The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (22 page)

See also:
Antisocial, being
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Bitterness
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Killjoy, being a
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Misanthropy
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Pessimism

Emma

JANE AUSTEN

B
eing a daddy’s girl never did anyone any favors. It’s fine when you’re the doted-upon darling who can’t put a foot wrong. But when you grow up and discover that the rest of the world doesn’t find your foibles as adorable as Daddy does, it will come as a bit of a shock. The new boyfriend won’t be amused to discover he’s barred from the number one spot in your heart. But maybe it doesn’t matter, because he won’t last very long anyway. Nobody’s good enough for a daddy’s girl, and Daddy will make sure this is known.

Emma, the eponymous heroine of Jane Austen’s satire of nineteenth-century marriage, is the ultimate daddy’s girl. To her nervous, frail, and foolish father—whose chief obsession in life is to protect himself from drafts and persuade his friends to eat a nourishing boiled egg—the beautiful, clever Emma is a model of goodness who deserves to have everything her way. It doesn’t help Emma’s skewed vision of herself that her parental triangle is completed by an absent (dead) mother and an overly devoted governess.

And so her hapless, hopeless father sends Emma, at twenty-one, out into the world with an overly high opinion of herself and a self-centeredness that can only bring her grief. When she competes in love with the equally accomplished yet impoverished Jane Fairfax and publically mocks Miss Bates, Jane’s aunt, for being a chatterbox, Emma is not only being unkind but is
breaking unspoken rules of social propriety regarding the treatment of one’s social inferiors. For a while she risks losing the respect of everyone in her community—a calamity for someone in her position. And we blame her silly old dad. Because who better to correct a child of her faults than a parent who loves her unconditionally? Imagine the fairer, stronger person Emma might have become if she had been affectionately teased through the years.

Heed this cautionary tale. Daddies: don’t do it to your daughters. And daughters: beware of having a doting Mr. Woodhouse for a dad. If you do, your best option is to stop playing the game and show him what a bad girl you can be. For some inspiration, see: Rails, going off the.

White Noise

DON DELILLO

•   •   •

One Hundred Years of Solitude

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

D
o you ever wonder how anybody manages to function knowing they may be wiped out at any moment? Do you ever awake in the night in a cold sweat, pinned to your bed by the terrible knowledge that a looming eternity of nonexistence awaits you?

You’re not alone. An awareness of death is what sets us apart from animals. And how we choose to deal with it—whether we opt to believe in God and an afterlife, reconcile ourselves to nonexistence, or simply repress all thoughts of it—is something that sets us apart from one another.

Jack Gladney, chair of Hitler studies in a midwestern college, suffers constantly from acute fear of death. Jack obsesses about when he will die, about whether he or his wife, Babette, will die first (he secretly hopes that she will), and about the size of “holes, abysses and gaps.” One day he discovers that Babette fears death as much as he does. Until then, his blond and ample wife had stood between him and his fear, representing “daylight and dense life.” The discovery shakes his soul—and the foundations of their otherwise happy marriage.

Jack explores all manner of arguments and philosophies to overcome his fear of death, from placing himself within the protective realm of a crowd to reincarnation (“How do you plan to spend your resurrection?” asks a friendly Jehovah’s Witness, as though asking about a long weekend). His most
successful method for soothing (and distracting) himself is to sit and watch his children sleep, an activity that makes him feel “devout, part of a spiritual system.” For those lucky enough to have sleeping children at hand, this is a balm we heartily endorse not just for fear, but fears of all kinds.

Maybe one of Jack’s mental arguments will work for you. If not, at least
White Noise
will help you laugh about your fear. DeLillo is a funny writer, and his description of Jack attempting to pronounce German words gets our vote for one of the funniest passages in literature. Reach for it in the night when your death terror hits, and witness the metamorphosis of fear into laughter.

The other cure to keep by your bed is
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. This novel about the Buendía family of Macondo can be read over and over, as the events occur in a sort of eternal cycle, and it’s so densely written that you’ll find new gems and revelations every time. As the novel spans a full century, death occurs often and matter-of-factly and the characters accept their part in the natural order of things—an attitude that, in time, may rub off on you.

If it doesn’t, keep reading. Over and over again. And one night, perhaps, as you wearily reach the last page and begin again, you’ll start to see the need for all good things, eventually, to come to an end.

See also:
Angst, existential

After You’d Gone

MAGGIE O’FARRELL

•   •   •

Incendiary

CHRIS CLEAVE

•   •   •

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

•   •   •

What I Loved

SIRI HUSTVEDT

•   •   •

Here Is Where We Meet

JOHN BERGER

O
f all the challenges we face in life, none, perhaps, is harder than this.

Whether it is a parent, spouse, sibling, or child we have lost, a lifelong friend, or someone we knew only briefly, the death of a loved one brings with it a bewildering slew of emotional states, all of which can be bracketed under the general heading of grief. It has helped many people to think of their grief in terms of the five stages that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified in the late sixties: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Not everybody goes through these five stages, and those who do don’t necessarily experience them distinctly or in this order. But we hope that by borrowing these
categories we might more clearly direct mourners to the novel most likely to offer you solace and comfort when you need it.

If you suspect you are in denial about your loss—which many see as the body’s way of moderating the onslaught of grief, stalling its flood with numbness and shock—we offer Maggie O’Farrell’s
After You’d Gone
. When we first meet Alice, she is on her way to visit her sisters in Edinburgh. But in the ladies’ loo at the station she sees something so terrible, so unrepeatable, that she cannot process it—and immediately takes the train back to London. That night, her state of shock is made absolute when she is hit by a car, sustaining a head injury that puts her in a coma. It is from this dreamlike state of the protagonist’s coma that we explore her life up to this point and discover a lurking and unprocessed grief. Let this novel give you permission to exist for a while in your own cocoon of shock. Don’t worry if you can’t seem to persuade yourself to come out of it; your body will shed the cocoon when it’s ready.

If anger dominates, you need to let it out. There is no better model for this than
Incendiary
, Chris Cleave’s heartrending cry of anguish and fury from a woman who has lost both her husband and small son in a fictional terrorist attack on Wembley Stadium. Written in the form of a letter to Osama bin Laden—who is thought to be behind the attack—the narrator hopes to make Osama understand and love her boy so that he won’t ever kill again. “I’m going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away . . . so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind,” she writes. Her voice is as unforgettable as its message, for the rawness of her delivery—ungrammatical, full of crude colloquialisms and tabloid headline shorthands—shows a woman past caring about things that don’t matter. Words “don’t come natural for me,” she tells Osama—but, oh, do they pack a punch.

Fearless and increasingly maddened by imagining her lost boy shouting for his mummy, she vents until she cracks, but we know, by the end, that this venting has been deeply necessary. Your anger may feel endless—and so it should, for it is the transmutation of your love. But it can dissipate only if you let it out. This stage cannot be rushed. Mourners experiencing grief in this way should also see: Rage.