Name That Novel

Remember those college days when you just didn’t get around to reading the 500-page novel before the final exam … so you resorted to CliffsNotes? Well, for the fun of it, let’s turn that experience around. We provide the plot summary, you name the novel and its author.

1. An orphaned Gypsy boy and a free-spirited Yorkshire lass play out a tragic romance – with multigenerational aftershocks – in this classic novel, possibly the finest specimen of Gothic fiction ever penned.

2. Despite a dramatis personae teeming with some of literature’s most colorful characters, at the center of this psychologically complex and, at times, deliciously comical mystery lie a dead man and the river Thames. It was the last complete novel of arguably the most accomplished novelist of the Victorian age.

3. Over-the-hill at 27, the faded heroine of this novel must watch as her jilted fiancé of yesteryear – now a captain of the Royal Navy – looks about for a young bride. With its improbable happy ending, this classic has been described as a gift to all women who would never enjoy a second spring. (Its celebrated author was herself a spinster.)

4. What happens when a planeload of proper British schoolboys is dropped onto a de­serted island and left to their own devices? The collapse of civilization, that’s what – according to this 1956 allegorical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author. The novel was initially a sales dud, but later had great success and was adapted for two films and a play.

5. Two unfinished novels – one about a man accused of an unknown crime, the other about a man seeking employment as a land surveyor – are the best-known works of the surrealist whose name (with the suffix “esque” appended) has become an eponym for irrational and Byzantine bureaucracy.

6. Published in 1919, this novel fictionalized the life of the founder of late 19th-century “primitivism.” In the dogged pursuit of art and beauty, a stockbroker abandons his wife and children, steals another man’s wife, then voyages to the South Pacific, leaving behind him a trail of ruined lives. He eventually self-destructs in a blaze of leprosy-induced blindness and insanity.

7. Those who have read this 1906 novel, set in the grisly meatpackeries of Chicago, can never look at the supermarket deli section in quite the same way.  Ironically, its author – a socialist muckraker who had set out to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labor movement – was dismayed to find public outrage focusing on food safety reforms rather than his intended target, the plight of immigrant “wage slaves.” 

8. Probably the finest dystopia ever written in the English language, this 20th-century British masterpiece presents a future of perfect order peopled by the genetically engineered members of an ideal caste system, governed by a benevolent state, freed from moral constraints to enjoy a life of no-strings-attached hedonism and culminating in drug-induced nirvana and painless death.

9. A minuscule man with a messiah complex and a vocal anomaly that constrains him to scream is the protagonist of this 1989 novel by one of our great living authors. Several of this New Englander’s bestsellers have been turned into successful films, and a few years ago, his screen adaptation (for a different novel) earned him an Academy Award.

›› CONTEST RULES  We are looking for the title and author referenced in each clue. Up to five $30 gift certificates from Borders Books and Music will be awarded to the best bibliophiles among the Last Worders to respond. If more than five perfect entries are received, five winners will be drawn by lot.

Send your answers no later than June 15 to The Last Word c/o USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790. Submissions by fax (213-821-1100) and e-mail <magazines@usc.edu> are welcome.