literature

Apocalypse Now Is the Subject of a Blog Post

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In the mood for some human-race-almost-gets-wiped-out reading? Then apocalyptic novels are the books for you.

Some of those books are also dystopian novels, but a major difference is that things like disease and nuclear bombs can bring on the apocalypse while a dystopian society can come about via (harsh) political change. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Donald Trump owned the New Jersey Generals in…1984.

Why do some of us like apocalyptic novels despite those books being depressing as hell? Well, they’re intense, dramatic, and cautionary — as in here’s what we don’t want to happen in real life and let’s support ways to prevent it (by trying to eradicate contagious diseases, reduce various countries’ nuclear arsenals, etc.). And of course climate change is another existential threat that many countries (but few Republican leaders) take seriously.

Readers of apocalyptic lit also wonder how they would personally react to a decimated world — even as they’re fascinated with how fictional characters deal with that scenario.

Apocalypse is on my mind after reading Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, in which a 20th-century nuclear holocaust has the survivors living a rather primitive existence. Goods are bartered, decent food is scare, people travel in cars pulled by horses, and it takes months for a letter to get from New York to California. As they deal with those privations, the characters in Dick’s novel do what ultra-stressed people often do — become despondent,  behave recklessly, steal from each other, and occasionally act in inspiring ways.

It’s not clear what causes the already-happened apocalypse in The Road (Cormac McCarthy is more concerned with how his characters react to it), but the U.S. is in bad shape. The Road is also an example of how many apocalyptic — or post-apocalyptic — novels mostly focus on a small number of protagonists and a few secondary characters to bring readers into the story on a very personal level.

Novels with an apocalypse caused by disease or something else of a pandemic nature include Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Albert Camus’ The Plague, and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. (Shelley’s book is also quite fascinating in that its three main characters are thinly veiled versions of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and the author herself in male guise.)

I should also mention Stephen King’s The Stand, one of the longer end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it novels. The bleak, haunting conclusion of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is apocalyptic, too — or maybe more an Earth is dying of old age thing.

Of course, apocalyptic novels can make for eye-catching movies — as with The Road and I Am Legend. And there’s the famous “Time Enough at Last” Twilight Zone TV episode — adapted from a Marilyn Venable short story — about a man who’s rather pleased with the Earth’s devastation because he can finally read in peace. (Needless to say, that bibliophile ends up barely having enough time to peruse a blog post, much less a bunch of books.)

Speaking of short stories, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is also pretty darn human-race-is-in-big-trouble.

What are your favorite apocalyptic works?

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

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

Fiction’s Female Felons

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The vast majority of criminals are men. One statistic I found on “the Internets” says only 18% of the U.S. “correctional population” is female. Many men are just more lawless and violent, to state the obvious.

So when fictional women do something they might get arrested for, it can be…arresting. And startling, fascinating, etc. — heightening the drama many literature lovers crave.

Adding to the interest is that many female “villains” have nuanced, complex reasons for committing crimes. Maybe the power imbalance in a patriarchal world finally gets to them. Maybe the felony happens in a moment of intense anger. Maybe their victims fully or partly deserve it. Maybe some progression of circumstances makes the illegal action almost inevitable. You rarely see totally senseless violence done by women.

Anita Shreve’s absorbing novel The Weight of Water, which I read this month, features a double murder committed by a woman I won’t name to avoid a spoiler. One totally understands the fury that causes her to kill the first person, who had treated her badly. The killing that immediately follows — committed because that second victim was a witness about to run for help — was less easy to stomach.

The two homicides in Shreve’s book take place in the 1800s, as does the double murder in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. The Grace Marks character serves a long prison term for being an accomplice to that crime (her male cohort is hanged), but it’s ambiguous how much Grace was actually involved in the mayhem.

Another 20th-century book set partly in the 19th century is Louis Sachar’s young-adult novel Holes, in which white teacher Katherine falls in love with Sam, a kind black man subsequently murdered for the interracial relationship. Katherine becomes a vengeful outlaw, killing a number of men who deserve that fate.

Novels written in the 19th-century also have their share of women on the wrong side of the law; among those books are George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Wilkie Collins’ Armadale.

Hetty Sorrel of Eliot’s novel is a poor young woman seduced by the rich squire Arthur Donnithorne, who has no intention of marrying her. She becomes pregnant, and what happens to the baby might mean the gallows for Hetty.

The charismatic Lydia Gwilt of Armadale is a schemer and would-be killer, but also possesses some conscience and vulnerability.

Virtually no vulnerability or conscience in Annie Wilkes, the psychotic former nurse from Stephen King’s Misery who does unspeakable things to the author (Paul Sheldon) she traps in her home.

As with Alias Grace, there are questions in Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel about whether the title character is a criminal or not. Did Rachel help poison Philip’s late guardian Ambrose? Or is she innocent?

Then there’s the self-defense killing by Janie Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, but she is nonetheless charged with murder.

Also charged with homicide (of her married lover) is Laura Hawkins in The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.

And as Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison begins, detective novelist Harriet Vane is in jail for allegedly offing her former lover.

Do Crawford, Hawkins, and Vane get convicted or acquitted? I don’t think it’s a crime to say I’m not telling. 🙂

In the Jack Reacher novels, there are a small number of female “bad guys.” One book (I won’t name it for spoiler reasons) makes it seem like a man is the serial murderer of women when in fact the culprit ends up being a female (driven by bitterness toward her stepsister and a hankering for the family inheritance) who has slain the various women to confuse investigators. That Lee Child novel is similar to The Weight of Water in setting up a male as the probable suspect — which of course skillfully and subversively plays to our knowledge that men are more likely than women to commit crimes.

Who are some of your “favorite” female transgressors 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.)

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.

Protagonists With a Plethora of Abilities

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A number of fictional characters have two or more talents that readers see simultaneously or consecutively.

For instance, Adam Dalgliesh of P.D. James’ mysteries is both a detective and published poet. In the consecutive realm, Charles Strickland is first a stockbroker and then a struggling genius of a painter in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence.

Having more than one talent can obviously make a character more interesting, admirable, unpredictable, etc. — and can open up lots of dramatic possibilities. An example of that is the way Strickland coldly abandons his wife and children to pursue his art — trading a comfortable existence for a life of intense privation that involves starving for his fame as well as actually starving (almost).

Then there are the amateur detectives who do other things for their “day job” — as is the case with Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen running a small-town post office when she and her pets aren’t sleuthing in Rita Mae Brown’s mysteries. An often-seen personality “hook” for many fictional detectives is doing another thing well in addition to ferreting out the bad guys.

Other characters have a job they hate or at best tolerate, and then do something more fun in their spare time. Dave Raymond is a courier in Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones, but gets his real enjoyment playing guitar in a wedding band (when he’s not agonizing over which of two women is best for him).

In Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog, former Iranian colonel Massoud Behrani is working as a trash collector and convenience-store clerk in the U.S. when he buys a house as a first step to becoming a real-estate investor. Unfortunately, havoc ensues. Behrani is also an example of immigrants forced to take less prestigious jobs in a new country.

Chance, necessity, or societal events can cause people to put their different talents to use. In Fannie Flagg’s The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion, Fritzi Jurdabralinski is an expert car mechanic and stunt pilot who joins the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II.

The not-admirable Briony Tallis becomes a nurse during that war and later a novelist in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

Then there’s Renaissance man — actually Renaissance orc — Mr. Nutt in Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals. That intellectual character is a “candle dripper,” blacksmith, soccer coach…

Who are your favorite fictional characters with two or more talents and/or a diverse job history?

If you’d like, you could also name real people with multiple talents and/or jobs — such as Leonardo da Vinci (painter, inventor, architect, etc.), Paul Robeson (singer, actor, activist, etc.), and Hillary Clinton (lawyer, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, etc.). Actually, I prefer Bernie Sanders, but that’s another story. 🙂

Authors who had other jobs before, during, or after their writing careers? See this 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.)

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.

They’re Famous in Their Fictional Worlds

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Every fictional character is famous in a way — after all, they’re in a book! But then there are fictional characters who, within the context of that book, are actually famous — as in being a celebrity, being at the top of an important profession, being a notorious criminal, etc.

So I’m not necessarily talking about characters who are famous to readers. For instance, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is one of the most iconic protagonists in literary history, but she’s only known to a fairly small number of people in her fictional world and is thus not famous for the purposes of this blog post’s theme.

It’s interesting to see how authors depict the fictionally famous and how they show the pros and cons of prominence. In their works, writers might answer questions like: Is the fame sudden or the product of a long period of hard work? How much luck was involved? Is the fame fleeting or enduring? Is the high-profile person enjoying the fame or is s/he “lonely at the top”? Does fame change the celebrity, in a good or bad way? For instance, is s/he feeling proud, satisfied, financially secure, etc.? Or does fame bring negative consequences such as egomania, neglect of family, the break-up of a marriage, etc.?

As usual, I think of blog ideas while reading a book. In this case it was Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals — a comic novel, with plenty of heart, set in a fantasy university area populated by wizards, dwarfs, goblins, and other creatures. The seemingly ditzy kitchen worker Juliet is unexpectedly chosen to model dwarf clothes (despite not being a dwarf) and handles her overnight fame and wealth with more common sense than expected. Her kitchen boss Glenda becomes well known not only for her cooking but for having a more impressive mind than the university leaders she feeds. And the genial, overachieving orc Mr. Nutt becomes prominent for his amazing intellect and physical strength.

In J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Desert, young Lalla leaves the arid wide-open spaces of Morocco for big-city France, where she becomes a prominent photography model without seeking that profession. She finds the shallow celebrity life not to her liking, and returns to Morocco within months.

Enough about models! The ambitious, hard-working Thea Kronberg becomes a big-time opera singer in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. But as is often the case with celebrities (particularly female ones), there is some sacrificing of personal and family life. Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto also features a mega-celebrity opera star (Roxanne Coss) who gets a lot closer to the general public than usual when she’s taken hostage along with her audience during a performance.

In Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen becomes well known in the dystopian country of Panem for her courage, archery skills, and more as an involuntary contestant in the trilogy’s brutal games.

A real sport — baseball — is featured in The Natural, whose protagonist Roy Hobbs becomes a major Major League star but has major difficulties before and after that happens. The movie version of Bernard Malamud’s book gives Roy a happier ending.

Speaking of films, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon stars movie producer Monroe Stahr, who was partly based on real-life Hollywood legend Irving Thalberg.

Another producer — a TV one — is Savannah Jackson in Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale. She has a very successful career but a messy personal life.

Henrietta Stackpole is a fairly famous journalist in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, and — unlike a lot of fictional celebrities — seems fairly happy with her career and life.

Another prominent journalist is Mikael Blomkvist in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels. He too seems pretty comfortable with himself, but has to endure some dangerous situations while conducting his impressive investigative reporting.

Then there are fictional characters famous within a relatively limited sphere, but famous nonetheless. One example is the beloved teacher Mr. Chipping in James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

Some villains who are “celebrities” in their fictional worlds? Sauron of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Lord Voldemort of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Professor Moriarty of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Count Fosco of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Iago of Shakespeare’s Othello, etc.!

Those evil fellows squared off against also-famous heroes and heroines: Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Harry, Hermione, Ron, Dumbledore, Sherlock, Walter Hartright, Marian Halcombe…

Who are your favorite characters well known in their fictional realms?

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

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

Obsession in Lit and From Many a Political Twit

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After right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died this month, Republicans proved once again that they’re obsessed with obstructing Barack Obama at every turn. Refusing to consider ANY Scalia replacement nominee from the Democratic, biracial president with almost a year left in the White House? How partisan — and, yes, racist — of the GOP. Sure, Obama’s pick would change the ideological bent of the Supreme Court, but them’s the breaks.

Since I’m a literature blogger, I also started thinking of obsessed fictional characters — both negative (like the Republicans in their vicious hatred of the more-centrist-than-liberal Obama) and positive. Whether the single-mindedness is political, romantic, or otherwise, it can be riveting in a protagonist.

For instance, there are the rulers obsessed with control of the populace in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the hyper-ambitious, Huey Long-like Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

Or how about the fanatical police inspector Javert, who focuses to the nth degree on trying to capture Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables? And the escaped prisoner Edmond Dantes, who devotes his life to revenge against the men who framed him in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. And the guilt-ridden lovers Therese and Laurent, who are hyper-focused on the memory of the man they killed in Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin. Heck, those three examples are just from 19th-century French literature alone.

Also obsessed is the man (Nathanael) who becomes infatuated with a (robot?) woman in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story “The Sandman,” the woman (Katerina) who stays intensely/criminally attached to the no-good Sergei in Nikolai Leskov’s “The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” and various Edgar Allan Poe protagonists — including the murderers in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” and the love-struck young man in the partly comedic “The Spectacles.”

Then there’s the title character in Toni Morrison’s Sula who’s obsessed with being independent, unconventional, and not bound by gender norms.

A torrid affair begets homicide in Therese Raquin, but romantic obsession has different results in other novels such as W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. In the first book, would-be doctor Philip Carey becomes totally fixated on a waitress (Mildred Rogers) who holds him in contempt until… In Garcia Marquez’s novel, Florentino Ariza carries a torch for Fermina Daza over many decades until…

Theo Decker carries something else — a painting — out of a museum after a terrorist attack in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and remains obsessed for years with Carel Fabritius’ famous bird portrait — partly because of its association with Theo’s beloved mother, who died in the attack.

Another creature filling the mind of a protagonist is the huge marlin relentlessly reeled in by Santiago the fisherman as he tries to defy bad luck and aging in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and Sea.

Still another creature is the fixation of Captain Ahab, who, in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, angrily pursues the huge white whale that bit off part of his leg. (Some latte-drinking readers might also be obsessed with the novel’s Starbuck character and how his name was appropriated by a certain coffee chain. 🙂 )

Speaking of 20th-century/19th-century connections, Octavia Butler’s Kindred novel sends Dana Franklin back in time to America’s slave-holding South. As the black character navigates that horrid world, her obsession is making sure her ancestor is born so that she (Dana) can exist 150 years later.

Many Americans are also known for single-mindedly climbing the corporate or social ladder, and an example of someone who ascends the latter ladder is Undine Spragg of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. It’s not a coincidence that her initials are U.S.

The title character’s initials in Martin Eden represent Jack London’s semi-autobiographical “me” — a self-educated, working-class protagonist hell-bent on becoming a successful writer.

Also obsessed with having a writing career is Jo March, the Little Women character partly based on the author herself — Louisa May Alcott.

Last but not least, we have Lord Voldemort’s obsession with killing Harry Potter. I’d compare the GOP’s many obstructionist politicians to Voldemort, but that would be an insult to J.K. Rowling’s gruesomely evil creation. 🙂

Who are your favorite fixated fictional fellows and women? (Also welcome are any thoughts on the late Harper Lee, who died Feb. 19 following decades of being obsessed with maintaining her privacy after the great To Kill a Mockingbird rocketed her to fame.)

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

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

Long Island Books and Short Island Books

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There’s something about islands that make them an important part of some fiction.

They can be the settings for romance, vacation, adventure, murder, intrigue, etc. — and the often-isolated nature of islands adds drama to all kinds of story lines.

Given that today is Valentine’s Day, we’ll start with romance. In L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of the Island, Anne Shirley continues to deny her feelings for Gilbert Blythe until… I would add that much of Montgomery’s wonderful fiction is set on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, where her characters fall in love, experience heartache, and more.

Then there’s Bernard, the British protagonist in David Lodge’s Paradise News who travels to Hawaii for family reasons but finds unexpected romance there with an American woman named Yolande.

Things are a bit more complicated in M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans, in which the new marriage between Isabel and lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne changes radically after a baby washes up on shore. The very plot of the novel probably wouldn’t have worked without an island being that couple’s home.

Islands as the place for adventure? That’s the case with books such as Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island.

Speaking of mysterious, islands are also a classic setting for some mystery novels.

For instance, when I read P.D. James’ The Lighthouse last week, I noticed that having the murders committed on a sparsely populated island conveniently limited the number of suspects — all of whom lived within close proximity of the victims (the first of whom was a much-disliked novelist!).

Also, what might be Agatha Christie’s most famous mystery — And Then There Were None — takes place on an island where the guests get bumped off one by one. Hard to run for help when you can’t get away.

Vile experiments are conducted in the title locale of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. Also negative is how the innocent Edmond Dantes is jailed for years in the Chateau d’If rocky island prison until he ingeniously finds a way to swim to safety and then plots his epic revenge against the men who framed him in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.

Dumas’ earlier Georges novel was set on Isle de France (now the island nation of Mauritius). Besides being exciting, the book is also known for being the only work by the part-African-descended author to focus on race and racism.

The setting of Aldous Huxley’s Island is remote and self-contained enough to allow for an experiment in forming a utopian society that’s quite the contrast with the dystopian world of Huxley’s more famous Brave New World.

And we can’t forget novels in which the protagonists are stuck on an uninhabited island — with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe perhaps the most famous example. Oh, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which a stranded bunch of boys behave very badly.

What are you favorite novels and stories set partly or completely on an island? Heck, you can also discuss islands on the screen — in the Cast Away movie, the Gilligan’s Island sitcom, the Enemy at the Door miniseries, etc.!

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

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

A Nod to Literature That’s Odd

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Some novels are just weird. Or absurd, surreal, and a few other adjectives. You may love or hate such books, and they may be great or not great, but they’re just…weird. And thus memorable.

I thought about that when recently reading Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. Nope, not a law-enforcement version of The Third Man, but a darkly humorous tale of a guy who meets a bunch of bicycle-obsessed cops in a disorienting netherworld. So unusual a novel that it wasn’t published until after the death of Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien’s real name) — nearly three decades after he wrote the book.

Is The Third Policeman‘s protagonist actually dead for most of the novel? Hmm. That’s certainly the case in Robertson Davies’ Murther and Walking Spirits, whose murdered lead character quickly becomes a ghost and then attends a film festival where he watches “movies” of his ancestors — “movies” no other festival attendee can see.

Better known examples of odd fare include Lewis Carroll’s unnerving/delightful Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (part poem, part text, wholly nuts protagonist?), and several novels by Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving. The latter’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, features a VERY quirky title character and the death-by-baseball of Owen’s best friend’s mother. To misquote a famous song, it’s sad to be taken out at the ballgame.

Another wacky work — Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair — references a famous novel as literary detective Thursday Next enters the pages of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre via a “Prose Portal” to interact with Jane and Rochester. The height (albeit not wuthering) of peculiar-ness.

Also peculiar is Herman Melville’s Pierre, which was lambasted by critics in 1852 for being another “p” word: perverse. The novel depicts an incestuous (or near-incestuous) relationship and also devotes many pages to Pierre ultra-obsessively writing a book that ends up being loathed — reflecting Melville’s bitterness at the harsh response to his 1851 masterpiece Moby-Dick. “I would prefer not to” be magnanimous about critics’ stupidity, a Bartleby-channeling Melville might have said.

Another 19th-century novel with plenty of eccentricity is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which the Karamazov dad is one crazy dude and the book’s devil scene is a wonderfully outlandish standout in literary history. Heck, that wily devil could have won the GOP caucuses in Iowa — or did he?

Additional 1800s books with strange content include Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (in which Catherine Morland is goofily obsessed with Gothic fiction), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (about a way-out voyage way out to sea), Alexandre Dumas’ The Black Tulip (we’re talking a tulip contest smackdown here), and Wilkie Collins’ Armadale (which includes four…count ’em…four characters named Allan Armadale).

Going back to the 1700s, we have Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels — which, when you think about its big people and small people, is rather kooky amid its more sober content.

Yes, offbeat novels can also be deadly serious or satirically serious for many of their pages. A number of the books mentioned in this post fit that description — as do some of the post-1900 works I’m about to name.

Erich Maria Remarque’s The Black Obelisk, for instance, is partly a devastating look at Nazism’s early days but also gets quite zany at times with things like a recurring urination motif. Jack London’s Before Adam takes a fascinating look at early human evolution, but some of the passages — whether intentionally or not — are kind of madcap. John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown features a dead dad as a tree — ’nuff said. Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers is intense horror/sci-fi, but also daffy at the same time. Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman is…oh, heck, you know that novel screams “outre” from the title alone.

What are your favorite novels with some or many weird moments?

(And, yes, some of Dr. Seuss’ great writing and drawing is bonkers. Hat-wearing cat? Eleven-fingered creature? The consumption of green eggs? Sheesh…)

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

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

Why Sci-fi Should Be Given a Try

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A conversation with myself:

“I read Octavia E. Butler’s riveting Kindred and Andy Weir’s compelling The Martian this month. I should write a blog post about science fiction!”

“But you haven’t read THAT much sci-fi. You’re no expert!”

“Well, if I define sci-fi loosely enough to also include speculative fiction, time-travel novels, apocalyptic books, and so on, I think I could pull together something credible.”

“Okay, but try to avoid discussing things like ghost stories, horror novels, dystopian classics, and fantasy fiction. Those aren’t quite sci-fi (I think), and are better as topics for their own blog posts.”

“Noted. And don’t forget that people who may have more sci-fi knowledge than I can add their thoughts in the comments area.”

“True — and people with even less sci-fi knowledge than you (if that’s possible 🙂 ) can comment, too. After all, most of us have at least watched Star Wars movies and/or various Star Trek offerings.”

“But I haven’t seen The Man With Two Brains.”

“So, how are you talking with yourself?”

Sci-fi is fascinating. Most of us are curious about what the future might bring, about what the past was like (in time-travel books that go backward), about space travel, about faraway worlds, etc. And of course sci-fi set in the future is often a way to metaphorically and exaggeratedly discuss how things (such as social conditions) are in the author’s present time.

The sci-fi genre has its roots in the 19th century (if it dates back further, please correct me in the comments area). Mary Shelley was definitely a pioneer, with her iconic Frankenstein (1818) and apocalyptic The Last Man (1826) — the latter set in the 2090s.

Edgar Allan Poe flirted with time travel in his 1844 story “A Tale of Ragged Mountains,” and Jules Verne began his legendary career in the 1860s. Robert Louis Stevenson put some sci-fi elements in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Edward Bellamy went utopian sci-fi with Looking Backward (1888), and Mark Twain plunged full-on into time travel with his pessimistic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

Then H.G. Wells closed the 19th century and opened the 20th with his incredible run of sci-fi classics The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901). Yes, the two lunar travelers in that last book went inside the moon.

A few decades later, various 20th-century masters arrived on the publishing scene. You know their names: Isaac Asimov (who I was privileged to meet in 1986), Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, the still-living Ursula K. Le Guin, etc. And you know their prominent works — such as the Foundation novels (Asimov), The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), and The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin).

Past and present sci-fi notables also include Douglas Adams, Orson Scott Card, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert, Ann Leckie, Anne McCaffrey, Joanna Russ, and Connie Willis, among others.

Some of the above have also written in other genres, but achieved much of their fame from sci-fi work. Then there are authors who primarily focus(ed) on more “general” fiction, but delve(d) into the sci-fi realm on occasion. One current example is Margaret Atwood, whose self-described “speculative fiction” includes works such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. Also, Marge Piercy went partly sci-fi with Woman on the Edge of Time, as did Virginia Woolf with Orlando. Kurt Vonnegut is by no means a pure sci-fi writer, but there are certainly elements of that genre in his novels such as the time-travel-tinged Slaughterhouse-Five. The same can be said for Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand.

Some novels — such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods — mix sci-fi and fantasy. Others — including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — contain apocalyptic scenarios with some sci-fi aspects.

The Martian? The Wall Street Journal called it “the purest example of real-science sci-fi for many years,” and the 2011 novel certainly has many classic sci-fi trappings: space travel, a disaster, smart/stranded protagonist, an epic fight for survival, plausible-sounding technology, etc.

Kindred (1979) is a fascinating/searing fictional work that looks at slavery and more through a sci-fi/time-travel lens as protagonist Dana (an African-American woman) is repeatedly pulled from 20th-century California to America’s pre-Civil War South.

What are your favorite sci-fi novels? What do you think of the genre?

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

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

‘The Goldfinch’ and Other Modern Masterpieces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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