolf Larsen, the sadistic, handsome, and immensely strong ship captain who’s brilliant but not quite brilliant enough in Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf; and Cathy Trask, the amoral psychopath in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Also: Charles Strickland, the selfish, people-hating stockbroker who makes an astonishing career change to become a legendary painter in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence; Dinah Morris, a very rare female preacher for her time (18th-century England) in George Eliot’s Adam Bede; and Reggie Love, the brainy, brave, compassionate woman who rises above an abusive marriage and alcoholism to become a crack attorney in John Grisham’s The Client.

Also: Owen Meany, the small boy with a high-pitched voice and lots of smarts who predicts his own unusual destiny in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany; Oscar Wao, the nerdy Dominican-American who’s into stuff like cartoons and sci-fi before things get scarily serious in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; and Ignatius J. Reilly, the slobby, delusional, neurotic, narcissistic, modernity-disdaining “wise fool” in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

Who are some fictional characters you’ve found to be very original, and what makes them so different?

Thanks to everyone in 2014 who read my weekly blog posts, and left comments about literature and other topics! Those comments were wonderfully knowledgeable and friendly (and often humorous). This blog started on July 14, 2014, and by the end of the day on Dec. 31 there were 4,200 comments and 13,690 views from 85 countries during those five-and-a-half months.

(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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

— 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, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and 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 Gives Us Screen Gems and Screen Duds

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I don’t watch many movies or much TV, but I’ve seen enough to have a sense of what it’s like when literature makes it to the screen.

Often, the results are at least a little disappointing. Great literature has a certain “voice” that’s not easy to capture on film, and some content usually has to be left out because of time constraints — even in a miniseries.

Plus there are inevitable revisions — graphic stuff might be sanitized, happier endings might be tacked on, and performers are usually better looking than the fictional characters they play (more on that third point when I mention Jane Eyre later).

In addition, the actress or actor playing a fictional character you love has also played roles in other movies, so it can be hard to suspend belief about the performer being that character.

Then there’s the fact that “seeing” something in one’s imagination (via the printed or eBook page) can be infinitely more interesting than seeing it depicted on a screen.

But sometimes movie or TV treatments of literature almost match the original literary work, or even surpass it. The screenplay writers might improve the weaker parts and/or distill a too-long work into its wonderful essence. Also, the acting and/or direction might be so spectacular that viewers get more than a great story.

Anyway, it’s time to for me to discuss several specific literature-inspired movies and miniseries (the BBC has aired plenty of the latter, with some of course based on Jane Austen novels). And I hope commenters with much more screen knowledge than I will name various other productions.

I recently saw To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time, and — while I missed some of Harper Lee’s earnest/humane/lyrical prose — the 1962 film mostly did justice to a novel in which there’s no justice for its African-American characters. The cinematography is evocative, and the acting terrific. Gregory Peck won an Oscar for his ultra-convincing portrayal of lawyer Atticus Finch, and Mary Badham as his young daughter Scout and Brock Peters as the doomed Tom Robinson are pretty darn good, too.

More great acting, from Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, helps make the Coen brothers’ True Grit movie almost as good as the Charles Portis novel. That 2010 film hewed more closely to Portis’ seriocomic western than the 1969 True Grit film starring John Wayne.

Acting also makes the 2002 movie The Hours — from Michael Cunningham’s novel — a pleasure to watch. Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, and Ed Harris are mesmerizing, and Nicole Kidman isn’t bad as Virginia Woolf.

There’s stellar acting, too, in the pioneering 1977 Roots miniseries — based on Alex Haley’s book — that brought a then-rare black drama to TV. LeVar Burton, Cicely Tyson, Maya Angelou, Ed Asner, and dozens of others!

And let’s go all the way back to 1933, when The Emperor Jones movie based on the Eugene O’Neill play featured a tour de force performance by Paul Robeson that still leaps off the screen eight decades later. (I realize turning a play into a movie is different than turning a novel into a film.)

But then there are cinematic disappointments, whether the letdown is moderate or severe. For instance, the 1955 East of Eden movie — while great in certain ways — leaves out a huge chunk of the novel as well as one of John Steinbeck’s most sublime character creations: the intellectual, compassionate Asian-American servant Lee, who is absolutely central to the book. One wonders if there was some racism in that decision — and in the casting of such movies as 1993’s The House of the Spirits that has so many non-Hispanic performers playing the crucial Hispanic roles in Isabel Allende’s novel.

Speaking of Steinbeck, the 1940 film The Grapes of Wrath starring Henry Fonda is mostly superb, but wrongly concludes in a more upbeat way than the novel. The 1949 movie A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with Bing Crosby loses a lot by being significantly sunnier than Mark Twain’s novel, much of which takes a dim view of humanity and warfare. Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural is grim and riveting, while the 1984 film version starring Robert Redford is unfortunately more of a gauzy, feel-good baseball tale with a happy ending that’s not in the book and doesn’t fit the story.

The 2002 movie treatment of The Count of Monte Cristo is serviceable while not viscerally capturing the magnificence of Alexandre Dumas’ page-turning revenge novel. But an obviously ill Richard Harris (who would die later that year) is brilliant as Edmond Dantes’ fellow prisoner Abbe Faria.

Harris is also Dumbledore in the first two of the eight Harry Potter films — a cinematic franchise of sustained excellence that features a who’s who of famous British thespians in memorable supporting roles. Yet a portion of the charm in J.K. Rowling’s novels isn’t quite there. Same with The Lord of the Rings movies — impressive and very exciting, but missing some of the intimacy and humor that’s almost as much a part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy as the epic stuff. Still, the Rings films and especially the Potter productions are pretty terrific.

The 1943 Jane Eyre film with Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as Edward Rochester is quite good, but a big problem is the presence of…Fontaine and Welles. Both do admirable acting jobs, but are too good-looking for their roles. The soul-mate relationship Charlotte Bronte created was mostly based on an emotional and intellectual connection between plain Jane and not very handsome Rochester.

Yikes — I haven’t mentioned any Stephen King movies!

I’ll conclude by saying I just read Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, a fascinating 2012 novel set in North Korea that takes an unsparingly look at that harsh country. Given the hacking of Sony due to The Interview movie, I doubt Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book will soon be filmed…

What are some of your favorite movies based on literary works? And what are some lit-inspired films that disappointed you — and why?

(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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

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, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and 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.

Big Gap in Ages on Many Pages

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It’s December, so writing a blog post about literature’s May-December romances seems appropriate. But please don’t wait until May to read this!

Relationships between people who are 15, 30, or even 50 years apart in age crop up a number of times in fiction, as they do in real life. Men are often the older party in our sexist society, but sometimes the roles are reversed.

I personally prefer couples to be roughly the same age (my wife and I are three years apart). They’re more likely to have similar maturity levels, and share cultural and sociopolitical touchstones. Plus there’s a better chance that the ravages of age will take their toll at roughly the same time. It’s more fun acting out The Three Musketeers if you both have canes to use as swords!

But literature’s May-December couples (or May-August couples) can certainly be compelling from a dramatic standpoint. Will a relationship with a large age gap last? Does the different chronological prism of each lover make for a relationship that’s less compatible or more interesting? Does the younger person want financial security? A mentor? A surrogate “parent”? Does the older person want sex? To relive his or her youth? Have power over another? Have someone to take care of them in old age? If the older person is male, does he want another biological child or his first biological child? What do the couples’ parents and friends think of the wide life-span range? Questions, questions. Answers will be provided next May (just kidding).

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the stellar Stieg Larsson novel I also mentioned last week, has a “twofer” in this area: 42-year-old Mikael Blomkvist sleeps a number of times with a woman who’s 56 before doing the same with one who’s 24. The women — I’m omitting their names to avoid spoilers — initiate the “affairs” in each case. (Does the dragon on that tattoo also have a May-December relationship? I’ll check The New York Times‘ “Vows” column and get back to you.)

But as I mentioned earlier, men are older in the majority of age-mismatched couples. For instance, Jane Eyre is 18 and Edward Rochester in his latter 30s when the two meet. But Jane’s hard-won, exceptional maturity makes that gap seem significantly less in Charlotte Bronte’s novel.

Another Edward, the Rev. Casaubon, is also much older than his wife in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Dorothea Brooke is a smart woman who eventually becomes as clear-eyed about life as Jane Eyre is, but her combination of idealism and youthful naivete when meeting Edward cause her to misread what Casaubon is really like (awful).

Also negatively matched are Isabel Archer and her two-decades-older husband in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. There are other reasons besides age for why that marriage doesn’t work, but it’s germane that the husband has lived long enough to have a secret history plus lots of “practice” being controlling and manipulative.

Another reverend wed to a much younger woman is John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, but the match is a fairly positive one despite his ill health. The marriage gave John (whose first wife died giving birth to a daughter who also died) two second chances because he also has a young son with Lila.

Then there are very queasy age gaps, such as the one in Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita between the 12-year-old title character and Humbert Humbert — who’s in his late 30s when the pair’s sexual involvement happens.

There are also unreal gaps, as with Cormac O’Connor being roughly 275 years old when in a serious relationship with a normal-aged women near the end of Pete Hamill’s Forever. Cormac can live indefinitely (and still look young) as long as he doesn’t leave Manhattan — meaning gentrification is an obvious threat. 🙂

As I said earlier, older woman-younger man couples are not seen as frequently, but they do exist in literature as well as real life.

Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back tells the story of a forty-something stockbroker and single mother who, while on an island vacation, falls for a man half her age.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s semi-autobiographical Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter features an 18-year-old named Mario falling in love with 32-year-old divorcee Julia. She is indeed his aunt, but they’re not related by blood.

Colette’s Cheri focuses on the affair between the novel’s title character and Lea, who’s 24 years older than him. The author herself had a (bad) first marriage to a man 14 years her senior and a (good) third marriage to a man 16 years her junior.

Harold and Maude, featuring a relationship between a young man and 79-year-old woman, is best known as a cult-favorite movie but was also turned into a novel by Colin Higgins.

And there’s a sweet section of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine novel in which a young man and a woman over 90 have a series of deep conversations that are essentially a verbal love affair.

Who are some of the most memorable fictional couples (married or not) with wide age gaps? (Straight or gay relationships welcome!)

(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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

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, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and 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.

Today’s Forecast: You’re About to Read a Post Discussing Weather in Literature

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Two years ago, as autumn was coming to an end, I wrote a column about winter scenes in literature. That was back when I blogged about books for The Huffington Post or The Huffington Kellogg’s or whatever that site is called when you visit it while eating breakfast cereal.

As winter approaches again, I thought I would write another weather-related literature piece, only this time expand it to all four seasons in order to not repeat myself. Myself, myself, myself. Okay, I just repeated “myself.”

Anyway, weather can add to a fictional work’s drama, be a plot device, test the courage or cowardice of characters, reflect their moods, serve as symbols or omens of what is happening or will happen in a story, or even get a book or your Kindle device soaking wet. That wetness, of course, symbolizes the need to hold your water glass more tightly while reading.

I’m finally reading Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and weather is an element in that fabulous first installment of the “Millennium” trilogy featuring the impressive computer hacker/”punk prodigy” Lisbeth Salander. In the novel, Stockholm-based financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist loses a libel case after being set up when doing a story about a nasty industrialist, and then moves to a small town after being offered an unexpected one-year assignment. Blomkvist is a bit bitter about his legal comeuppance, and the bitter cold of the small town sort of symbolizes that. To misquote Freud, sometimes an icicle is more than an icicle.

Crime and Punishment‘s impoverished Raskolnikov, who lives in a bare-bones room in St. Petersburg, often shivers from that Russian city’s frigid weather. But his shivering is also a manifestation of exhaustion, confusion, pangs of conscience, and fear of being caught/desire to be caught for the murders he committed. Why did Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s protagonist kill? It wasn’t just…in cold blood.

There’s a mix of temperatures in J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Desert, as exemplified by this line: “The wind blew relentlessly, the desert wind, hot in the daytime, cold at night.” The intense heat creates a mesmerizing, lethargic, almost hopeless mood in the novel — and the temperature extremes echo Desert‘s counterpoints: its juxtaposition between plot lines in the distant and more recent past, and the contrast between protagonist Lalla’s life in Morocco and France. One more juxtaposition: The hot-titled Desert helped Le Clezio win a Nobel Prize he accepted in chilly Stockholm (where he didn’t meet Mikael Blomkvist. 🙂 ).

Heat is also a palpable presence in Geraldine Brooks’ March, in which the father of Jo March from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women leaves New England to be a minister for Union troops on the southern front lines of the Civil War. The much warmer climate and the fever March suffers when he becomes desperately ill make heat a literal and figurative representation of his misery. Say it ain’t so, Jo. 😦

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the heat at one point is described as “unbearable” — which could also describe the horrors and tribulations that novel’s African-American characters have to face before and after the aforementioned Civil War. That was long before the U.S. became a post-racial society…um…the U.S. never really became a post-racial society — as the unindicted police killing of Eric Garner illustrates.

The drenching precipitation toward the end of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is yet another “when it rains it pours” moment for a determined but beleaguered Joad family that can’t catch a break. The epic flood that concludes George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is the only way incompatible siblings Maggie and Tom Tulliver can (tragically) reconcile (due to Maggie’s heroic efforts). The dramatic storm in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre occurs just after the two protagonists declare their love — and doesn’t bode well when a tree is split by a lightning bolt. From Lowood to lowered wood. 😦

In L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the tornado is a major plot enabler that sends Dorothy on a course to the Land of Oz. “A course of a different color” in the famous film version of Baum’s book.

Climate change, which of course includes weather change, devastatingly affects the migratory patterns of monarch butterflies in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, which is not about the way stressed airline passengers act.

On a more positive note, David Lodge’s Paradise News is about a British man traveling from crummy-weather England to gorgeous-weather Hawaii, where his life improves as much as the climate. Aloha to loneliness and all that.

And last but not least, in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Anne’s deep enjoyment of autumn and spring illustrates the enthusiastic nature of her personality and the gratitude she feels for being in a lovely rural area after life in a drab orphanage. But her new mother Marilla initially has a personality that’s rather…wintry.

What are some of your favorite fictional works in which weather is a significant factor?

(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. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

— 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, and various authors. The book also talks about the malpractice death of my first daughter, my remarriage, and life in New York City and 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.