I’ve been accused of reading too much depressing fiction. Novels about people overcoming adversity don’t really seem depressing to me, but unless they’re about famous people, you don’t know whether they’ll rise above it in any way until the end. Humor at its best is one way to surmount grim reality, so a humorous novel about believable people with real problems is a sure bet, and the humor is a relief throughout the book.

Last year I picked three titles that were reviewed in the Seattle Times. Is The Empress of Weehawken based on author Irene Dische’s real grandmother? Bigoted and meddlesome, she’s a marvelous character to satirize, but the satire never seems cruel. Karen Joy Fowler seems to reinvent herself with every book. Wit’s End is a modern spoof about mysteries and their fans.

After the last member of her small family dies, Rima comes to the gothic house of her mystery writer godmother to find why a murderer in the books is named after her father. I wouldn’t have believed that drugs and prostitution could be treated with humor, but Scottish author Chris Hannan succeeds in Missy with wonderful language he found in first person accounts of the Old West. Dol McQueen’s ingenuity carries the plot along, but her affection for her fellow “flash girls” wins out over her get rich schemes in the end.

This year I set myself a task of finding humor that takes on one of my own problems - that of a lapsed Catholic not ready to change religions or to abandon them completely. Are there modern novels written by other people who take “THE FAITH” seriously but not that seriously? Morte D’Urban, by J. F Powers won the National Book Award in 1963, and it’s set in rural Minnesota, where my most of my Catholic relatives live. Father Urban is a middle-aged priest whose way with words and knack for fundraising only get him transferred further into the hinterlands. He leaves the less ambitious, bumbling clerics to do the actual work of sprucing up a former orphanage into a resort for religious retreats while he drives around in a female parishioner’s sports car, adroitly avoiding her attempts to draw him into her right wing political opinions. He’s a contented celibate, who worries that she might get romantic ideas and later swims away in his street clothes to avoid spending a night with the daughter of another donor. As Hayden Carruth wrote in “The New Republic” in 1973, “Parts of this book are so cruel in their mockery that they could only have been written by a Catholic for other Catholics…Anything else would be simply too embarrassing for all of us.”

The cast of characters in Conclave by Roberto Pazzi is made up of the most successful clerics, the cardinals, who are sequestered along with their assistants and the Swiss Guards in the Vatican to choose a new pope. It’s not going well, and one of the cardinals suggests things might loosen up if a Turkish bath were installed to help them relax. It proves so popular that everyone feels they should try it, but the elderly cardinals have never had to deal with the nudity required to enjoy it. Then a series of “plagues” begins, starting with rats, followed by scorpions, then bats. The cats, chickens, and owls brought in to clear up the pests create their own problems, including another plague of impure thoughts!

A fellow librarian told me years ago to try prolific British author David Lodge. His first successful novel, The British Museum is Falling Down, was written at the beginning of the sexual revolution. It’s about a young couple with three young children already who continue to try to practice the rhythm method of birth control, the only one permitted by the Catholic church. Adam Appleby is trying to get started writing his graduate thesis and the book follows him through a day of anguish over the fact that his wife’s period is late again. Some of the humor involves parodies of English literature, most of which escaped me, but there’s a lot that’s reminiscent of Basil Fawlty or Woody Allen here too. “Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around.”

Ruth Korkowski
Adult Services Librarian, High Point Branch, 206-684-7454
Thursdays 11:30-8, Fridays, B-Saturdays & Sundays (RBE), 3rd Tuesday evening or A Tuesday day.