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.

Cops in Canons: a Literature Post Lamenting Police Violence

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Amid the fury I felt when white police officers weren’t indicted for killing unarmed black men in New York City and Ferguson, Mo., I thought about scenes of law-enforcement violence in various novels. And yes, as in real life, those fictional “public safety” people rarely paid any legal price for their destructive acts.

Heck, even irrefutable proof of police aggression often doesn’t lead to trials — whether in literature or the actual world. As we all know, a grand jury last week decided not to indict NYC cop Daniel Pantaleo despite his fatal, unnecessary chokehold on Eric Garner being captured on video. In contrast, there was reportedly some conflicting testimony about why Ferguson cop Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in a not-filmed encounter, but the grand jury should have sent that case to trial, too.

In this post, I’ll discuss several fictional scenes of police violence, and also mention a few positive depictions of cops in the canons of various authors. My advance apologies for including some spoilers; please stop reading if you don’t want to see them. 🙂 If you do stop here, here’s my question of the week: Who are some of the law-enforcement characters, bad or good, you remember most in literature? (Detectives included!)

James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain contains a sickening flashback moment when white police officers arrest and brutally beat innocent black man Richard (boyfriend of Elizabeth, who’s pregnant at the time with the novel’s protagonist, John). A devastated Richard soon commits suicide.

Another innocent black man, Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, barely escapes being lynched while in jail (interesting that no police were there to protect him). Then, after he’s convicted by an all-white jury despite his innocence, Robinson dies in a hail of bullets shot by white prison guards who could have stopped his despairing escape attempt in a less lethal way.

A white man is the victim of law-enforcement violence in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath when compassionate ex-preacher Jim Casy is murdered for organizing migrant workers. (Ever notice that the police, in addition to targeting black people more than white people and the poor more than the rich, almost always crack down harder on liberals than conservatives? Look at the way the police forcibly dealt with the unarmed, economic-inequality-decrying Occupy movement while allowing Tea Party members to tote guns at public events denouncing the insuring of more Americans via “Obamacare.” Also, imagine what might have happened to Cliven Bundy this year if he had been a left-winger; the right-wing Nevada cattle rancher/tax cheat and his armed supporters were treated rather gently by the federal officers they confronted.)

Moving to novels that take place at least partly outside the U.S., we find violent Mexican police in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and violent Dominican Republic police in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Arundhati Roy’s India-set The God of Small Things includes the kindly “Untouchable” character Velutha who’s savagely beaten by police officers for alleged crimes of which he’s not guilty — and then left to die a slow, agonizing death. When the officers learn of Velutha’s innocence, they participate in something the police often do well — a cover-up.

Emile Zola’s Germinal features French coal miners who toil in horrible conditions that impel them to stage a strike later crushed by the police and army. There was also the 1928 “Banana Massacre,” fictionally recounted in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, that saw hundreds of striking workers at the American-owned United Fruit company murdered by Colombian troops playing a “law enforcement” role.

Dystopian novels, of course, are frequently set in totalitarian societies that use secret police and other security thugs to terrorize citizens with the aim of keeping them cowed. That’s the case with books such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy.

Law-enforcement people do come off better in some novels. To name a few examples, there’s decent Sheriff Tate in To Kill a Mockingbird, cop-with-a-conscience Arevalo (who balks at killing a black man) in one of the radio serials within Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, police officers who find Novalee’s kidnapped daughter Americus in Billie Letts’ Where the Heart Is, and friendly and competent cop Cynthia Cooper in Rita Mae Brown’s mystery Wish You Were Here. Plus all those justice-seeking sleuths in detective fiction!

The above paragraph illustrates that many police officers do what they’re supposed to do: try to protect all citizens, regardless of color. Unfortunately, a number of officers — in fiction and real life — have different policing standards for black people than white people.

This of course doesn’t just apply to killings. For instance, police disproportionately arrest African-Americans on drug charges despite statistics showing that whites use drugs at roughly the same rate. And don’t get me started on all the white-collar crimes committed by bankers, oil-company execs, and other wealthy Caucasian bigwigs who never see the inside of a jail.

(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 Who Met Cute and Not So Cute

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Those of us who love literature also love to hear about encounters between literary greats — whether those encounters were short or long or in-between.

Author interactions can be mutually beneficial, stir competition, result in enmity, develop into lifelong friendships, be memorable, be awkward, be inconsequential, or various other things.

Let’s start with two situations involving Mark Twain: He was in the audience when Charles Dickens did an 1868 reading in New York City, and he later lived next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe for 18 years in Hartford, Conn.

Until an estrangement, Dickens was good friends with novelist Wilkie Collins — who collaborated on stories with Dickens, wrote for the older author’s publications, and participated in Dickens’ amateur theatricals. Collins’ brother even married one of Dickens’ daughters.

Like Dickens, Henry James was in contact with various iconic authors. He and Edith Wharton shared a close friendship, and, as a young man, the American-born James made sure to visit George Eliot — the English novelist he greatly admired. Meanwhile, Eliot and the aforementioned Stowe corresponded by mail many times across the Atlantic.

Another encounter involved Charlotte Bronte, a William Thackeray fan who visited the Vanity Fair author in London after Jane Eyre made her famous. Bronte, so intelligent and passionate in her writings, was less adept socially; Thackeray’s daughter Anne reported that Charlotte’s shyness and quietness made the evening a dud.

Two other iconic 19th-century authors, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, were friends for a while — with the former dedicating Moby-Dick to the latter. Earlier in the 1800s, American writers James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving separately met Sir Walter Scott in Europe — with Irving and Scott developing a years-long friendship.

Over in France, Gustave Flaubert of Madame Bovary fame knew Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Russian author Ivan Turgenev, and other novelists.

Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy met in Russia, and Boris Pasternak as a kid knew Tolstoy because the father of the future Doctor Zhivago author illustrated some of Tolstoy’s books.

Moving back to English authors, Aldous Huxley briefly taught George Orwell (then Eric Blair) at Eton — an interaction between two men who would write literature’s two most famous dystopian novels: Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Also, it’s well known that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were close pals for many years.

Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were also pals — collaborating on a play called Mule Bone that wasn’t staged in their lifetimes because they had a falling out.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were friends, too, and The Great Gatsby may have helped inspire Hemingway to write a famous novel of his own: The Sun Also Rises. But their relationship mostly cooled later on.

Hemingway and James Joyce were acquainted with each other, and the former was a big fan of the latter’s work.

James Baldwin and Toni Morrison were friends, starting when Morrison worked as a book editor — and she would write a memorable New York Times eulogy to Baldwin after his 1987 death. Earlier, Baldwin and Richard Wright also had a good relationship until Baldwin, in a published essay, criticized some aspects of Wright’s Native Son.

Speaking of criticizing a fellow writer, Mary McCarthy during a 1980 TV appearance slammed Lillian Hellman (“every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the'”) — and Hellman retaliated by filing a massive lawsuit. The two authors had met here and there before 1980.

On a more positive note, Carson McCullers and Isak Dinesen were mutual admirers — which inspired McCullers to host a 1959 luncheon for Dinesen that included guests Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe (who had a strong interest in literature).

Harper Lee and Truman Capote were childhood pals in Alabama, with the Dill character in To Kill a Mockingbird partly based on Capote and Lee helping Capote research In Cold Blood. Their friendship soured after Capote didn’t give Lee enough credit for that research assistance.

Then there are authors who of course know/knew each other from being related by blood or marriage. They include — to name just a few — the Bronte sisters, the sisters A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble, father and son Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis, father and son Andre Dubus II and Andre Dubus III, spouses Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and their daughter Mary Shelley (whose husband was poet Percy Bysshe Shelley), and Stephen King and Tabitha King and their author sons Owen King and Joe Hill. Also, Daphne du Maurier was the granddaughter of George du Maurier (whose Trilby novel gave the world the term “Svengali”), but she was born 11 years after George died.

Who are other past or present authors related by blood or marriage? Other unrelated authors who encountered each other in some way? Any information or anecdotes you’d like to offer about those encounters — or about author encounters I mentioned in my post?

(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.

Symbols in Literature’s Orchestra

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A brief note before this week’s column begins: Since I started “Dave Astor on Literature” four months ago (on July 14), the blog has received 10,303 page views and 3,319 comments. Thank you, everyone!

Those of you who’ve seen the iconic Citizen Kane movie know how important a symbolic object can be to a story. The same can be said for novels.

A symbolic object — or something like a recurring theme, a repeated word or phrase, etc. — can make a novel more interesting and evocative, and impress readers with the author’s artistry.

I thought about this last week while reading Anne Lamott’s Blue Shoe, in which a footwear knickknack among her late father’s possessions helps stir Mattie Ryder to learn more about him. There’s even a line in the novel about “waiting for the other shoe to drop” — which refers to discovering the father’s sordid history and also to what might happen to Mattie, a divorced woman dealing with two stressed kids, her abrasive/physically declining mother, and a friendship with an unhappily married guy she grows to love.

The title of Morag Joss’ psychological thriller Half-Broken Things also has a double-edged meaning — describing inanimate objects as well as the emotionally damaged humans secretly living in a mansion that’s not theirs (the owner is away).

Two things are referenced, too, in The Lacuna‘s title: gaps (lacunae) in the telling of the novel’s story and an actual watery gap that’s crucial to the plot. Barbara Kingsolver’s book is about a gay man who works for Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera before carving out a fiction-writing career and then falling victim to Joe McCarthy — that symbol of right-wing political intolerance.

Speaking of water, some novels contain recurring images of that ubiquitous liquid. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, for instance, protagonist Edna Pontellier is at first fearful of water, then grows to love it, and then…well, I won’t give the ending away. In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, there are eerie parallels between a canal scene (involving the kindly Daniel Deronda and the despairing Mirah Lapidoth) and a later boat scene (involving the beleaguered Gwendolen Harleth and her abusive husband Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt).

Moving to another form of transportation, a car plays an outsized role in Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance — as a symbol of freedom, or perhaps a symbol of being boxed in. Jim Nashe drives all over the country in that car, loses it in a gambling situation, and then gets to ride it one more time, only to…

Speaking of freedom, that word is used a number of times — sincerely and ironically — in the novel Freedom. Jonathan Franzen’s book looks at that particular “F word” from all kinds of angles and via a number of 21st-century-American characters.

Another novel with one word that helps tie things together is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Solitude” not only appears in the title but is repeated many times in the book, and refers to the isolated town of Macondo as well as the situations of various characters.

Or a novel can contain a repeated phrase rather than just one word — as with the fatalistic “So it goes” refrain that famously appears in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Sometimes symbolism comes from the initials of character names. Examples include Jim Casy, the Jesus Christ figure in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; Martin Eden, the semi-autobiographical “me” in Jack London’s Martin Eden; and Undine Spragg, who embodies crass U.S. materialism in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.

A name symbolizing the better side of America is possessed by Americus, the beloved young daughter of Novalee Nation in Billie Letts’ Where the Heart Is (a heartwarming book I also read last week). Novalee finds friendship and an extended “family” in Oklahoma after being abandoned, while pregnant with Americus, by her boyfriend during a car trip from Tennessee to California.

Then there’s the “Gogol” first name that The Namesake‘s Indian-American son is stuck with — a moniker that evokes the absurdity of life as well as the often-absurdist Russian author Nikolai Gogol admired by the father in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel.

Or how about an animal symbolizing a person, as is the case with experimented-on Algernon the mouse being the critter counterpart to experimented-on Charlie the mentally challenged man in Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon.

In literary works, what are your favorite symbolic objects, recurring themes, repeated words or phrases, and other things of that nature?

(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.

All’s Well That Ends Well — Except When It Doesn’t

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What makes a good ending to a novel? What makes a not so good ending? And when I say “ending” I mean a book’s last few chapters, or last chapter, or last page, or last paragraph, or even last line.

A novel’s conclusion is often what we remember most, so it’s obviously crucial to a work of fiction. If the ending isn’t satisfying and true to the novel, an excellent book becomes, well, almost excellent.

I’ll discuss this topic by citing specific novels and why their conclusions are or aren’t great — starting with those that end in a satisfying way. And I’ll try to avoid spoilers!

When one thinks of fine fiction finales, the first novel that often comes to mind is The Great Gatsby and its immortal last line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” You don’t need me to explain why F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentence works — it’s evocative, it says a lot about the human condition, and it’s written like a dream.

Among many other memorable last lines are “He loved Big Brother” (George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man), and of course “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known” (Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities).

Moving away from last lines per se, another novel with a very satisfying conclusion is To Kill a Mockingbird. At first glance, it would seem that the 1960 book should end with the dramatic trial that features Atticus Finch trying against all odds to get innocent black man Tom Robinson acquitted by a racist white jury. But a lot happens after that — some of it hopeful and of a cosmic-justice nature. Perhaps Harper Lee was trying to show that change, while often glacially slow, was coming in the United States.

Staying in the American South, the final chapters of John Kennedy Toole’s New Orleans-set A Confederacy of Dunces (which I read for the first time last week) are also satisfying in the way they depict major life changes happening to the various eccentric characters — who by then have pretty much morphed into individuals rather than hilarious stereotypes.

For The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck knew exactly what his closing scene would be before writing the novel that led up to it. Rose of Sharon’s encounter with a starving man mixes heartbreak and humanity in an astonishing way.

Moby-Dick‘s intense ending works superbly because of Herman Melville’s mighty prose and the foreshadowing in the novel that seems to augur nothing but that ending.

The same can be said for Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which the ultimate fate of the town of Macondo seems as inevitable as the wind.

Jane Eyre has a conclusion that’s both tragic and romantic, and one can think of almost no other way Charlotte Bronte could have resolved the dilemmas of her two main protagonists while making them equal to each other and trusting of each other.

Henry James ends The American with the burning of a document and the reaction of the person who prematurely tossed it into the fireplace. A priceless moment.

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (which I reread this month) and Jack London’s Martin Eden have similar conclusions that are shocking yet make total sense in the context of how the troubled protagonists are feeling in those novels.

There are also novels that tell disparate stories that don’t “come together” until the finish. When the meshing is done skillfully — as in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer — there’s a “wow” factor.

L.M. Montgomery’s final Anne of Green Gables chapters mix death, self-sacrifice inspired by gratitude, and the blossoming of a relationship in a fashion that’s not only very moving but sets the stage for the sequels to come. Making a novel sequel-ready is one way to create an effective ending.

Speaking of multiple-book properties, the last installment of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series nears its conclusion with the riveting Battle of Hogwarts and final Harry/Voldemort standoff, but is followed by a clunky epilogue about the main characters’ future lives.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy almost ends with epic warfare and the ultra-dramatic scene at Mount Doom, but stretches the story a bit too long as Frodo and others return to “civilian” life.

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is exquisite until the late appearance of Tom Sawyer turns things farcical when a more serious approach is warranted.

Mentioning Henry James again, The Europeans is an absorbing novel that abruptly ends with nearly everything summed up in too neat a bow.

Then there are mostly sunny books with sad conclusions that don’t seem right, and mostly sad books with sunny conclusions that also don’t seem right. The House of the Seven Gables has one of those scenarios (I’m trying to avoid a spoiler here) that reportedly happened when Nathaniel Hawthorne was persuaded to change the ending.

Of course, some novels have happy endings that are logical and organic to the story — and what’s not to like about that? But many of the best novels are too true to the troubled nature of human existence to offer happy-ending wish fulfillment. We may not like those depressing finales, but they often feel realistic and not insulting to our intelligence.

What are your favorite novels with conclusions that are satisfying or not so satisfying? What makes those endings work or not work? And do you agree or disagree with my takes on the novel finales I discussed?

(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 in the middle of 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.