I had to read Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy in high school. I thought it was terrible and full of implausible plot developments.
I wrote a paper in school parodying it. In the book, a character is stung by an adder and dies at a very convenient moment. In my paper, I had someone get hit by a meteorite which I thought was equally plausible. I wrote that people were more concerned about getting the blood off the meteorite than they were about the victim.
Yesterday, I read that someone really did get hit by a meteorite.
One other note on the book. In Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano, there’s a character named Egdon Heath. Hardy’s book is set in Egdon Heath. I have always wondered if this was because McGuane loved Hardy or hated him.
Sad! 