The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (12 page)

R
are is the person who goes through life with his or her heart intact. Once the arrow has flown from Cupid’s bow and struck its target, quivering with a mischievous thrill, there begins a chemical reaction that dispatches its victim on a journey filled with some of life’s most sublime pleasures but also its most tormented pitfalls. (See: Love, doomed; Love, unrequited; Lovesickness; Falling out of love with love; and, frankly, most of the other ailments in this book.) Nine times out of ten,
*
romance is dashed on the rocks and it all ends in tears.

Why so cynical? Because literature bursts with heartbreak like so many aortic aneurisms. You can barely pick up a novel that does not secrete the grief of a failed romance or the loss of a loved one through death, betrayal, or some such unforeseen disaster. Heartbreak doesn’t just afflict those on the outward journey; it can strike even when you thought you were safely stowed (see also: Adultery; Divorce; and Death of a loved one). When afflicted you have no choice, at least not initially, but to sit down with a big box of tissues, another of chocolates, and a novel that will open up the tear ducts and allow you to cry yourself a river. Heartrending music could accompany your read; some would say this is crucial, especially if you have a tendency to keep your emotions under tight control (see: Emotions, inability to express).

It works for the father and son in Niall Williams’s seriously hanky-drenching
As It Is in Heaven
, both still brokenhearted and stunned by the deaths in a car crash of Philip’s wife, Anne, and their ten-year-old daughter some years before. Both cut from the same cloth, retired tailor Philip and his shy, history teacher son, Stephen, have retreated into their separate, solitary worlds, shutting their hearts to each other and everyone else. Indeed Philip can think of little else but giving his money away to the poor and joining his wife as quickly as possible, aided and abetted by the cancer with which he’s been diagnosed.

But once a month, when they meet to play chess, they are enveloped by the music of Puccini. And as we meet the other inhabitants of Ennis, the
small town in Ireland where they live, we watch how Stephen finds himself compelled to go to a concert despite driving his car into a ditch on the way. Everything changes overnight. For at the concert he hears Italian violinist Gabriella Castoldi, causing “pools” of “clear black sadness” to fill inside him, and he begins to let out his grief at last. When a thirst for the music becomes a thirst for the musician herself, Stephen’s father plays a pivotal role—romantic love is the most powerful motivation in his life too. Now his greatest desire is to help Stephen find happiness with Gabriella. And as the symphony builds to its uplifting conclusion, we see how Stephen’s healing brings healing to his father too. Let yourself be swept along for the ride. As this novel shows, the passage of time—and love—does heal.

Broken hearts can be redeemed—and for those refusing to give up on their lost love, we prescribe
Jane Eyre
. When Jane and Rochester’s marriage ceremony is interrupted by the announcement that the owner of Thornfield Hall has a wife already, Jane is too shocked to cry: “I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river,” she says, though the “full heavy swing” of the torrent does come later. Bereft, she forgives Rochester in an instant when he shows that he still loves her as much as ever. But the better part of her knows that there is neither “room nor claim” for her, and despite the “cracking” of her heartstrings, she tells him she must go. At which point it’s Mr. Rochester’s turn to be heartbroken: “Jane! . . . Jane, do you mean to go one way in the world, and to let me go another?” Has there ever been a more heartrending spelling out of the pain of parting?
*

All is not lost, however. Jane gets her dark hero in the end—but on her own terms and with her self-respect intact. Mr. Rochester, true, is a charred ruin of his former self by this time, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Jane has a fortune of her own now, which enables them to meet as equals, and she never gets tired of reading out loud to him. Follow Jane’s example: On no account must you attempt to mend your broken heart by compromising your integrity. Better to suffer with dignity than to self-placate in shame. And you never know who might notice and love you all the more for your strength of character and ability to endure.

It’s vital to grieve when love is lost. Drop out for a while to do it. (See: Cry, in need of a good, for our ten best weepies.) Don’t compromise unwisely in an attempt to make yourself feel better. Cupid will strike again, either with new love or the same love, in new circumstances. And if you
decide that you’re better off on your own, there are plenty of solitary pleasures to be had in this book.

See also:
Appetite, loss of
•
Despair
•
Hope, loss of
•
Sadness
•
Turmoil
•
Yearning, general

Cleave

NIKKI GEMMELL

B
eing able to move—to walk, to run, by extension to run away—is overrated. There’s much more sense in staying put. But if you’ve broken your leg and are wondering how you will stay sane lying in one place or hobbling around on crutches for the next few weeks, turn to
Cleave
by Australian novelist Nikki Gemmell. The title of Gemmell’s debut—written in crisp, inventive prose ever aware of its sounds and contours—is an antagonym, a word that, by a freakish accident of linguistic evolution, also means its own opposite. Muse as you read on the relationship of
cleave
(“to split”) to
cleave
(“to stick fast to”). It will help you visualize the cleft nature of your bone and therefore speed up its new cleaving.

Snip—“thin and bitten from too much life on the run”—had her first taste of being on the move when her father took her from her mother twenty-five years earlier. He cut her hair (hence, Snip) to make her look like a boy so no one would find her. Now thirty, Snip has made sure that the men in her life have always had the feeling she’ll be out the door any minute, so that while they’re with her they’re hooked. Then, when she decides it’s over, out the door she goes. “No number. No forwarding address. A new town, another rupture.”

That is, until she meets Dave, a city boy who answers her ad for a companion to drive her and her Holden Ute from Sydney to Alice. Snip is quick to dismiss him as not her type. His face is “too open,” too untroubled. He “blares” good health. He shows all the signs of having been loved very much in his life, like a rock that’s been sitting in the sun. She runs away again, of course, but headlong into an experience that forces her to reevaluate her habit.

Don’t be a Snip. Be a Dave. Lie in that hospital bed with the expanse of the Australian desert unfolding in your mind (you’ll particularly appreciate,
no doubt, the image of “the great stretch of blue arching above . . . [with] the shin-bone beauty of a lone ghost gum against a reddened hill”) and be like a rock emanating heat to those who come to your bedside. Not only will you get lots of attention, but you’ll end up with new friends to go see once you’re up and about again. The reader invests a lot in Dave and ardently hopes for Snip to find a way to cleave to him—a desire that will manifest itself in the reknitting of your bones.

See also:
Hospital, being in the
•
Pain, being in

See:
Trust, loss of

The Grapes of Wrath

JOHN STEINBECK

•   •   •

The House of Mirth

EDITH WHARTON

T
here’s a reason they called the global economic crisis of the 1930s the Great Depression, beyond depressed stock prices and failed banks. The Great Depression was also a time of misery, sadness, and despair as the afflicted populace saw its prosperity and prospects come crashing down. These days, in the new millennium’s Great Recession, that bleak mood is felt by many who agonize that the present, and future, are chancy. If you’re feeling frightened, pessimistic, and whipped by fate, mend your broken spirit by reading John Steinbeck’s novel
The Grapes of Wrath
. It’s about the desolate Joads, a family of tenant farmers from Depression-era Oklahoma who travel to California looking for crop-picking work.

After serving four years in prison for manslaughter, Tom Joad emerges to discover that the Dust Bowl has ruined his family’s fortunes. Bad as things are, he struggles to get work to help his family. A young migrant worker he meets on the road tells Tom that men like them have to put up with whatever employers dish out because work is so scarce, and it’s best not to get a reputation as a complainer. Tom retorts, “So we take what we can get, huh, or we starve; an’ if we yelp we starve.” That is not how Tom rolls;
he may be an ex-con living in a tent city and warming himself by a trash fire, but he has his pride. “I ain’t gonna take it,” he says. “Goddamn it, I an’ my folks ain’t no sheep. I’ll kick the hell outa somebody.” Tom won’t let a stranger demoralize him and he won’t give up. When work comes his way, he tells his sister Ruthie, “I got a chance at a job, an’ I’m a-goin’ for it.” Even as calamity after calamity continues to befall the luckless Joads, Tom’s resolve is unshaken. He determines to bring the workers together to defend their rights. However rough a road you may be on, you can take heart in recognizing that the Joad family’s was surely worse, and find inspiration in Tom Joad’s convictions and courage.

But what if your broken spirit is not a product of evil times but of your own outsize ambition, which has led you to aim for greater glory than you were likely to attain, resulting in dashed dreams and frustrated hopes? Rather than stew, mope, and give up on yourself, recalibrate your desires and reconceive your achievable potential by reading Edith Wharton’s wickedly perceptive social novel
The House of Mirth
. Wharton’s beautiful, haughty, and calculating antiheroine, Lily Bart, wrecks her own happiness by setting the bar too high. Lily was born to wealth, but after her father’s bankruptcy and death, she loses both her money and her status. Nearing thirty, she determines to regain both through marriage. She stubbornly refuses to accept reality, turning down eligible men because they’re not rich enough or sophisticated enough, until there’s hardly anyone left for her to reject. Even as her romantic career circles the drain, she continues showing callousness to the few men who still come knocking. One of those, a former suitor named George Dorset, who has a philandering wife, asks Lily to save his reputation and mend hers by marrying him. She refuses him. “I’m sorry; there’s nothing in the world that I can do,” she says. That is because she, unlike you, is not capable of being flexible and adjusting her views to match her possibilities. Don’t be like Lily. Shore up your spirits by inventing for yourself a realizable future. Then fight your way there, like Tom Joad.