short stories

This Blog Post Is On The House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(The box for submitting comments is below already-posted comments, but your new comment will appear at the top of the comments area — unless you’re replying to someone else. Also, please feel free to read through comments and reply to anyone you want; I love not only being in conversations, but also reading conversations in which I’m not involved!)

—

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

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

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.

Surprise, Surprise! How Authors Keep Us On Our Toes

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There are various ways fiction writers can play with reader expectations as they try to make their work more interesting.

Obviously, one approach is to create an ironic and/or surprise conclusion a la O. Henry — who was a master of that in tales such as “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Last Leaf.” Readers will certainly want to keep reading a writer who offers story-line stunners.

Other short stories with major jolts at the end include “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, “Proof Positive” by Graham Greene, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” by Edgar Allan Poe, to name just a few.

Another way to intrigue readers is to mix in poetry, letters, lists, newspaper clippings, author drawings, and/or other content amid traditional text. That’s the case with A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Wilkie Collins’ Armadale, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, various novels by writer/doodler Kurt Vonnegut, and so on. (In Goethe’s day, novels with letters were fairly common.)

As I wrote in a past post, some authors also shake things up by including small amounts of whimsical humor in what are mostly dead-serious novels — such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Erich Maria Remarque’s The Black Obelisk, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. This can surprise readers as well as give them a little breather that helps them better appreciate the rest of the great-but-depressing prose.

Yet another way of using unpredictability to draw readers in is to juxtapose a sad or partly sad plot line with an idyllic setting — say, Paris. Much of the French capital is of course beautiful and romantic, yet I can think of few very upbeat works set in “The City of Light.”

Instead, I think of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (with the struggling Jean Valjean) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (with the unhappy Quasimodo). Or Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (with frustrated painter Claude Lantier) and The Ladies’ Delight (which has a love story but mainly depicts the “Walmartization” of a 19th-century Paris neighborhood).

Or Balzac’s Cesar Birotteau (with its affluent title character duped into losing so much money he may or may not be able to repay his debts), Colette’s The Vagabond (about the often-tough life of vaudeville performer Renee Nere), and J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Desert (whose Lalla protagonist has some success in Paris but misses her native Morocco).

Non-French authors also depict Paris as a place with the potential for heartache. For instance, Henry James chronicles Christopher Newman’s difficult effort to marry a French woman in The American, Edith Wharton sets up the possibility of a happy or unhappy Paris ending in the mostly New York-set The Age of Innocence, and James Baldwin depicts a visiting American struggling with his gay identity (among other things) in Giovanni’s Room.

Without divulging too much about plot lines ( 🙂 ), can you name additional literary works that play with reader expectations in the ways I mentioned in this post? Also, in what other ways do authors shake up readers, and which literary works exemplify those other ways? And, heck, if you don’t want to deal with those two questions, I’d be happy to hear the titles of other novels set in Paris!

(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.

Oh, Canada Has Great Literature

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Last week, I talked about American traits we might find in fiction. This week, I’m moving to Canada (literarily, not literally).

As a U.S. citizen, I don’t possess enough firsthand knowledge to discuss the psyche of our northern neighbor. I’ve spent 30 or so days in Canada, and have the sense that the people there are friendlier, more modest, and more tolerant than many citizens of the American colossus to their south. But that’s just a snapshot. Canada is also quite a birthplace of musical acts: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Sarah McLachlan, Oscar Peterson, Alanis Morissette, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire, Metric, Rush, The Guess Who, etc.

But I digress.

I’ve read several of Canada’s better-known fiction writers, and they will be what this post is about. Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Yann Martel, L.M. Montgomery, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, and even that part-time “Canadian” Willa Cather, who spent many a summer on New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island.

Atwood deserves a Nobel Prize, just like Munro merited the one she received last year. A novelist since 1969, Atwood has excelled at traditional fiction, satirical fiction, feminist fiction, historical fiction, dystopian fiction, speculative fiction, and more. She is of course best known for The Handmaid’s Tale, a superb/scary book about the future subjugation of women that shares my “Top Six Atwood Novels” list with The Robber Bride (three women with the same enemy), Alias Grace (inspired by a real-life double murder), The Blind Assassin (novel within a novel within a novel), Cat’s Eye (painter reflects on her younger years), and Oryx and Crake (post-apocalypse). Despite the intense subject matter in many of her works, Atwood’s writing can also be quite funny.

I confess to having read only one Munro short-story collection, Friend of My Youth, but the tales were moving, subtle, and emotionally complex — along with being quite readable. It has been said that Munro never needed to write a novel because her stories are like mini-novels.

As with Munro, I’ve only read one work apiece (all novels) by Martel, Richler, and Davies.

Martel, of course, wrote the renowned Life of Pi, which mixes philosophical ruminations with an adventure story about a boy and tiger (not Calvin and Hobbes!) adrift after a shipwreck. Pi avoids two BC’s: British Columbia and Being Consumed.

Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here — considered by some to be “The Great Canadian Novel” — is a multigenerational story of a wealthy, eccentric family. The seriocomic saga includes real-life events and…Yiddish-speaking Eskimos!

Davies’ Murther & Walking Spirits is about a murdered newspaperman who retains a consciousness that allows him to see his widow, the man who murdered him, and the history of his many ancestors — with that history unfolding via a movie-theater film only the dead man can view. Rated PG: Progenitors Galore.

Richler is perhaps best known for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and Davies for the three novels comprising “The Deptford Trilogy.”

Then there’s the great L.M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery, author of the young-adult classic Anne of Green Gables about an imaginative, brilliant orphan girl. (I just reread that very engaging and heartwarming novel last week.) Montgomery also penned many Anne sequels (some better than others), the semi-autobiographical Emily trilogy, and “grown-up” books such as The Blue Castle — the most absorbing and at times funniest story you’ll ever read about a bright young woman with a (supposed) terminal illness. One of my top-ten favorite novels.

Montgomery’s fiction usually has rural settings, befitting the less densely populated nature of much of Canada.

Part-time Grand Manan Islander Willa Cather’s most Canada-centric book is Shadows on the Rock — a gem of an historical novel, starring a father and daughter, set in late-17th-century Quebec City. Canada also figures in Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge.

Is there something about Canadian literature that makes it different than, say, American literature? (Besides scenes of colder weather. 🙂 ) Is the fiction in The Country of Provinces “friendlier, more modest, and more tolerant” — like Canadians might be themselves? Hard to say. I certainly haven’t noticed an inferiority complex in the works of Canadian authors. Any thoughts on what, if anything, might make a novel “Canadian”?

Two more questions: Who are your favorite Canadian authors? (Obviously, I’ve named only some of the most famous ones.) And what are your favorite novels or other literary works from Canada?

(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.

Bad Marriages…We’ve Read a Few

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What is literature full of? Words, sentences, paragraphs, and…unhappy marriages.

And why not? There are tons of unhappy marriages in real life, and many fiction readers are fascinated by car wrecks — whether literal (dented vehicles) or figurative (dented relationships). Heck, authors are among the people in negative wedlock, and the adage is “write what you know,” isn’t it?

I just read E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, a 1930s-set memoir/novel in which young Edgar’s parents Rose and Dave “exemplify” several reasons why unhappy couples are unhappy. The too-practical Rose is frustrated in the way many stay-at-home moms were before the modern feminism era, while the free-spirited but at times irresponsible Dave has wider interests — one of which seemingly involves cheating on Rose. Also, Dave’s mother is very condescending to Rose, who not only bitterly resents that but resents Dave for not taking his mother to task for her attitude. Meanwhile, the family is slipping financially.

Yes, marriages can be troubled because of money problems, adultery, mismatched personalities, and many other reasons — including health issues, mental issues, and physical or psychological abuse.

The passive-aggressive Edward Casaubon is psychologically abusive to his young wife Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which also dissects the strained marriage between the ambitious Dr. Lydgate and the spoiled Rosamond Vincy. In the same author’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, the willful but basically decent Gwendolen Harleth marries wealthy brute Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt out of financial desperation — and disaster ensues.

Few authors depict wedded non-bliss in as astute a way as Eliot does.

Published a year after Daniel Deronda, Emile Zola’s 1877 L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den) sees a happy marriage between Coupeau and the hardworking Gervaise go sharply downhill when the former gets injured and becomes an alcoholic. Eventually, Gervaise…well, I won’t give away what happens to her, except to say that the abused wife in Stephen King’s Rose Madder ends up faring much better (with a little supernatural help).

Societal racism can also weigh heavily on a marriage that might have been happier in a more unbiased world. That weight is certainly apparent with couples in novels like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

While the male half of a couple is often most at fault in literature, that’s not always the case. For instance, Cathy is amoral while Adam Trask is merely clueless in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and the hypochondriacal Zeena is much less sympathetic than the taciturn title character in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. Wharton also created another unlikable woman in The Custom of the Country‘s social-climbing Undine Spragg, who badly treats her first husband Ralph Marvell.

Here are a few of the countless other fictional works with somewhat or very troubled marriages, of long or short duration: Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, Graham Greene’s short story “The Basement,” Henry James’ The American, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behavior, W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, and Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection.

This blog post focused on heterosexual marriages because gay marriage is relatively new enough to not yet appear in a lot of novels (as far as I know). And I didn’t discuss not-wed couples in order to keep this post a manageable length! Besides, it’s often easier to get out of a bad relationship than a bad marriage.

Which unhappy marriages do you remember most in literature?

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

A Look at Young Protagonists in Literature

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With the school year underway, kids are on the minds of many — including book lovers. So, our subject this week is literature’s most memorable young characters (from babies to teens).

I just finished Elsa Morante’s History, and Giuseppe in that magnificent/heartbreaking novel is one of the most adorable, engaging, precocious, well-drawn kids I’ve ever encountered in fiction. This is especially amazing because he was conceived when a German soldier raped his Italian mother Ida — after which she and Giuseppe spend the rest of World War II suffering additional privations such as the loss of their bombed home, near starvation, and Ida’s constant fear that her half-Jewish ancestry would be discovered by the Nazis. (All that horror, combined with a hereditary condition, does eventually affect Giuseppe’s psyche and health.)

Obviously, the vast majority of young people in literature don’t have to go through those things. Readers can enjoy the innocence of many kid characters, hope those characters turn out okay when older, cringe if they get jaded or go bad, and be reminded of their own childhood and/or their own kids and grandkids.

Another unforgettable child in fiction is Anne Shirley, who’s an 11-year-old orphan when we first meet her in Anne of Green Gables. Brainy, friendly, funny, needy — Anne has captivated readers since L.M. Montgomery’s novel was first published in 1908. Heck, a late-in-life Mark Twain said Anne is “the dearest, most moving, and most delightful child since the immortal Alice.” That of course being Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland-visiting Alice — another enduring kid in lit.

Montgomery created a second memorable girl in her semi-autobiographical Emily trilogy, whose title character becomes a writer.

Among the many other young females who strongly resonate in literature are the four diverse sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women; the bright, frustrated Maggie Tulliver, who’s initially nine years old in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss; the mistreated, resilient Celie when a teen in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; the neglected, loyal Florence in Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son; the iconic Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; and the offbeat, perceptive Pearl — daughter of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

The young Owen Meany is also offbeat and perceptive in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Other compelling boys in lit include Charlie, the beleaguered teen son of a semi-crazy dad in Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast; Twain’s entrepreneurial, bossy, annoying, sometimes admirable Tom Sawyer; and the more likable Huck Finn, a secondary character in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before taking the spotlight in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Speaking of annoying, the kidnapped boy in O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” story is so grating that the kidnappers have to pay his father to take him back! Now that’s a memorable young character.

Other great literary creations include the intelligent, buffeted-by-tragedy fraternal twins — impulsive Rahel and mute Estha — in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; and the destined-to-meet Yuri Zhivago and Lara during their adolescent years in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

The seven Harry Potter books are of course chock-full of distinctive young people: the brave Harry, the brilliant Hermione Granger, the affable Ron Weasley, the hilarious Weasley twins, the spacey Luna Lovegood, the spoiled Dudley Dursley, the often-brutish Draco Malfoy, the at-first-downtrodden Neville Longbottom, etc.

Children’s books also have tons of interesting kid protagonists, but that could be the subject of a whole other blog post. So The Cat in the Hat‘s Sally and her brother get only a brief Seussical mention here.

Who are your favorite young characters in YA or grown-up literature?

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

—

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

I’m also 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/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 “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson, among others.

Enemies As Engines of Engrossing Fiction

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A couple of posts ago, I wrote about memorable friendships in literature. Now I’ll get less “warm and fuzzy” and discuss…enemies in literature!

Reading about adversaries is hardly pleasant, but well worth the time. The dramatic possibilities are endless, as are the questions: Who’s right and who’s wrong? Are both parties hostile or is one person doing most of the hating? Will the relationship improve or go even more downhill? Will someone get hurt (psychologically or physically)? If righteous revenge comes into play, how viscerally satisfying is that? (Very satisfying, as the many fans of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo will tell you.)

Enemies of course appear in both modern and classic literature as well as in both literary and popular fiction. In the last category, Richard Matheson’s Hunted Past Reason features two friends who go on a wilderness trip that sees one of them turn on the other. Some of what happens next is too graphic to describe here.

Another intense work is The Hunger Games, in which young people forced into a state-sanctioned contest of death become each others’ enemies to try to survive. Also not pals in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy are Katniss Everdeen and Panem President Coriolanus Snow, and ultimately Katniss and District 13 President Alma Coin.

Adversaries abound, too, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books — most notably the villainous Voldemort vs. the heroic Harry. Also, Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy is seething with small-town foes.

Or how about Taliban psychopath Assef vs. the flawed but basically good Amir in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner?

Obviously, adversarial pairs don’t have to consist of one bad person and one good person. Enemies can both be likable or both be unlikable. For instance, one wouldn’t want to go near either “The kid” or Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. And cousins Phillip Boyce and Norman Urquhart are both unappealing in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison, though one ends up being far worse than the other.

Indeed, friends can become enemies (Philip and Norman seemingly had a congenial relationship at one point) and enemies can become friends — or at least somewhat friendly. One example of the latter happens with two pivotal characters in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits; to avoid a plot spoiler, I won’t give their names here!

And enemies aren’t always a one-on-one proposition, as exemplified by Zenia trying to wreck the lives of three women in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.

In fact, a whole state apparatus can be the enemy of almost an entire populace, as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the aforementioned The Hunger Games.

Moving to older literature, there is of course the police inspector Javert who obsessively hounds Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

Another authority figure, the physically strong Capt. Wolf Larsen of Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, treats the initially soft Humphrey van Weyden viciously much of the time before their fraught relationship turns into something more equal.

Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons features the spoiled/selfish George Amberson Minafer, who makes himself a foe of Eugene Morgan by interfering with the love that likable widower has with George’s also-widowed mother Isabel. Complicating matters is George being in love with Eugene’s daughter Lucy.

Yes, the enemy thing can get very messy when it involves family. I think of Janie Crawford, who begins to hate her prominent husband Jody Starks after he treats her so nastily and patronizingly in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and Dorothea Brooke, who realizes her husband — the Rev. Edward Causabon — is an ice-cold, unfeeling excuse for a human being in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

In the child-parent realm, Dmitri loathes his vile father in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and John Grimes fears and dislikes his overbearing/hypocritical dad in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain.

Sibling relationships gone bad are also a staple of many fictional works, as when a character poisons the drink of her sister in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Who are some of your “favorite” foes in literature?

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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/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 “The Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson, among others.