The best novels that mix comedy and tragedy

After a long fiction reading drought, I picked up this novel and could not put it down. There is so much depressing literary fiction saturating the market, that I had nearly given up on the genre until I read The Heart’s Invisible Furies. We follow Ireland’s evolution from a theocracy to the first nation to approve marriage equality via popular vote through the eyes of gay Dubliner Cyril Avery. Once I read this opening line, I was hooked: “Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.”

If you’re older, you probably read O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” for one or more lit classes; if you’re younger, you may have never heard of her as she is now “problematic” according to the unfunny woke-on-steroids crowd. I love O’Connor because I love characters with moral failings, I love mordant humor, and I love the possibility that even the most irredeemable among us can experience moments of grace. The brief details in her stories do such heavy lifting in terms of irony, for example when a Wellesley undergrad hits Mrs. Turpin in the head with a copy of Human Development in the short story “Revelation.” The action itself – a privileged white college student from an elite school inflicting violence upon a rural white woman – also speaks to our ongoing culture wars. 

What I’ve noticed about curmudgeons is that they often cast a long shadow of despair that they can never quite ever seem to shake. Ove is a grumpy old man, and, over the course of his unsuccessful attempts to end his own life, we learn more about his past with a woman named Sonja. “Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.” Almost against his will, Ove emerges from his cocoon of grief and guilt to learn how to live again, in his own singular, peculiar, and heartwarming way.

Lorna Landvik’s experience as a stand-up comic shines through in her debut novel, a Minnesota tale about what happens when Patty Jane's husband leaves her, and how she and her sister, Harriett, reinvent themselves by opening a neighborhood beauty parlor – complete with live harp music and Norwegian baked goods. You don’t have to be from Minnesota to appreciate the regional humor, and the narrative voice sounds like an old friend who has shared your joys and heartbreaks over years of good times, bad times, and all those times in between.

While the gay coming of age novel is now a genre unto itself, this 1973 novel about Molly Bolt’s journey from the impoverished south to the concrete jungle is most likely the book that started it all. Brown beautifully renders hysterical moments like Molly’s savage turn as the Virgin Mary in a children’s nativity play, to her involuntary institutionalization when it’s discovered she’s a lesbian. A funny, sad, and unforgettable story for anyone who has been labeled an “outsider.”