The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (20 page)

S
ome novels make you want to keep it all in; others make you want to let it all come out. This sprawling, voluminous novel set in the poverty-stricken slums of Bombay, written by Australian ex–bank robber Gregory David Roberts, will have you unblocked in no time at all. Read it for its narrator’s great warmth, its embrace of all that is spirited and lawless inside. Read it for the ease with which the words tumble out, raising up this city of twenty million with its choking heat and dirty mirages, its acre upon acre of shantytown in which people go about their lives: eating, smoking, arguing, copulating, haggling, singing, shaving, birthing, playing, cooking, dying—and relieving themselves—all in full view of one another. Read it for its lovely list of soft fruits that may loosen your small intestines like a lexical laxative: pawpaw, papaya, custard apples,
mosambi
(sweet lime), grapes, watermelon, banana,
santra
(orange), mango. And above all read it for Prabaker’s description of the male slum dwellers’ morning “motions,” which occur en masse off the side of a jetty, young men and boys squatting with their buttocks to the ocean in convivial harmony, able to spectate at will on one another’s progress, or lack of it. “Oh, yes!” says Prabaker, the narrator’s friend, urging him to come to the jetty, as he knows other people are waiting for them. “They are a fascinating for you. You are like a movie hero for them. They are dying to see how you will make your motions.”

With this image of bare buttock cheeks doing their business in public engraved on your memory, you will be forever grateful for your own private toilet, and eager to make use it. And if, when you get there, the long-awaited “motions” fail to motate, this doorstopper of a novel will keep you marvelously entertained while you wait.

See also:
Irritability

The Way of All Flesh

SAMUEL BUTLER

•   •   •

The Man Who Loved Children

CHRISTINA STEAD

Y
ou know the way you like things. So you like to keep things that way. And you like to tell everyone around you the way you like things, so that they can keep things that way too. Why should you listen to anybody else when you already have things under control?

We’ll tell you why. Because you’re a control freak and nobody likes you. Because being a control freak is hard, endless work that rarely yields good results. And because your children, should they grow up to be famous writers, will expose your domineering ways and tell everyone what an awful person and parent you were. No writer has more thoroughly itemized and weighed his parents’ soul-crushing character flaws than the surprisingly levelheaded Samuel Butler (who fled to New Zealand in the 1850s to get out from under the parental thumb). His semi-autobiographical novel
The Way of All Flesh
offers so many lessons in recovering from damage wrought by control freak parents that it ought to be prescribed to psychotherapists to save them years of study.

Butler hated his bossy clergyman father, and the feeling was mutual. So severe, critical, stern, and punitive was Butler
père
, so rigid his method of raising children, that his son never forgave him for it, even as a grown man. Awed by his dictatorial parent even after the man was dead, Butler did not dare to take his revenge while he himself was alive—his novel was published posthumously. In this curiously engaging book—imagine Dickens without the ruffles and the mawkishness—Butler recalls stultifying silent Sundays, endless, tedious homilies, and harsh punishments. Yet he puts this childhood oppression in context. Like his narrator, he had broken free of his familial shackles and built himself an eventful, self-directed, well-savored life. He urges his readers to follow his example and not to dwell on their early misfortunes at the hands of those who warped them. “A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood,” he writes.

A more recent contender for the most overcontrolling parent in literature goes to the self-mythologizing title character of Christina Stead’s
The Man Who Loved Children
. Sam Pollit, the blithely cruel father in this 1940 novel, builds a cult of personality around himself, using intellectual games, forced
high spirits, and favoritism to make his seven children vie for his attention like members of opposing sports teams—while assuring that ultimately every victory goes to himself. Christina Stead’s crystal-sharp voice chillingly conveys the far-reaching sadism in Sam Pollit’s power games and offers a useful corrective to anyone who’s a little too drunk on his or her own dominion. If you’re given this novel by someone else, you’ll know that includes you.

See also:
Anally retentive, being
•
Dictator, being a
•
Give up halfway through, refusal to
•
Organized, being too
•
Reverence of books, excessive
•
Workaholism

See:
Adolescence
•
Alcoholism
•
Carelessness
•
Drugs, doing too many
•
Rails, going off the
•
Risks, taking too many

August

GERARD WOODWARD

T
here are variations in the intensity of one’s inability to cope. At one end of the spectrum, there’s not being able to deal with the confusion of one particular moment—the laundry, the cat poo, the baby. At the other end our coping mechanism—perhaps depleted further by hormones, exhaustion, insomnia, or sickness—is so compromised by the volume of demands that it seizes up completely. Here we prescribe for the mild form of the ailment, somewhere between spilled milk and spilled blood. (If your inability to cope is more extreme, see: Stress; Depression. And if you suffer from just being too busy but are in fact juggling it all rather well, stop complaining and get on with whatever it is you’ve got to do—and, while you’re at it, see: Busy, being too.)

When we first meet Colette in Gerard Woodward’s excellent debut novel,
August
, she seems imperturbable. A “funny, interesting wife” to Aldous, she’s also a mother of four with a quirky, blithe spirit. It’s the seventies, and they live together in a bohemian North London home. Each August they go camping at the same spot in Wales, a holiday that becomes the symbolic center of their lives. She is delighted by all that surrounds her—her
children, her clothes, her ability to move “like a ballet dancer” in her job as a bus ticket collector. But it all starts going downhill when she discovers a new means of mental escape: glue sniffing.

Colette’s glue-induced hallucinations are described in thrilling, tempting terms. On holiday, she watches the top of a nearby Welsh hill from her tent, normally a “blend of moss greens and lime greens,” but this afternoon becoming, “slowly, a brilliant fluorescent orange, as though a spoonful of syrup had been tipped over it.” But by the time they get back to London, things have become more disturbing, and Colette is scrabbling around her living room trying to catch miniature sheep.

Faced with Colette’s bizarre behavior, her family is completely out of its depths. It isn’t long before her children start to show signs that they, too, are having coping issues. But even while Colette’s family disintegrates around her, there’s warmth and love here too. For those hanging over the precipice, the pellucid prose of this sympathetic novel will help clear the clamor of your mind—at least you have your mental faculties intact. Use them to regroup and set some priorities. Deal with what’s important first, and leave what isn’t until later on. It won’t be hard to feel more in control than Colette.

See also:
Christmas
•
Cry, in need of a good
•
Exhaustion
•
Fatherhood
•
Motherhood
•
Single parent, being a

Catch-22

JOSEPH HELLER

•   •   •

The Good Soldier

FORD MADOX FORD

•   •   •

Burmese Days

GEORGE ORWELL