death-in-venice

More of the Morose

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Last week, I wrote about some of literature’s comedic or part-comedic novels. This week, I’ll flip that to discuss some of the saddest novels. Given that I covered this topic in a post eight years ago, I’ll focus on novels I’ve read since then — whether those books were published before or after 2018.

Of course, sad novels are not always 100% bleak; they perhaps contain some happier moments and/or semi-optimistic endings. But they’re downbeat overall.

Kristin Hannah’s excellent fiction can certainly leave a reader shaken. For instance, her 1970s-set novel The Great Alone (2018) is a depressing look at a Vietnam War veteran living in the Alaskan wilderness and how his post-traumatic stress wreaks havoc on himself, his wife, and their teen daughter.

Elin Hilderbrand’s also-excellent fiction is considered somewhat “lighter” than Hannah’s, but she does often wrestle with major personal and societal issues. One of Hilderbrand’s more melancholy novels is 28 Summers (2020), about a cancer-stricken woman who had a longtime one-weekend-a-year affair with her soulmate while she and him lived separate family lives the rest of the time. A superb book amid the sorrow.

In-between the two above novels arrived Colson Whitehead’s partly 1960s-set The Nickel Boys (2019), a heartbreaking look at abuse in a Florida reform school and at racism in general. Whitehead’s earlier The Underground Railroad (2016) — which unfolds in 19th-century slavery times — is another very good novel that will leave readers morose. Both Whitehead books won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Barbara Kingsolver’s later Pulitzer winner Demon Copperhead isn’t all dispiriting, but the scourge of opioid addiction and the poverty depicted in the 2022 novel leave readers dejected even as they’re impressed with the author’s modern reimagining of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.

Moving to some older novels I’ve read since 2018, we have Michael Crichton’s 1990 sci-fi thriller Jurassic Park in which the hubris of using DNA to recreate living dinosaurs in the 20th century results in lots of destruction by those out-of-their-element dinos.

Twenty-five years earlier, there was John Edward Williams’ 1965 Stoner novel about a farm-raised boy who becomes an English professor but lives a personal life marked by an unhappy marriage and other disappointments. Again, a really good novel amid the sorrow.

Another 1965 release was James Leo Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy (better known for the 1969 movie adaptation) about a naive Texan’s odyssey in New York City and the discouraging experiences of he and his down-and-out, ill-fated friend.

In 1957 came Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, about Australians waiting to die from a deadly wave of nuclear war-caused radiation heading their way. Almost any apocalyptic/dystopian novel would be eligible for this post.

Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) is exquisitely written and set in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, but the plot is full of unrequited obsession — and then comes the cholera outbreak.

In 1833, Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin was published after appearing in serial form between 1825 and 1832. A depressingly brilliant work filled with boredom, arrogance, selfishness, an ill-fated duel, a missed romantic opportunity, and more.

Among the sad novels I mentioned in my 2018 post were Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog (1999), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), Erich Maria Remarque’s Spark of Life (1952), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), and Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819).

Your thoughts on this post, and examples of sad novels you’ve read?

Misty the cat says: “I was gonna give Dave this tree for his birthday but it’s stuck in the ground.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a VERY close budget referendum and a not-close but controversial development decision — is here.

Self-Therapy By Book

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Thomas Mann (Picture Alliance/Ullstein Bild)

Sometimes, novels are semi-autobiographical confessionals and/or expressions of authors’ repressed thoughts and/or a way for them to “work out issues” and/or a way of reckoning with their past and/or an exercise in wish-fulfillment, etc. Sort of self-therapy by book.

I thought about this when recently reading Thomas Mann’s novellas Tonio Kroger (1903) and especially Death in Venice (1912), and seeing that there was a whole lot of male longing for other males by the protagonists. Sure enough, a little online exploring showed that Mann — the father of six with wife Katia — was sexually attracted to men, though there’s no conclusive evidence he acted on that during a more homophobic time. But he sure made his feelings known in some of his writing, as when middle-aged Death in Venice protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach (a famous author…hmm) becomes obsessed with a teen boy he finds very good-looking.

Several years later, in 1918, Willa Cather wrote perhaps her best novel: My Antonia. In it, male protagonist Jim Burden holds Antonia in such high regard that he might well be a stand-in for Cather, who was probably gay. Meaning she could have narrator Jim (i.e. Willa) express some feelings the author might have found more difficult to express if that character were a woman.

While sexual orientation isn’t a subtext (as far as I know) in Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic 1826 novel The Last Man, the author did base the male protagonist Lionel Verney on herself despite the different gender and modeled two other characters — Adrian and Lord Raymond — on her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their late friend Lord Byron, respectively. So, Mary was kind of remembering and analyzing her relationships/interactions with the two famous poets.

Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853) also has a semi-autobiographical element: characters Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel are partly based on Charlotte and the real-life Constantin Heger, who Charlotte fell in love with (?) while enrolled in the Belgian boarding school run by Heger and his wife Zoe. And the downbeat tone of some of Villette was shaped to a degree by the 1848 and 1849 deaths-before-their-time of Charlotte’s younger novelist sisters Emily and Anne.

The Brontes’ contemporary Charles Dickens used a number of his novels to indirectly work through the childhood trauma that would help shape his social conscience. The future author’s father was sent to a debtors’ prison, and 12-year-old Charles had to leave school to work in a miserable factory to help support his family. Echoes of that can be found in the impoverished young characters Dickens created in David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist (1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and other works.

Amid the compulsive plot of his 1940 novel Native Son, Richard Wright wrestled with such matters as racism (which he experienced plenty of as a Black person) and his complicated feelings about the Communist Party USA (which he joined but later broke from).

Some authors who served in the military and were perhaps wounded in action indirectly worked through that trauma in war novels they would later write. Erich Maria Remarque — in books such as 1929’s All Quiet on the Western Front — is one prominent example of that.

Also, authors’ unrequited “crushes” in real life can provide rather intense fodder for novels, as was the case with Mann in his aforementioned Death in Venice and with Goethe in his The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Thoughts about and examples of this topic?

Misty the cat says: “Halley’s Comet won’t be back until 2061, so you may not see it in this video.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — a time-warped look at a long-closed movie theater that might open again — is here.