Some Fiction Contains ‘The Shape of Things to Come’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A link to a recent “Montclairvoyant” column.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are the fictional teachers you remember most?

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

Mismatches Aren’t Always ‘Mismatchy’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

When Prose Is VERY Praiseworthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

Fiction’s Best Moms and Dads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

An Appreciation of Social Justice Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are some of your favorite novels with sociopolitical elements?

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

—

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

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

A Look at Loners in Literature

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One of literature’s major archetypes is the loner — a character who, happily or not, often goes the solo route.

Some loners are rather boring, which can happen when a person has minimal social interaction. But other loners are interesting and even fascinating. Why do they do things “their way”? What inner resources keep them functioning? How do things go when they encounter people? If they’re unlikable, we’re rather glad they don’t have a wider circle of friends and family. If they’re likable, they draw our sympathy.

Heck, a good number of real-life loners are drawn to literature — reading is usually a by-yourself thing — so they relate to their fictional counterparts.

Some people are of course loners by nature or choice, while others might be more gregarious types who find themselves out of the social loop because of betrayal, tragedy, or other circumstances.

An example from the nature/choice category is the title character in Toni Morrison’s Sula. She does for a time have close friend Nel, but mostly “marches to a different drummer” due to her intelligence, wanderlust, unconventionality, lack of empathy, and refusal to be confined to a racial/gender box during a more biased era.

From Sula to Silas: The introverted star of George Eliot’s Silas Marner has loner leanings, too, but is somewhat “of the world” until a betrayal by a close friend sends him into an emotional tailspin and hermit-like existence. Then…

Another kind of major disappointment (being jilted by her fiance) leads Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations to mostly withdraw from life.

Years of abuse, mistreatment by male authority figures, and more make the brilliant Lisbeth Salander a hostile loner in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and the two other novels in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

And the biggest blow of all — death — makes Gauri almost incapable of love as she sheds her two closest relationships in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. Gauri actually deals with two deaths: the murder of someone very close to her, and a different man’s murder she peripherally helped make happen.

The self-sufficient Jane Eyre of Charlotte Bronte’s novel is like Silas Marner in that she has social tendencies yet fate has conspired to often keep her solo. Jane grows up with a family that doesn’t love her, sees her best friend die, and gets engaged to a man with a devastating secret.

In current mass-audience literature, a quintessential loner is Jack Reacher of Lee Child’s adventure series. He’s unmarried, has no home, drifts around the country meting out vigilante justice to bad guys, and then, before getting very close to anyone, hitches a ride or takes a bus elsewhere. In Never Go Back, he does get into a romantic relationship, but…

Some of Reacher’s roaming is in the West (South Dakota, Nebraska, etc.) — which reminds me that the “western novel” is full of loner types. Among the countless examples are Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn of Charles Portis’ True Grit, Billy Parham of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, and early frontier protagonist Natty Bumppo of James Fenimore Cooper’s five “Leatherstocking” novels. Natty is only out west (Kansas) in The Prairie, but the woodsy New York milieu of the other four novels was wilderness in the 1700s.

Cornelius Suttree of McCarthy’s Suttree — a novel set in the South rather than the West — is another memorable loner. Like many of his type, he does have friends and a (temporary) romance even while going solo much of the time.

But some characters are just loners through and through, like the enigmatic Bartleby of Herman Melville’s famous short story “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

Certain circumstances almost guarantee significant solitude. For instance, some characters who would like to be liked are meanly ostracized (or they self-ostracize) because of their looks or mental situation. Examples include the overweight “nerd” who stars in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and the intellectually challenged Charlie Gordon in Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon and Boo Radley in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Also, between-performance solitude can be the lot of traveling entertainers — such as music-hall dancer Renee Nere of Colette’s The Vagabond and Sinclair Lewis’ corrupt preacher Elmer Gantry, who’s a performer in a way.

Loneliness is of course also felt by jailed characters, such as Edmond Dantes during his Chateau d’If imprisonment in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo — though Edmond does eventually find a friend/mentor during his solitary confinement.

Traumatic battle experiences can also push survivors into the loner camp, as with World War I veteran Larry Darrell as he searches for some transcendent meaning to life in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

And in apocalyptic novels where much of the human race is wiped out, some characters obviously have to become loners — whether it be “The Snowman” protagonist in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake or Lionel Verney in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.

In a related matter, there are also reclusive writers such as Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger, and the aforementioned Harper Lee, but that’s another story…

Who are your favorite fictional characters of the loner persuasion?

(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.

They Pass the Bar of Reader Interest

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Lawyers in literature. They file suits. They wear suits. They’re good. They’re bad. They’re honest. They’re crooked. They seek justice. They seek money. They appear in this blog post. They will not be paid for doing so.

But attorneys often give “zing” to fiction. We love them if they fight for social justice, and dislike them if they’re highly paid legal shills for big corporations. Plus many take part in courtroom scenes, which have plenty of dramatic potential.

Perhaps the most famous fictional attorney of them all is To Kill a Mockingbird‘s Atticus Finch — smart, compassionate, courageous, realistic, low-key. He was said to have been based on author Harper Lee’s admirable lawyer dad.

In the 55 years since Lee’s novel was published — and particularly in the past quarter century — there has thankfully been a huge rise in the number of female attorneys in literature. A big reason for this, of course, is the huge rise in the number of real-live women becoming lawyers; statistics show that they now comprise 34% of the profession and 47% of law-school enrollment.

So it’s no surprise to meet two female attorneys — Helen Sullivan and Tracy Edmonds — in the first 46 pages of Lee Child’s Never Go Back, one of the novels starring the feminist-leaning scourge of evildoers Jack Reacher. Then there’s Annika Giannini, whose defense of Lisbeth Salander makes for riveting reading in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest; and Reggie Love, who emerges from an abusive marriage to practice law with brilliance and empathy in John Grisham’s The Client.

There are also unsavory attorneys, and few novels have more of them than Grisham’s The Firm. That book’s law office (well, it’s sort of a law office) has an all-male roster of corrupt legal guys — of whom some are viciously evil and others sold out for the money and because they feared for their safety. But Grisham provides one (flawed) legal hero — the new attorney, Mitch McDeere, who weighs a very risky FBI request to take down the firm in The Firm.

Other hard-to-like lawyers (greedy, nasty, corrupt, etc.) include Mr. Tulkinghorn in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Guillaumin in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Luzhin in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Daniel Palmer in Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor.

Also, many politicians in literature (and in real life) began their careers as attorneys, and we know how unadmirable many elected officials are.

Of course, there are male lawyers other than Atticus Finch who are very or somewhat ethical and impressive. They include the unprejudiced attorney Boris Max who defends Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son, fingerprint expert David Wilson in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, environmentalist Walter Berglund in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, the ultra-skilled Perry Mason in the Erle Stanley Gardner novels, and the Clarence Darrow-like Henry Drummond in the Inherit the Wind play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee.

In a related matter, there are a number of novelists who are/were lawyers — including the aforementioned Erle Stanley Gardner and John Grisham as well as Lisa Scottoline, Meg Gardiner, Scott Turow, Louis Auchincloss, Sir Walter Scott, Henry Fielding, and Goethe, among others.

Which fictional attorney characters have you found the most 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. 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.

Reverse Chronology in Fiction (Or Maybe This Headline Should Be at the End of This Post)

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The start comes before the finish, right? That’s what I hear, but some literary works don’t follow that timeline.

Back in 2013 (which reportedly preceded 2015), I wrote a Huffington Post piece about how some fiction is chronological while other fiction jumps around via flashbacks and such. Today, I’m going to take that a step further by discussing literature in which you know the fate of the protagonist from the start.

That removes much of the suspense and story development, doesn’t it? Well, in a way. But things can still be interesting — sometimes even more interesting — when the conclusion comes first. We’re more alert to foreshadowing as we continue to read, and we’re curious how the protagonist gets to the “place” we’ve already witnessed. Plus we want to know why things ended up the way they did.

I thought about that last week while reading Camille — the novel by the Alexandre Dumas who was the son of the more famous Alexandre Dumas. Camille (originally titled The Lady of the Camellias) features the “courtesan” Marguerite Gautier, who is dead at the start of the book. Then the emotionally powerful story unfolds about how she lived her short life.

Camille was adapted for the stage and screen — two places where Betrayal also found its home. Harold Pinter’s play begins at the end of an affair and then backtracks to the start of that liaison — a stunningly effective device that adds to the reading or watching experience.

There’s also Susan Vreeland’s novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which traces a painting — and the painting’s profound effect on various people’s lives — from the 20th century to the 17th century. The scrolling back in time adds to the mystery and poignancy.

Or how about Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome? It’s not strictly “reverse chronological,” but we soon know that the title character has become physically damaged and very unhappy. The rest of the riveting novel goes back in time to explain how that came about.

There are also introductory sections set years or even centuries after the events in the novel unfold. For instance, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House” essay that precedes his iconic The Scarlet Letter tells about finding — in the 19th century — a faded “A” that Hester Prynne wore in the 1600s. Also, Old Mortality first focuses on an 18th-century man re-engraving the tombstones of Covenanter martyrs before Sir Walter Scott starts telling the compelling 17th-century story of those deceased people who wanted to re-establish Presbyterianism in Scotland.

Many other novels, such as Margaret Atwood’s excellent Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, show middle-aged or old protagonists in the book’s present time and then flash back to those characters’ much younger years.

While this is not strictly on-topic, I also think of Graham Greene’s (very) short shocker of a story “Proof Positive.” Is Philip Weaver dead at the start of the tale? At the end of the tale? Or both? You can read it here.

What are your favorite works that start at the end? What are the pros and cons of literature with that kind of chronology?

Given that there might not be many examples of the above, you’re also welcome to name your favorite works that don’t necessarily begin with a concluding event but are non-linear (jumping back and forth through time via flashbacks or other narrative devices). Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five would be among countless examples.

(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.