The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (10 page)

Desperate Characters

PAULA FOX

I
f you suffer from boredom, whether you live in London, Shanghai, Yaroslavl’, or a tiny mountain hamlet, it might just be your own boring fault. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Samuel Johnson said—or at least James Boswell said he said it, in his
Life of Johnson
, more than two hundred years ago. Johnson knew it wasn’t fair to blame boredom on geography: each of us is responsible for whipping up our own interest in the world.

In
Desperate Characters
, a dark gem of a novel by the American writer Paula Fox, a bite from a feral cat in Brooklyn shakes a bourgeois New York couple out of their congealed routine. The setting is New York in the last years of the 1960s. “We are all of us dying of boredom,” a pompous playwright tells Sophie and Otto Bentwood at a neighborhood party, and the Bentwoods do not disagree. “Boredom,” the playwright goes on, “is the why of the war, the why of the assassinations, the why of why.” Is she right? In the wake of the deaths of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., the calm, coherent backdrop of the Eisenhower era had been replaced by a noisome collage of cultural change in which Vietnam, hippies, the Pill, and the civil rights movement jostled in the collective unconscious. Amid such confusion, can the sense of pointlessness the Bentwoods and their friends feel truly be put down to boredom?

Set in their ways and childless in their early forties, Otto and Sophie have bought a town house in a gentrifying part of Brooklyn, as have many of their friends. But at this early stage of transition, the neighborhood has rejected the transplants—or, at least, is not accepting the new organs easily. Seamy remnants of the neighborhood’s previous population linger on the sidewalks, throwing rocks, drunkenly colliding with trash cans, leering and lurching to show the newcomers they’re not welcome. You might think that fear for their own safety would keep the Bentwoods at a pitch of alertness that would stave off ennui. Apparently not.

As the novel begins, Otto has fallen out with his longtime law partner, Charlie Russel, whom he considers hypocritically sentimental and has come to hate. Otto dislikes people who display “unseemly emotions,” he dislikes the lurking bums on his Brooklyn block, and he doesn’t like gentrifiers such as himself any better. As he tells his wife as they leave a neighborhood
gathering, “I’m tired of parties. I get so bored.” More interesting to them both is whether the stray cat that bit Sophie is rabid. Sophie delays going to the hospital, and their anxiety about her possible rabies gradually brings them to a greater appreciation of their previous comfort. As they flee the city for a restorative visit to their country place, Sophie is on the verge of needling Otto when she catches herself and thinks, “Why interrupt the pleasant boredom of the drive?”

Desperate Characters
is a useful reminder that boredom can be a good thing; it may mean that nothing is terribly wrong with your life, which ought to give you a boost and encourage you to stoke your enthusiasm. “The sky was all clear now, a bland, washed blue, and the occasional house that could be glimpsed from the road looked freshly painted and prosperous and eternal,” Sophie thinks, her mood lifting. If you find yourself experiencing the malaise of feeling fitfully bored, it’s probably an occasion to celebrate. Follow the example set by Chloe in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and “tink ob yer marcies.”

See also:
Apathy
•
Dissatisfaction
•
Lethargy
•
Mundanity, oppressed by
•
Stagnation, mental

See:
Anally retentive, being
•
Humorlessness
•
Organized, being too
•
Risks, not taking enough
•
Sci-fi, stuck on
•
Teetotaler, being a

See:
Bully, being a
•
Control freak, being a
•
Dictator, being a

Franny and Zooey

J. D. SALINGER

I
don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy.” So says Mrs. Glass in J. D. Salinger’s novella
Franny and Zooey
—and she should know. Mother of seven precocious prodigies who have
all featured as panelists on the popular radio show
It’s a Wise Child
, she has since lost her eldest (Seymour) to suicide, and is now watching her youngest (Franny) have a suspected nervous breakdown on the living room couch.

Being brainier than everyone else should, in theory, be a positive thing. But there’s nothing mediocre people hate more than having their mediocrity exposed. Unfortunately, this sentences the exceptionally brainy child to a lifetime of alienation. The Glass children find themselves branded either “a bunch of insufferably ‘superior’ little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth” or the kinder but distrustful “bona fide underage wits and savants.” And if the exceptionally brainy are not pushed away by others, they often end up pushing others away. Clever people are easily bored and disappointed by their peers. Franny’s apparent breakdown is triggered by a weekend date with her college beau Lane, during which she finds herself criticizing him relentlessly. “I simply could
not
keep a single opinion to myself,” she laments to her brother Zooey. “It was just horrible. Almost from the very second he met me at the station, I started picking and picking and picking at all his opinions and values and—just
ev
erything.” It makes her hate herself.

In life, it’s usually the Lanes of this world who get the sympathy—those “normal” people on the receiving end of “abnormal” behavior. But literature likes to side with the freaks, and the exceptionally brainy will find great relief in Franny’s description of her torment. Luckily, readers adore characters like the Glass siblings for the very traits for which their peers dislike them, and the exceptionally brainy should take some comfort from this.

If, like Franny and Zooey, your cleverness has cut you off from the world, it’s vital not to hate the world for it (see: Bitterness). Franny and Zooey eventually find a way out of their disaffection via an epiphany that allows them to see God in everyone. You may prefer to leave God out of it; the invocation really is just to love others. This charming novella will fill you with a sense of solidarity and replenish your tank of love whenever it threatens to run dry.

See also:
Different, being

High Fidelity

NICK HORNBY

A
s the songs say, breaking up is hard to do. And whether you’re the dumper or the dumped, you should never go through it alone. Ideally, you need your hand held by a friend who has also been battered and bruised by relationship bust-ups and knows how it feels (for more of which, see: Broken heart). We offer you the hand of Rob, the music-mad hero of Nick Hornby’s paean to pop,
High Fidelity
. In our list of all-time best breakup novels (see below), this holds the number one spot. For though the vinyl may have dated, the experience, the emotions, the lessons, and the truths have not.

In order to make sense of his latest breakup—with live-in girlfriend Laura—Rob revisits his all-time top five most memorable splits, from the “first chuck” inflicted by twelve-year-old Alison Ashworth (who, for reasons that remain as unfathomable as they were then, decided to snog Kevin Bannister after school instead of him) to the humiliation of Charlie Nicholson upgrading to someone called Marco. Every page jangles with bells of recognition: who hasn’t experienced the initial wave of tentative optimism—part liberation, part nervous excitement—that washes over you in the immediate aftermath of a breakup, only to have it wiped out by a crushing sense of loss the minute it hits you that she or he is not coming back? And who hasn’t wondered which comes first—the music or the misery—as heartache plays out to the accompaniment of “Love Hurts” or “Walk on By”?

One of the hard truths Rob learns is that breakups do not get easier the more we go through. “It would be nice to think that as I’ve got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed . . . ,” bemoans thirty-five-year-old Rob. And yet, with some help from Hornby, one can try to do it a bit better than the time before. The main lesson for Rob is one of commitment (see: Commitment, fear of), but as you watch him pick through the shards of his broken loves, you’ll soon know which lessons are meant expressly for you. Are you the sort, like the twentysomething Rob, to react to your bust-ups by flunking college and going to work in a record shop (or today’s equivalent)? Do you beat yourself up, like the older Rob, for being a rejection magnet, when, in fact, you’ve left your own fair share of broken hearts in your wake? The wisdom of this novel may be from
a decidedly masculine point of view, but there are patterns here that will map onto almost any breakup and that you can use to help recognize the part you played. Girls will do well to remind themselves that boys cry into their pillows too. And the spurned may get a kick from the fortysomething woman who tries to flog her husband’s priceless record collection for fifty pounds because he’s run off to Spain with a twenty-three-year-old friend of her daughter’s. (Before you get any similar ideas, note Rob’s impressively disciplined response and see: Vengeance, seeking.)