The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (23 page)

It is not uncommon when suffering from acute grief for us to enter into a negotiation with ourselves, or with fate. If only we can find the right answer to X or Y, we believe, the pain will go away. Children are particularly
prone to this—as illustrated by the search over New York undertaken by nine-year-old Oskar Schell in
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
After his father, Thomas, is killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Oskar finds a little key in an envelope at the bottom of a vase in his father’s closet. The envelope has the word “Black” written on it. Oskar decides that if he can find the lock the key opens, he will understand something about what has happened to his father. So he embarks on a mission to visit all the Blacks in the telephone directory.

The search turns out to be a wild-goose chase, of course, but what Oskar finds in the process is more precious: an understanding of suffering and loss from the lives of his grandparents before he was born and, in a touch that will help to rewarm your heart, the desire for a grief-stricken but loving mother to help her son recover from his enormous loss.

The stage that everyone dreads the most, perhaps, is depression. There is no getting around it: some things cannot be made better, and it is vital that we allow ourselves, and others, to exist in this bleak, dark stage, in which attempts to cheer up are inappropriate and unhelpful, for as long as we need to. Siri Hustvedt’s novel
What I Loved
is an unflinching exploration of this place. Narrator Leo Hertzberg and his friend Bill Wechsler are both in mourning. The lives of both men were once so full of promise, but now they are disintegrating. Both also mourn the past, their intellectual lives in New York, which they had somehow thought would last all their lives.

Hustvedt’s characters, including the children, are an intelligent, thoughtful crew. What she shows is that our intelligence cannot save us from pain; sometimes, it actually makes it harder for us to find our way through. Pain is an unavoidable part of life, and experiencing yours in the company of these characters will help you inhabit its darkest corners—perhaps the most vital part of the process of grieving, if you have any hope of moving on.

Some people find their way to acceptance more easily than others. When the narrator of John Berger’s
Here Is Where We Meet
encounters his mother—dead for many years—in a park in Lisbon, it’s her walk he recognizes first. In the conversation that follows, he finds himself watching familiar, endearing gestures—licking her lower lip, as she always used to after applying lipstick—and being irritated, as he was as a child, by an outward show of sureness, which, to his eyes, seemed to conceal a complete lack of sureness underneath.

Berger’s narrator travels from city to city, finding evidence of his dead. In Kraków he reencounters his mentor Ken, and as they observe a chess
game together, he “suffers his death” as if for the first time—reminding us that grief is often experienced in waves, and at random, unpredictable moments throughout our lives. In Islington, London, he remeets his friend Hubert who is overwhelmed by the problem of sorting out the drawerfuls of sketches created by his dead wife, Gwen. “What am I to do?” he cries. “I keep on putting it off. And if I do nothing, they’ll all be thrown out.”

Walking in these places offers the narrator a way of remembering, and the conversations with the dead a way of assimilating his love of those he has lost. “I’ve learned a lot since my death,” the narrator’s mother tells him, referring afterward to “the eternal conundrum of making something out of nothing”—for she knows, finally, that this is what it is about. The narrator considers the question of what to leave at a graveside (one of his leather gloves, perhaps?) and notices how his dead take on new elements to their character—his mother, for instance, has a cheeky new impertinence about her, “sure now that she is beyond reach,” and his father now claims to prefer swordfish to salmon. Thus Berger allows the dead to change and develop as the living do. Give your relationships with your dead the same new lease on life—you will find it more rewarding than leaving them locked and static.

So it is that, further along in our mourning process (though the process never ends), we come to see our lost loved ones as they really were, the good and the bad together. We can settle accounts, and we can also gather together the wonderful things about them, the things that we miss, and, perhaps, find a way to incorporate them into our lives in a different, magical way. Take a trip, with Berger, to the places where you spent time with your loved ones, do the things you used to do together, and relish and celebrate all that they gave you while they were alive—and continue to give you now.

See also:
Anger
•
Appetite, loss of
•
Broken heart
•
Guilt
•
Insomnia
•
Loneliness
•
Nightmares
•
Sadness
•
Turmoil
•
Widowed, being
•
Yearning, general

Beyond Black

HILARY MANTEL

W
e’ve all got a few demons on our backs. Some of us live with them so successfully that we’re able to forget all about them until, one day, we catch sight of one in the mirror. Then there’s hell to pay. Some of us, however, live with our demons in plain sight, rolling their eyeballs like marbles as they follow us down the street. Luckily, our friends can’t always see them. We maintain that all demons should be faced and vanquished, sent back to the hell from which they crawled out. To help you purge, we prescribe the scourge of
Beyond Black
by Hilary Mantel.

Alison lives off her demons, unwillingly. A charming, friendly psychic, she indulges in a vast amount of comfort food to keep her complex past safely smothered (for more on psychological battles with weight, see: Obesity). After a demanding performance in front of an audience of hundreds on the outer edge of London, she wakes up in the early hours of the morning craving sandwiches, doughnuts, pizza. Alison’s assistant, Colette, tries to put her boss on a diet. But this turns out to be as doomed as Alison’s efforts to find out what really happened to her when the men that she still finds sprawled semi-clad around her living room—having now “passed into spirit”—first took her to the shed to “teach her a lesson” as a little girl. To bring this traumatic memory to the surface, Alison must quite literally confront them, led by her spirit guide, Morris. Was her father one of these men? she wonders. And if so, which one was he?

Alison first discovered her ability to communicate with “spirit” when, also as a girl, she was befriended by a little pink lady named Mrs. McGibbet in the attic, who faded back into the space behind the wall whenever her mother’s heavy tread came up the stairs. Her powers don’t come without pain. “When I work with the tarot, I generally feel as if the top of my head has been taken off with a tin opener,” she tells us. But little by little, we begin to understand the references to what the dogs ate in the woodshed, and to what happened to the invisible Gloria, to whom Alison’s mother speaks continually. The almost constant prickle of fear disappears only when the psychic meets her monsters head-on. Alison’s final epiphany is an act of supreme psychic redemption. Take heart from her triumph, shake that demon off your back, and look it in the eye at last. The process may not be painless, but you will, like Alison, find it less terrifying than you think.

See also:
Haunted, being
•
Scars, emotional

See:
Alcoholism
•
Coffee, can’t find a decent cup of
•
Cold turkey, going
•
Drugs, doing too many
•
Gambling
•
Internet addiction
•
Neediness
•
Shopaholism
•
Smoking, giving up

The Adventures of Augie March

SAUL BELLOW

•   •   •

South Riding

WINIFRED HOLTBY

I
n these times of austerity, when moneymaking opportunities are thin on the ground and a flexible approach to one’s métier is called for, what better companion to have at one’s side than Augie March, an everyman struggling to make good in his own hard times of the Great Depression. Raised on the rough west side of Chicago, Augie is a man who lives by “luck and pluck,” going at things “free-style.” Never quite managing to get himself a formal education, Augie moves from job to job—and girl to girl—as he searches for what he was meant to be.

The litany of lives he tries on for size makes for an eclectic list of job ideas and as such is an excellent resource for anyone in search of a novel way to spin a dime. For your convenience, we list them here: distributor of handbills at a movie theater; newspaper boy; stock unpacker at Woolworth’s; Christmas elf; funeral wreath maker for a flower shop with a gangster clientele; butler, secretary, deputy, agent, companion, right-hand man (plus arms and legs) to a wheelchair-bound real estate dealer; assistant manager to a heavyweight boxer; robber; salesman of shoes, hunting gear, and paint; driver of illegal immigrants over the border; pampered dog trainer, washer, and manicurist; book racketeer; house surveyor; trade union organizer; hunter (with trained eagle); researcher for wannabe author; merchant marine.