william-faulkner

1930s Novels Remind Us of Today

Posted by

119

From The Grapes of Wrath movie. (20th Century Fox/Getty Images.)

After mentioning Daphne du Maurier’s great 1938 novel Rebecca in last week’s post about Gothic fiction, I thought of other books from that decade and how those years were a significant time in literature as well as quite relevant to the 2020s. After all, both decades had/have war, a rise in authoritarianism, major economic problems, and more.

So, I’m going to discuss a number of novels I’ve read, and a few I haven’t, that were published in the 1930s.

One that immediately came to mind is John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic The Grapes of Wrath, which focused on the Joad family but also took a wider look at the impact of The Great Depression bedeviling the U.S (and most of the world) that decade.

Steinbeck also wrote other notable 1930s novels — including Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), and Of Mice and Men (1937) — that reflected social conditions. In Dubious Battle focused on a strike, fitting for a decade when labor flexed its muscles.

It Can’t Happen Here (1935) is a dystopian Sinclair Lewis novel imagining the rise of fascism in the U.S. — making it almost a primer for current dictator wannabe Donald Trump. (Although Trump is notoriously known for not reading books.)

War? Two of Erich Maria Remarque’s lesser-known novels: The Road Back (1931) and Three Comrades (1936) — have World War I elements. (The Road Back was a sequel of sorts to Remarque’s 1929-published All Quiet on the Western Front.) The American Civil War is a backdrop to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936). And Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1939) makes a powerful antiwar statement.

The 1930s were also significant writing years for William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying (1930), about a family and its journey to bury their matriarch; Light in August (1932), whose characters include a multiracial (?) drifter; and other works.

Then there was the 1934 publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s perhaps second-best novel, the semi-autobiographical Tender Is the Night.

Three years later, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) featured the memorable experiences of protagonist Janie Crawford.

That decade’s other notable book releases included — to name just a few — Mildred Benson’s The Secret of the Old Clock (1930), the first Nancy Drew mystery; Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), featuring private investigator Sam Spade; Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison (1930), with mystery writer Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey; Pearl S. Buck’s China-set classic The Good Earth (1931); Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic Brave New World (1932); and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932).

Also: James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), set in a mythical paradise; Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn (1936), which was also mentioned in last week’s blog post about Gothic fiction; Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937), starring a fishing captain; J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), the fantasy novel that became the prequel to the 1950s-published The Lord of the Rings trilogy; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling (1938), about a boy and his fawn; Agatha Christie’s mystery And Then There Were None (1939); and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), starring sleuth Philip Marlowe.

While writing this, I remembered that I had done a 2023 piece focusing on novels published in 1937. But the other years in that decade were not included in that post. 🙂

My list of 1930s novels is of course incomplete. Your favorites from that decade, whether mentioned by me or not?

Misty the cat says: “I own all this land, but where did I put the deed?”

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 — which has a literature theme connected to local news in my town — is here.

Gothic Fiction Gives Readers Frisson

Posted by

114

Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca movie from 1940.

What’s a Gothic novel? Definitions I found online include “a literary genre combining fiction, horror, death, and romance” that might be “set in gloomy, decaying locations like castles or ruined mansions” and also might feature “the intrusion of the past upon the present” as well as “dark secrets, supernatural elements” and “a brooding hero” and “a vulnerable female protagonist.”

Those definitions mean books in this category can be compelling, mysterious, haunting, and more. So, all that is an incentive for me to discuss various Gothic novels I’ve read.

I recently reread Daphne du Maurier’s mesmerizing Rebecca (1938), which is one of the first books that come to mind when thinking of the Gothic genre. It’s about an unnamed young woman who marries wealthy widower Maxim de Winter. His first wife? Rebecca, of course. The shy/insecure/inexperienced new spouse compares herself (and is compared by others) to the late Rebecca — whose presence remains palpable at Maxim’s huge Manderley estate. In which we meet sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who was very attached to the beautiful/charismatic/seemingly admirable Rebecca and treats the second Mrs. de Winter with contempt and cruelty.

After finishing Rebecca, I read for the first time du Maurier’s 1936 potboiler of a novel Jamaica Inn, which also has some Gothic elements (including a remote setting and plenty of terror) but no upper-class characters in the main cast. Not as skillfully composed as Rebecca, but still plenty gripping.

Du Maurier also wrote several other novels considered Gothic or part-Gothic — including 1951’s My Cousin Rachel and 1969’s The House on the Strand.

Going back to 19th-century literature, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) included various Gothic elements — a big old home, a mysterious woman in the attic, some disastrous events, an otherworldly occurrence, etc. Its story, several of its characters, and the dynamics of its central romance clearly influenced the Rebecca novel published nearly a century later.

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (also 1847) has lots of Gothic content, too — obsession, psychological torment, ghostly apparitions, the wild moors…

Almost 30 years earlier, Mary Shelley’s ominous 1818 novel Frankenstein drips with atmosphere while also being an early example of science fiction.

Later in the 19th century, we have Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) with its suspense, “insane asylum,” and mistaken identity; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) with its split-personality motif, claustrophobia, and foggy London streets; and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which I don’t need to summarize but can give many a reader nightmares.

In the realm of 19th-century short stories, a number of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales can be considered Gothic — including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the Red Death.”

Joining du Maurier in writing 20th-century novels with at least some Gothic elements are authors such as Shirley Jackson (1959’s The Haunting of Hill House), Stephen King (1977’s The Shining), and Toni Morrison (1987’s Beloved).

And I shouldn’t forget to mention Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey — an 1817-published spoof of Gothic fiction.

It’s pretty much agreed that Gothic novels first appeared in the 1700s, but I haven’t read any from that century (yet). They include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), among others.

There’s also the Southern Gothic genre that includes such novels as William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952), and Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968).

What are your favorite Gothic novels, whether I mentioned them or not? I know there are a number of books in that genre I didn’t name.

Misty the cat says: “When I requested a deck, I meant a deck of cards to play poker.”

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 welcome election victory and more — is here.

Formidable Fiction Is ‘Furmidable’ to a Feline

Posted by

105

I, Misty the cat, might be the first kitty to write a blog post while asleep. (Photo by my human Dave.)

Last week, Dave blogged about the appeal of escapist fiction as a diversion from the dire 2025 political climate faced by people, cats, and blue-footed booby birds who migrated from red-footed states. This week, as I, Misty the cat, do the every-two-month feline takeover of Dave’s blog, I’ll discuss a few of the many challenging novels I’ve read amid the escapist stuff, if only to keep up my paw strength as I swatted those weighty books off the table.

Currently, Dave and I are in the middle of Orfeo by Richard Powers, who later wrote the acclaimed environmental tree saga The Overstory — a novel not about me hovering over a short story. Orfeo is a book featuring a rather complex musical motif as well as sudden swings between the present and past, yet it’s still quite readable in its way. How did I, Misty the cat, learn a word like “motif”? In The Idiot’s Guide to Pretentious Vocabulary.

Some other challenging novels? James Joyce’s Ulysses comes to mind, but I haven’t read it because of my lack of interest in American Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. There’s also Marcel Proust’s many-volume In Search of Lost Time, of which I managed to finish the initial Swann’s Way book. Here’s what I discovered: gorgeous language, kind of a slog to get through, and a swan and blue-footed booby will both eat a madeleine if it’s slathered in A1 steak sauce.

Plenty of food for thought (but no madeleine) in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, set after the American Civil War in which the aforementioned Grant waged battle against alliterative author names like James Joyce. I also liked Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, even though my cat eyes are green. Everything is not all about me! 99.9% about me? Sure, but not 100%.

Then there’s late-career Henry James. Those novels contain plenty of long and convoluted sentences, but, yes, Long and Convoluted would make a great name for a rock band. Dave and my feline self did enjoy James’ late-career novel The Ambassadors, which was about the Ambassador cars from India and the United States meeting cute before asking James to write The Turn of the Ignition. Or maybe that novel was about an American’s trip to Paris to try to bring back a young man to the family business. The Family Business would be a so-so name for a rock band.

An early-career novel by Eleanor Catton, published when the author was still in her 20s, is also quite ambitious. That would be The Luminaries, which combined a plot about the 1860s New Zealand gold rush with an astrological motif. (I’m a Sagittarius cat.) There’s that fancy word “motif” again, which I was moved to reuse after reading The Idiot’s Guide to Repeating One’s Self in a Blog Post.

I liked Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway a lot despite it not being the easiest of reads. The whole book unfolds in a day, which makes me wonder if it’s a multigenerational saga unfolding across several centuries. Let me think about that.

There’s also Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, about the yin and yang of my relationship with the chipmunk I often see during my daily leashed walks. Given its tiny size, the chipmunk only reads one-page novels, and gets its musical fix solely by watching NPR “Tiny Desk Concerts” — including excellent ones featuring Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan. It’s a small world after all…

Speaking of Russian novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s tome The Brothers Karamazov is a challenge, too, with many chapters that are wonderful and some chapters that sort of drag. But when it’s good it’s GOOD. The Sisters Karamazov didn’t leave as much of an impression on my feline self because that book doesn’t exist. The Second-Cousins-Once-Removed Karamazov? A real banger. Which reminds me to bang on my food bowl because it feels like I haven’t been served my chow since the 19th century in Russia. It’s been almost five minutes!

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s sweeping One Hundred Years of Solitude echoed my angst when I was once forced to endure One Hundred Nanoseconds of Solitude. Fortunately, I also read The Idiot’s Guide to Being Alone for Under a Minute.

Dave told me he twice tried William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury but couldn’t get past the first few chapters, unlike that author’s more readable Light in August and As I Lay Dying. I tried The Sound and the Fury myself, and went into a reading coma. Or maybe it was a food coma “as I lay digesting” too many cat treats.

Comments will be answered by Dave as I read The Idiot’s Guide to Recovering from Digesting Too Many Cat Treats.

I, Misty the cat, say: “I see the ghost, but where’s Mrs. Muir?”

Dave and I’s 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: 🙂

Dave is also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

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

In addition to this weekly blog, Dave writes the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a huge school budget deficit that grew even larger — is here.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Weekly Post, Monthly Theme

Posted by

113

August has arrived, and thoughts not only turn to the approaching start of the school year but also to…Light in August.

Yes, some novels have months in their titles, and William Faulkner’s 1932 book is no exception. It also happens to be my favorite Faulkner work as the author unspools a “Southern Gothic” story about a man (Joe Christmas) who passes as white but thinks he has some African-American ancestry, a pregnant woman (Lena Grove) searching for the would-be father, and others.

Now let’s work back to previous months. Nadine Gordimer wrote July’s People, a novel set in a near-future version of South Africa where apartheid had ended. This was before apartheid actually ended, at least officially, about a decade after Gordimer’s 1981 book was published.

There’s also Three Junes by Julia Glass, whose 2002 novel has an intriguing tri-format set in 1989, 1995, and 1999.

Various novels include May and April in their titles, but I haven’t read any of them. 🙂

March? We have Geraldine Brooks’ March, but — rather than referring to the third month of the year — the title of the 2005 novel is the last name of the father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as Brooks focuses on that dad’s harrowing Civil War experiences. There’s also Middlemarch, but that’s the name of a fictional English town in George Eliot’s 1871-72 classic.

I haven’t read any novels with February, January, December, or November in the title, but they do exist — including Gustave Flaubert’s…November (1842).

Going further back in the realm of months, we have Tom Clancy’s 1984 Cold War thriller The Hunt for Red October.

Have I read any novels with September in the title? Nope. But the Earth, Wind & Fire song “September” was pretty good.

Watch for a Misty the cat guest blog post next week! He was adopted in December (of 2017).

Any novels you’d like to mention with a month manifestation?

Misty the cat says: “There are twin beds, queen beds, king beds, and hall-floor beds.”

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 — which has a quirky percentage theme — is here.