The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (25 page)

The Family Fang
KEVIN WILSON

Herzog
SAUL BELLOW

Betty Blue
PHILIPPE DJIAN

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
MILAN KUNDERA

The Bluest Eye
TONI MORRISON

The Bell Jar
SYLVIA PLATH

Last Exit to Brooklyn
HUBERT SELBY, JR.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
ELIZABETH SMART

Some Hope
EDWARD ST. AUBYN

To the Lighthouse
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Revolutionary Road
RICHARD YATES

Alone in Berlin

HANS FALLADA

O
ne would never choose to live without hope (see: Hope, loss of). But sometimes one has no choice. Despair is to be found at the place where all hope is lost, and those in its grim grip need a cure that acknowledges what it is like to exist in this place. The author of
Alone in Berlin
understands it all too well, as do the characters that populate this sobering novel about life under the Third Reich. Let them
be your companions as you acquaint yourself with your despair. Watch them and learn from them. As you will see, there are cracks of light to be found even in the darkest of places.

Berlin is a city in thrall to the Führer and his henchmen. Opponents of the regime—which include anyone failing to inform on anyone else deemed disloyal to the Führer—face violent intimidation and arrest, followed by summary execution or internment in one of the notorious concentration camps. When their only son is killed on the front line, uneducated factory worker Otto Quangel and his wife, Anna, begin their own, unique form of resistance: leaving postcards around Berlin urging their fellow citizens to stand up to the Nazis and fight back.

Unfortunately, the postcards backfire. Far from encouraging anti-Nazi sentiment, their postcards succeed only in engendering more fear and paranoia among the already cowed citizens of the city. This realization, when it comes, risks sending the couple deeper into despair. But the act of resisting has already saved them. It has given them the moral victory, and when they face their persecutors, it is the Quangels who have access to hope, light, and even joy. Their persecutors do not.

The Quangels are not the only ones who rescue themselves from despair in this way. Dr. Reichhardt, Otto’s cellmate, does it by continuing to live as he has always lived: taking a walk each day (back and forth in his cell) and extending kindness and love to everyone he meets, good or bad. Eva Kluge, the ex-postwoman, does it by leaving the Nazi Party when she discovers that her adored son Karlemann has been photographed swinging a three-year-old Jewish boy by the leg and smashing his head against a car. In so doing Dr. Reichhardt and Eva Kluge put their lives at risk but keep their self-respect intact. As Eva says, this “will have been her attainment in life, keeping her self-respect.”

It sounds like a small thing, but it is not. Our lives are nothing without it. And with it, our lives become notable, rich, meaningful. Despair cannot coexist with these things; certainly they bar the descent to depression. There may not be hope, but
Alone in Berlin
teaches us that sticking tenaciously, proudly, defiantly to our sense of what is right and true is enough—and the only fail-safe cure for despair that there is.

See also:
Broken spirit
•
Depression, general

In the Skin of a Lion

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

I
f you are in the unfortunate position of having fallen in love with a nun,
*
Michael Ondaatje’s
In the Skin of a Lion
is the novel for you.

First, because it features the best chance meeting between a man and a woman in literature, and if you’re in a love with a nun, you’ll need to engineer a good chance meeting. He, Nicolas Temelcoff, is a migrant manual laborer who happens to be dangling in a harness from a viaduct under construction in central Toronto. She is one of five nuns who have mistakenly walked onto the unfinished viaduct at night and are scattered by a sudden gust of wind. When she is blown over the edge, Temelcoff, hanging in midair, sees her fall, and reaches out an arm. The jolt of catching her rips his arm from its socket. Terrified and in shock, she stares at him, eyes wide. He, in excruciating pain and barely able to breathe, asks her, politely, to scream.

This unparalleled meeting (inspired by a real-life topple from a real-life viaduct) is especially serendipitous because it begins the process by which Temelcoff’s nun decides she wants to kick the habit—which, obviously, at some point you’ll need your nun to do too. Before the night is over, Temelcoff’s nun has whipped off her wimple for him to use as a sling, allowed brandy to pass her lips for the first time, imagined what it’s like to have a man run his hand over her hair, and renamed herself Alice, after a parrot. If your chance meeting does not have such a transformative effect, however, don’t despair. Read on. Because
In the Skin of a Lion
features another man (Patrick Lewis) who is so in love with another woman (Clara, an actress) that even after a number of blunt rejections, even after she tries to pass him off onto her best friend, Alice (the ex-nun, in fact), and even after her boyfriend Ambrose Small sets him on fire with a Molotov cocktail, he still wants to sleep with her. And sleep with her he does.

In fact, Patrick Lewis ends up with the nun, but again that’s beside the point. (If you’re thinking this is a complicated novel, you’re right.) Reading this novel will teach you determination. You’ll get your nun. And
when you do, you’ll be able to read to her passages from what is, in our view, one of the most lyrical and ingeniously constructed novels of the past half century.

See also:
Mr./Mrs. Right, holding out for

The English Patient

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

I
f you are in the unfortunate position of having fallen in love with a woman who is already married,
*
Michael Ondaatje is once again your man. (Ondaatje likes a challenge when it comes to love.)

The determined chaser is the English patient himself, who turns out not to be English at all but a Hungarian count named Almásy, although he is definitely a patient. When we meet him, he is lying in a ruined villa in Tuscany, burned beyond recognition after his plane crashed in the North African desert. It’s the aftermath of the Second World War, and there are people dying from war-related injuries all around him, but it gradually transpires that the English patient’s plane did not crash as a result of being gunned down by enemy fire, but as a result of . . . you’ve guessed it: him having fallen hopelessly in love with a married woman.

It is her voice he falls for, at first—reciting poetry around a campfire in the desert, with Almásy himself sitting just outside the fire’s halo. “If a man leaned back a few inches he would disappear into darkness,” Ondaatje tells us in prose that succeeds in inhabiting the metaphysical spaces of poetry. Before long Almásy and the freshly married Katharine Clifton are consumed by the sort of passion that hovers on the edge of violence.

We’re not the sort to moralize, and Ondaatje isn’t either. But sometimes literature finds it hard to resist. And one could argue that the price this pair of lovers pay for their adultery is their due comeuppance. But then again, maybe there is no moral message here and Almásy and Katharine are just the random victims of Ondaatje’s cruel pen. Go ahead and chase your married
woman. Get her, for all we care. But think, now and then, about the cold, dark emptiness at your back, and the dangers of getting on the wrong side of husbands, especially very jealous ones with planes.

See also:
Common sense, lack of
•
Mr./Mrs. Right, holding out for

W
aste no sedentary moment. Select a novel from our list below, all of which are made up of fragments, vignettes, or very short chapters that won’t suffer from being read in short snatches. Make a special shelf for them in the smallest room of the house.