In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, the spy was Harvey Birch, who reported to George Washington. His mission was to watch British troop movements and learn what he could of their intentions. In the novel, he had an unofficial mission: to help Henry Wharton, a British officer, visit his family and return safely to...
Since I had read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) before reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), I first met Tom Sawyer in that novel. It wasn’t a welcome meeting. Towards the end of the story, Tom played a game that almost cost Jim, the runaway slave, his life. Tom considered it great...
Kim by Rudyard Kipling isn’t a spy novel as much as a novel about the type of person who would be recruited as a spy. Kimball O’Hara is a street urchin living in Lahore. A well-known and liked orphan—the locals call him “Friend to all the World”—he’s the offspring between a British soldier, with...
I had high hopes for Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Theses hopes rested in part on There Will Be Blood (2007), a movie based on the novel, a movie I loved. But the film, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, shares the “idea” of Sinclair’s novel, but not its plot....
Somewhere, around the 200th page, I thought to myself: Larsson needs to stop introducing new characters. Every one of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels contains a large cast of characters, but The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest had so many characters who became major or minor protagonists or antagonists that the plot grew complicated...
We all love a good spy novel. At least, I know I love espionage thrillers. I have already reviewed several on this blog, including Red Sparrow, The Rhythm Section, and Leaving Berlin. The spy has always been part of Western literature. In Homer’s Iliad, there is a book dedicated to Odysseus and Diomedes as...
Something is broken in Kenny Becker’s life, but he doesn’t know what it is or how to fix it. At thirty, he’s stuck in a dead-end job, and he has mixed feelings about his relationship with La Donna. Maybe he loves her. Maybe he enjoys having a woman around for sexual reasons. He wonders...
Edna Pontellier had followed the course of life laid out for women in the Turn of the Century America. She married young, and her choice of husband was a businessman with strong ambition and rising prospects. A Creole, he introduced her to the New Orleans Creole community, where she was stunned by the frank...
I don’t believe I’ve ever read any book that I have more trouble reviewing than Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Though it’s classified as a novel, it is unlike any novel I had read before. In truth, as I read it, I thought of it more as an epic poem than a novel. It seems...
As you read a novel, you do not need to like the protagonists; in fact, it’s possible to hate the main characters and still enjoy the novel. You can sympathize with them, understand their problems, relate to them, recognize their moral dilemmas, and even wish them success towards their goals. All while despising them....
