New York City police in riot gear march into Columbia University to break up peaceful protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. (Kena Betancur/AFL via Getty Images.)

The manipulation of truth to mislead people is known as gaslighting. We’ve been seeing a lot of that lately, and I’m going to discuss a real-life example before talking about gaslighting in novels.

As most of you undoubtedly know, there has been an outpouring of protest on numerous college campuses against the Israeli assault on Gaza that has left at least 34,000 Palestinians dead (the vast majority women and children), hundreds of thousands of other Palestinian civilians homeless and starving, many hospitals blown up, many schools destroyed, and more. This of course happened after the horrific Hamas attack on Israel last October 7 that killed more than 1,100 people. Which happened after years of Israel’s harsh authoritarian control over Gaza. Which happened after the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis (not the Palestinians) — an unspeakable trauma that has influenced Israel’s actions ever since its founding. But it’s a shame when the oppressed become the oppressors.

The college protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, but that hasn’t stopped various university administrators and elected officials from sharply escalating the situation by sending in aggressive/militarized police to attack and arrest the admirable students, many of whom were subsequently suspended and kicked out of campus housing — even as rich right-wing alumni donors threatened to derail the students’ future career prospects.

What kind of gaslighting is coming from those rich right-wing alumni donors, university administrators, mainstream-media outlets, and politicians — including not only most Republican pols and many Democratic pols (among them President Biden) in the U.S. but also Israel’s far-right prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu? It involves falsely describing the protesters as violent and (despite many of the demonstrating students being Jewish) also falsely describing them as anti-Semitic. Criticizing Israel’s government and the worst tendencies of Zionism is not being anti-Semitic. Sure, a tiny sliver of the protesters and/or protest hangers-on have said problematic things, but almost every righteous movement has bad apples who attach themselves to a cause but don’t represent the essence of it.

In fact, the only recent, major, not-by-police violence was perpetrated by a pro-Israeli mob that attacked pro-Palestinian protesters on California’s UCLA campus — with a feeble law-enforcement response to that quite different from the police crackdowns on students peacefully opposing Israel’s siege of Gaza.

Why the gaslighting of pro-Palestinian protesters? Many reasons, of course, with a key one an effort to distract from Israel’s unrelentingly disproportionate response to the vicious October 7 attack. A response that the vast majority of the world’s citizens, and a majority of Americans, feel is over-the-top.

There have been a few notable university exceptions involving schools willing to negotiate with students on such matters as considering the divestment of funds that help the powerful Israeli military. Among those schools are Brown, Rutgers, and Northwestern (the latter two my undergraduate and graduate alma maters) — and their willingness to bargain kept things calmer on those campuses. Did those universities negotiate with their students in good faith? Maybe, maybe not, but it was something.

Novels with gaslighting? In a political/governmental sense, few feature more examples of the “g” word than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the dictatorial leaders churn out slogans like “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.”

In another dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, gaslighting is one of the tools the sicko male rulers of Gilead use to subjugate women.

On a more one-to-one level, we have the “second Mrs. de Winter” gaslit by creepy housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Mr. de Winter is no angel, either.

Edward Rochester also did some gaslighting when trying to keep a major secret from the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s iconic Jane Eyre.

Another memorable 19th-century English novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, has a gaslighting scenario too complicated to briefly summarize here…but it’s quite riveting.

Moving to more recent literature, J.K. Rowling’s The Ink Black Heart crime thriller features a nasty misogynist gaslighter who goes by the online alias “Anomie.”

In On Mystic Lake, the emotionally wrenching Kristin Hannah novel I just read, protagonist Annie is basically gaslit by two men (her old-fashioned widowed father and her sexist corporate lawyer husband who leaves her for a younger woman) into feeling she is less capable than she actually is. That’s something perpetuated by many men on many women in real life and fiction, as is also the case with the way Dorothea is treated by her husband, the Rev. Casaubon, in George Eliot’s superb Middlemarch. And gaslighting is sometimes perpetuated by women on women, with one example being the behavior of Valancy Stirling’s disapproving mother in L.M. Montgomery’s classic The Blue Castle — until Valancy finally leaves her childhood household at age 29.

One final note: When American students and others in decades past strongly/publicly protested such abominations as racism, sexism, homophobia, the Vietnam War, South African apartheid (via the divestment movement), and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they were vilified by an “establishment” that rarely hesitated to send in the cops. Then, many years later, it became “safe” among at least part of the “establishment” to do the revisionist-history thing and acknowledge that the demonstrators had been morally correct. I suspect the students rightly protesting Israel’s collective punishment on Gaza might eventually be viewed the same way. It’s a shame that morally correct students can’t be respected in real time by “the powers that be,” but I guess those students are considered too threatening to imperial and corporate narratives.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 senior center and a data breach — is here.

Literature often contains gender dynamics and racial dynamics, but there can also be class dynamics. Given how depressingly present class divisions are in real life, it’s good to see some fiction wrestle with that, too.

In Night Road (2011), another emotionally wrenching novel from Kristin Hannah that I read last week, among the major characters are best friends Mia (daughter of a doctor) and Lexi (daughter of an impoverished mother). The respective “stations” in life of those two and others are major drivers of Hannah’s plot.

Another friendship fraught with class differences is the one between well-to-do Amir and servant’s son Hassan in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003).

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) has a diverse cast that includes a “houseboy” (Ugwu), a professor (Odenigo), and two women (Olanna and Kainene) from an affluent family during the Nigerian Civil War.

Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel Big Little Lies features a single mother (Jane) who is less affluent than most of the other parents at the Australian school her son attends.

Just before Night Road, I read John Grisham’s A Painted House (2001) — which features a struggling farm family in 1950s Arkansas. But even though the Chandlers barely get by, they’re in better financial shape than the “hill people” and Mexican migrant workers they hire to help pick the cotton crop. In turn, the Chandlers are worse off economically than a relative who’s a unionized auto-factory worker visiting from Detroit.

A book of course doesn’t have to be from the 21st century to have class consciousness. In the 20th century, Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) looks at new money vs. old money as it chronicles the saga of upward striver Undine Spragg. (The main characters are all affluent but there’s still a class divide.) And the guests in Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel (1929) include a businessman (Preysing) and an underling (Kringelein) who the businessman initially doesn’t know is also staying at the hotel.

In the 19th century, Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885) focuses on mineworkers and mine owners heading for a showdown. The characters in George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) include a landowner secretly married to a working-class woman and the child of that union who ends up being raised by someone else. Also published in 1861 was one of Charles Dickens’ most class-conscious novels, Great Expectations, in which impoverished orphan Pip comes into some money.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this theme?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 one suggested voting-age change, two traffic lights, and more — is here.

My much-read copy of The Grapes of Wrath that I’ve had since high school. (Photo by me.)

This month is the 85th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath, certainly in the conversation for The Great American Novel.

As many readers know, John Steinbeck’s April 1939-published classic is about the Joad family fleeing Dust Bowl/Great Depression-stricken rural Oklahoma for the “paradise” of California, which turns out to be more hellish than heavenly for the impoverished people moving there.

The Grapes of Wrath became a beloved bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and inspired an also-beloved 1940 movie somewhat more upbeat than the mostly downbeat novel — which chronicles the experiences of ultra-memorable characters such as main protagonist Tom Joad, family matriarch Ma Joad, and lapsed preacher Jim Casy (who appropriately shares the same initials as Jesus Christ).

Not surprisingly, the wealthy elite of “The Golden State” hated the populist book and its class-conscious author for depicting them, and things, as they were. The novel has also, to this day, been periodically banned by right-wingers who don’t like its expose-injustice bent. Yes, The Grapes of Wrath still feels relevant in 2024 — 85 years after its publication and more than six decades after Steinbeck won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The well-researched/very readable Grapes of Wrath (title suggested by Steinbeck’s first wife Carol Henning) is the author’s best novel, but he of course wrote various other excellent books that linger in the American consciousness. They include East of Eden, Steinbeck’s longest and most complex work; The Winter of Our Discontent, with its themes of materialism and moral decline; and the emotionally wrenching Of Mice and Men.

Steinbeck (1902-1968) was also skilled at seriocomic writing, as can be seen in Tortilla Flat as well as Cannery Row and its sequel Sweet Thursday. All three are quite enjoyable and compelling.

Among the author’s many other worthwhile works is the lesser-known The Moon Is Down, set in an unnamed Nazi-occupied country during World War II.

Any thoughts on The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s other writing, and the author himself?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 senior center finally coming to my town and the “political hit job” of two councilors on another councilor — is here.

Walter Mosley (top) and Percival Everett.

I’ve written before about the appeal of changing-up what we read, but I’m going to approach that topic from a somewhat different angle this time.

Often, I like to bounce around with my choices of novels. Read something heavy, then light. Read something long, then short. Read something general-interest, then genre. Read something old, then new. Read something by a female author, then a male author. Etc.

But on occasion I deliberately “schedule” two or more books in a row that have certain similarities. Perhaps by the same author. Perhaps in the same genre. Perhaps written and/or set in a similar time period. And so on. It can put one in a reading rhythm that’s nice to experience occasionally.

I did that this month when I read Percival Everett’s Assumption and then Walter Mosley’s Down the River unto the Sea. Both novels are by prolific African-American male authors born in the 1950s, both feature African-American protagonists who work/worked in law enforcement, both have mystery elements, both are exceptionally written, both were published between 2010 and 2020…

But Assumption (which I liked) and Down the River unto the Sea (which I loved) are of course not that similar in many respects. Some examples:

— Ogden Walker of Everett’s novel is a deputy sheriff in a small New Mexico town, while Joe King Oliver of Mosley’s novel is a private investigator in Brooklyn who was a decorated New York City police officer until getting framed by enemies within the force.

— Walker is a loner; the brilliant Oliver has a family (a teen daughter and former wife).

— Assumption is marked by a certain relaxed, understated quality (despite several murders occurring) while Down the River unto the Sea possesses a more frenetic urban vibe that had me eagerly turning the pages.

— The Mosley book’s conclusion is very satisfying but not shocking, while the Everett novel’s conclusion takes one of the most surprising twists I’ve ever encountered in literature. A twist I didn’t like, but it certainly got my attention and left me scrambling to think if there had been noticeable clues presaging what would happen.

So, yes, novels that seem somewhat similar are frequently quite different. Meaning readers often get a lot of variety even when they think they’re taking a hiatus from that.

Your thoughts on this topic?

Note: Mosley is best known for his acclaimed Easy Rawlins mysteries, while among Everett’s other novels are 2001’s Erasure (which inspired the 2023 movie American Fiction) and 2024’s James (which tells Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn saga from the perspective of escaped slave Jim rather than Huck.

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 — containing endorsements of Township Council candidates and my take on an amended lawsuit by Black firefighters credibly charging racism — is here.

Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. (Photos by Adam Bettcher and Andy Lyons/Getty Images.)

Female athletes are very much in the news these days with the NCAA basketball tournament. The University of Iowa (featuring superstar Caitlin Clark) is facing the University of South Carolina (featuring acclaimed center Kamilla Cardoso) in this afternoon’s championship game. Also in the Final Four or Elite Eight were the University of Connecticut’s Paige Bueckers, Louisiana State University’s Angel Reese, and other notables.

You know where this is going: I’m about to write a post about athletic women in fiction, mentioning various characters from novels I’ve read. 🙂

With basketball on my mind, I first remembered Patty Berglund of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The novel mostly depicts her as a post-school adult, but she was a great student basketball player.

We also have golfer Jordan Baker of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. A character inspired by the famous real-life golfer Edith Cummings.

Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall co-stars excellent tennis player (and tennis instructor) Joy Delaney, whose disappearance is the novel’s main story line.

Vivi Ann Grey of Kristin Hannah’s True Colors is a masterful equestrian who does rodeo work, too.

The very athletic prehistoric protagonist Ayla in Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and its five sequels also ably rides a horse (as well as a lion!), double-slings rocks, etc.

The 14th-century character Lady Claire d’Eltham of Michael Crichton’s Timeline impressively runs and climbs trees.

Katniss Everdeen of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy is highly skilled at archery, which comes in handy given the dangers she faces.

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the co-ed sport of Quidditch includes talented female players such as Ginny Weasley, Cho Chang, Katie Bell, and Angelina Johnson.

Athletic characters, whether female or male, obviously can make for interesting reading in literature. The personalities, the camaraderie, the hard work to become as physically and mentally strong as possible, the risk of injury, the thrill of competition, the suspense of who might win or lose, the potential for cheating and other shenanigans, etc. In the case of women, athleticism is thankfully more welcomed in our current era than it was many years, decades, and centuries ago.

Thoughts on this topic, and any other examples of athletic characters you’d like to mention?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 an accusation against another township manager, and more — is here.

One of the ways novelists can be inventive is with…inventions.

Yes, some of their books weave stories around some of the greatest inventions in the history of humankind. That can certainly add drama and historic resonance to partly fact-based fiction.

A prime example is Gutenberg’s Apprentice by Alix Christie, who tells the 15th-century story of a man who (at first reluctantly) helps the prickly, driven Johann Gutenberg develop the printing press — surely one of the most consequential inventions of all time. I’m currently in the middle of reading this absorbing 2014 novel.

Part of The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) revolves around the invention and early days of the automobile — which figures in Booth Tarkington’s absorbing exploration of progress vs. stasis, and new money vs. old money.

Stephen King’s novel Cell takes a horror-laden (and satirical?) approach to cell phones as that technology was becoming widely popular. The book — perhaps my least-favorite King effort — features a mysterious broadcast over a cell-phone network that turns a bunch of people into zombie-like beings. 🙂 Published in 2006, a year before the iPhone was introduced.

The main focus of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) is the switching in infancy of two boys — one born into slavery and the other born to the master of the house. But a fascinating subplot features a court case in which the new technology of fingerprinting figures prominently. Interestingly, that new technology was anachronistically more current to when Twain wrote the novel than to the time period in which the novel was set.

Also anachronistic was Ayla’s much-too-early invention of the travois (a type of sled or platform, pulled by a horse, on which could be placed heavy loads) in Jean M. Auel’s circa-18,000 BC-set series that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear. The incredibly resourceful Ayla’s method of starting a fire was more contemporary to her prehistoric time.

Novels with time travel can certainly make inventions fascinating. For instance, the 20th-century physician Claire of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels creates some homemade penicillin after she ends up living in the 18th century. Claire knew about that antibiotic because penicillin was discovered in 1928.

Another time travel book, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), was prescient in inventing an early version of a debit card — the modern version of which didn’t arrive until 1966.

Science fiction can of course also predict and depict inventions before they’re actually invented. One of countless examples is the spaceship from Earth in H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon.

For younger readers, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams took an early look at computers — which tended to be huge at the time of that novel’s 1958 publication.

Your thoughts on this topic? Other novels with a strong invention element?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 controversial project being voted on again, some overpaid municipal hires, and more — is here.

In Amiens, France.

Jules Verne died on this day, March 24, in 1905. A good excuse for a post about science fiction, but I’ve “been there, done that” in 2016. So I’ll instead discuss fiction writers who were also elected to public office.

What’s that have to do with sci-fi master Verne? Well, in 1888 he was elected a councilor in the French city of Amiens, and served in that role for the next 15 years.

Then there’s John Grisham, who I read again this month…namely, his compelling novel The Broker from 2005, exactly a century after Verne’s death. Unlike Verne, Grisham held political office mostly before his writing career, serving in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990. Which would certainly help his books, many of which have a political bent in addition to their frequent legal bent.

Booth Tarkington (The Magnificent Ambersons, etc.) did one term in the Indiana House of Representatives starting in 1902 — meaning he and Verne were in office at the same time, 4,000 miles apart.

Clare Boothe Luce was elected in Connecticut to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving from 1942 to 1946. She first became famous the previous decade as a playwright, most notably with her Broadway smash The Women.

Vaclav Havel also first rose to prominence as a playwright before becoming the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic between 1989 and 2003.

Then there were writers who tried for public office but weren’t elected. For instance, Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, etc.) ran for governor of California in 1934 on a progressive anti-poverty platform and received a very respectable 879,000 votes despite being massively smeared by wealthy right-wing interests. He wrote a book about that campaign the following year that contained this classic line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Gore Vidal lost campaigns for a New York congressional seat (1960) and a California U.S. Senate seat (1982). In 1969, Norman Mailer ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.

Why do some authors seek and/or hold political office? There’s ego, of course, and the hope that they can have more impact in an elected position than through their writing. Or at least additional impact from combining the two pursuits.

Then there are people best known as politicians who have also written novels (often but not always after they leave office and sometimes with the help of co-authors or ghostwriters). Hillary Rodham Clinton co-authored State of Terror with renowned mystery writer Louise Penny, and Bill Clinton wrote The President Is Missing with author James Patterson. Other politicians going the novel route have included Jimmy Carter, Winston Churchill, and Newt Gingrich, among others.

I realize I’ve probably left out many fiction writers/elected officials, especially non-U.S. ones. Any you’d like to mention? Thoughts on this topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 my town’s controversial fire chief thankfully retiring, and more — is here.

Why do I have con artists on my mind? Well, Donald Trump recently wrapped up the 2024 Republican nomination for president, and I just read a novel featuring a character who seemingly has scamming on her mind.

There are a number of fictional people in literature who can be described as grifters, swindlers, carnival barkers, etc. Some are blatant scoundrels, while others are somewhat more nuanced amid their skullduggery. Once in a while, they might not be con artists at all, even if we think they are for much of the book.

If they ARE tricksters, we as readers ask: How clever are they? Will they succeed? When might they get their comeuppance? Just how gullible are their victims? Are we reminded of our own gullibility we may have displayed sometime in the past? Do we think of real-life flimflammers? Such as the aforementioned Trump.

The novel I just read — Joy Fielding’s Whispers and Lies — features twenty-something Alison Simms as the con artist (or not?) and 40-year-old Terry Painter as her “mark” (or not?). The lonely Painter, a nurse at a Florida facility for senior citizens and people with disabilities, rents the cottage behind her home to Alison. Terry finds her tenant charming, even as she’s also wary of her. Some very dramatic stuff ensues, and we get a twist ending few readers would see coming.

Other examples of con artists in literature?

There’s of course the iconic title character in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which inspired an obscure movie you probably never heard of. 🙂 He is pictured above in that film, as played by Frank Morgan.

Nouveau riche millionaire Jay Gatsby, who made his fortune illicitly, is also a snake-oil salesman of sorts — reinventing himself as someone he’s really not in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

While he has some admirable qualities, Tom Sawyer of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn novels has con-artist tendencies as well — whether it involves getting others to paint a fence in the first book or cruelly messing around with runaway slave Jim’s psyche in the second work. (Huckleberry Finn also features some shady characters in secondary roles.)

Lydia Gwilt possesses a measure of decency amid the unscrupulousness in Wilkie Collins’ novel Armadale. Like some con artists, she might have behaved differently if she hadn’t had such a challenging upbringing.

There is also Savannah, who insinuates herself into the lives of the Delaney family in a way that feels very suspicious in Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall.

I’ve only read one of Patricia Highsmith’s five novels featuring Tom Ripley, but that character is clearly a con artist who mixes criminality, likability, and more.

The last book I’ll mention is The Confidence-Man, but that’s one of the few Herman Melville works I haven’t read so I can’t say anything about it.

In the theatrical realm, we have Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man and its dishonest traveling salesman Harold Hill.

Fictional con artists you’ve known and loathed? Or maybe liked a little bit?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 whether a local governing body should take a stand on global issues such as the current Mideast carnage — is here.

The vehicle in The Time Machine movie from 1960. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)

I’ve written before about how I love to occasionally read time-travel novels — even mediocre ones. It’s exciting to see how sojourning characters react to the past or future, to see how residents of the past or future react to those travelers, and to think about ourselves leaving the current era. Other reasons to enjoy those novels, too.

But one angle I’ve never focused on is the wide variety of methods authors use to get their characters into another time period. That can be fascinating, and we admire the oft-cleverness of said methods.

I just read the compelling Timeline by Michael Crichton, who transports his late-1990s characters into 14th-century France with the help of computers and quantum physics. People are sent to the past like Star Trek crew members beamed to a planet’s surface, or maybe more like three-dimensional faxes. (It’s hard to explain; you’d have to read the novel. 🙂 )

What are the transporting methods in some of the other time-travel novels I’ve enjoyed?

There are books, of course, that put their characters into the past or future via an actual time machine, as in H.G. Wells’ novel…The Time Machine.

Or characters can be in a seemingly ordinary vehicle that ends up making a temporal journey — as with a railroad train that takes the protagonist of Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back into the past, and a subway train that does the same for the children in Caroline Emerson’s novel The Magic Tunnel.

Hermione in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban uses a small “Time-Turner” device that enables the studious teen not to miss any courses scheduled at the same time. 🙂

An unusual library situated between life and death provides the means to visit various timelines in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series has her characters go through stones to travel from the 20th century to the 18th century and back again.

Drugs? Those, too. The 1960s protagonist of Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand gets to the 1300s that way.

A severe blow to the head also works; that’s how “Camelot” is visited from the 19th century in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Self-hypnosis does the trick in Jack Finney’s Time and Again. Similarly, the lead character in Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward goes to the future via a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep.

The co-star of The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is repeatedly pulled from the present because of a genetic disorder.

How some other characters travel through time is kind of mysterious. Octavia Butler’s Kindred protagonist is yanked to the past perhaps by being summoned by an ancestor? The star of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time somehow uses her empathy and perceptiveness to interact with a future being.

Thoughts about and/or examples of this topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 my town’s unpopular mayor thankfully not seeking reelection — is here.

In 2018, I wrote about late-career novels. Today, I’m going to tighten that focus to discuss final novels.

There’s something poignant and memorable about an author’s last book — whether it’s good or not-so-good, finished or unfinished, written when the author was aged or relatively young, published in the author’s lifetime or posthumously, etc.

Few final novels are the very best of an author’s canon, given that many soon-to-die people are often not in the very best of health — and/or perhaps not brimming with as many new ideas as when they were in their writing primes. But there can be exceptions or near-exceptions.

A couple of mentions before I begin: I’m focusing on authors with a number of books in their canon, not authors who wrote only one or two novels. And there have been some cases where posthumously published novels were written by the author before other novels by the author, so I’m not considering those to be final books — even if they were the last to be released.

Maybe the most famous last hurrah was The Brothers Karamazov (1880), considered one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s two best novels along with Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky died at age 59, so there might been more stellar works ahead; in fact, the author reportedly envisioned The Brothers Karamazov as the first of a trilogy. But death intervened in early 1881.

George Eliot, who died in 1880 at age 61, saw her final novel Daniel Deronda published in 1876. Not as highly esteemed as Middlemarch, but I found it to be her most emotionally gripping work. Quite a fiction finale, as it turned out.

Ten years later, in 1886, Herman Melville began sporadic work on Billy Budd — not finishing it before he died in 1891 at age 72. It was finally published in 1924, and is in the conversation as possibly the best Melville novel other than Moby-Dick (1851).

Staying with the 19th century, the novel that Charlotte Bronte wrote last was Villette (1853) — which has many good moments but nowhere near the power of the author’s Jane Eyre (1847). With her young novelist sisters Emily and Anne dying in 1848 and in 1849, respectively, Charlotte was understandably depressed during the Villette writing process. She died in 1855 at age 38.

In the 1890s, Robert Louis Stevenson worked on two novels simultaneously — both of which he would not finish before his 1894 death at age 44. One of them, Weir of Hermiston, is a quantum-leap better than his excellent previous fiction.

Unfinished as well was The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald — who also passed at 44, in 1940. Not The Great Gatsby or Tender Is the Night, but very compelling.

John Steinbeck’s final novel (though not his final book) was The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which is very absorbing, even if not in The Grapes of Wrath masterpiece territory. Steinbeck died in 1968 at age 66.

Any final novels you’d like to mention?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

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 huge unpaid municipal utility bill and more — is here.