The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (34 page)

S
omething that no medical doctor or scientific researcher has yet studied, or even noticed, is the following strange coincidence: the moment a flu patient begins to read an Agatha Christie novel marks the commencement of their recovery. Our favorite is
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, the Poirot mystery that confirmed Christie’s genius as a writer of detective fiction.

If the correlation is more than mere coincidence, we can only speculate as to what is, medically speaking, going on. Perhaps, like fish that cannot refuse the bait, our innate curiosity to find out whodunnit is stronger than the urge to wallow in our fluey misery.
*
Aches, chills, fever, sore throat, runny nose—all these are nothing compared with the determination to work out the guilty party
before
Poirot.
*
Perhaps the degree of brainpower required to follow and attempt to solve an Agatha Christie is just the right
amount to rally your sick gray cells without actually taxing them unduly—as if you’ve given them a light, healing massage as opposed to sending them out on a five-mile run.

Whatever the explanation, we prescribe Agatha Christie for your cure. Prop yourself up on your pillows. The masterwork of Hercule Poirot—that “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep” (Christie’s words)—has begun.
*

See also:
Appetite, loss of
•
Exhaustion
•
Headache
•
Nausea
•
Pain, being in
•
Sweating

Night Flight

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

O
ur unconventional cure for this debilitating modern affliction is to slip into your carry-on luggage an account of a pilot struggling to wrest control of a flimsy two-seater aircraft caught in a cyclone on its way from Patagonia to Buenos Aires with the Europe-bound mail: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s hair-raising
Night Flight
.

Fabien, the pilot of the mail plane, has been married only three weeks. As his wife gets up in the darkness of the small hours to kiss him good-bye, she admires him in his flying leathers and sees someone almost godlike: here is a man capable of waging war with the very elements. By the time ground control spots the storm heading off the Atlantic, it is too late. Somewhere over the Andes, Fabien is surrounded and can’t turn back. With visibility reduced to nil, he has no choice but to tough it out from his tiny cockpit, the aircraft rolling and floundering in its vast sea of pitch. It takes all his strength to hold the controls steady so the cables don’t snap. Behind him, the radio operator gets electric shocks in his fingers when he attempts to tap out a message. No one can hear them, no one can see them. The peaks of the Andes loom up like towering waves trying to pluck them to their deaths. Any slackening of willpower, any weakening of his
grip, and Fabien knows they are lost.

You, meanwhile—yes, you, reading
Night Flight
in the air-conditioned cabin of your Boeing 747 with a blanket on your knee, your gin and tonic neatly perched on your tray table, smiling flight attendants tripping down the aisle beside you, the mellow voice of the captain calmly announcing that you’re leveling out at thirty-five thousand feet, lifting the window shade with your finger to admire the low orb of the sun . . . Terrified, did you say?
Terrified?
Really?
How Fabien would smile at the thought!

If your heart insists on pounding, let it pound for Fabien and his radioman, for the stricken wife waiting by her phone, for the pilot’s boss, Rivière, holding his terrible vigil on the tarmac. Or, for that matter, let it pound for Saint-Exupéry himself, who disappeared while flying over North Africa in 1943. Peer out your window again. See anyone trying to shoot you down? Hmm. Didn’t think so. Get back to your novel, chuck back that G&T, and pull yourself up by your cozy in-flight socks.

See also:
Anxiety
•
Claustrophobia
•
Panic attack

So gripping you’ll forget you’re thirty-five thousand feet up in the air.

I’m Not Scared
NICCOLÒ AMMANITI

The Count of Monte Cristo
ALEXANDRE DUMAS

The Magus
JOHN FOWLES

In the Woods
TANA FRENCH

Carter Beats the Devil
GLEN DAVID GOLD

The Woman in Black
SUSAN HILL

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
STIEG LARSSON

Labyrinth
KATE MOSSE

The Lovely Bones
ALICE SEBOLD

The Shadow of the Wind
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN

Everything Is Illuminated

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

I
f people dub you a foreigner and you do not dig this appellation very much, and it spleens you that they think you have shit between your brains just because you come from a different part of the globe, we suggest you make a feature of it, like Alex, the noncompetent narrator of
Everything Is Illuminated
. Then, even if you’re not a particularly premium sort of person and not many girls want to be carnal with you, you can parrot him and at least make people dig you. Alex ensures his father, the owner of Heritage Touring, that he is fluent in English, and so he’s dispatched to be a translator and guide for the novel’s hero, Jonathan Safran Foer (we are meaning the character here, not the author, though you are right to be confused as they share many qualities, all of them premium), and together with Alex’s weeping grandfather, once a farmer but now retarded, and a mentally deranged dog called Sammy Davis Junior, Junior (which we agree is not very flaccid to utter), they promenade in quest of a small Ukrainian shtetl dubbed Trachimbrod in the hope of dishing up the woman who may have saved Jonathan’s grandfather from the Nazis. The history of Trachimbrod, told by Jonathan in interminable chapters, is an electrical one. But it’s Alex’s abnormal and memorizable voice—a potent result of his referencing a thesaurus rather than a dictionary—that is winning us. We suggest that if you are anticipating being foreign in the near future, or when you are less miniature, you go forth and disseminate some currency on a thesaurus or equivalent (we are cocksure that a cookbook or an automotive manual would deliver you) in the language in which you are incompletely fluent and you will not only illuminate yourself but make yourself very charming and oppressive in the process.

See also:
Different, being
•
Homesickness
•
Left out, feeling
•
Outsider, being an
•
Words, lost for

The Kindness of Women
J. G. BALLARD

Seize the Day
SAUL BELLOW

The Debut
ANITA BROOKNER

The Good Earth
PEARL S. BUCK

Daniel Deronda
GEORGE ELIOT

Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man
FANNIE FLAGG

May We Be Forgiven
A. M. HOMES

A Heart So White
JAVIER MARÍAS

In Praise of Older Women
STEPHEN VIZINCZEY

A Handful of Dust
EVELYN WAUGH

So Long, See You Tomorrow

WILLIAM MAXWELL

W
e hear a lot about the pain of failed romantic relationships, but what about the loss of a best friend of many years standing when, for whatever reason, you fall out irredeemably? Friends are meant to be forever, after all, and the pain of losing the one person in your life who has known you from your youth, seen you at your worst, and understands you inside out, is truly gutting. Not only must you face a future without that person by your side, but you will find yourself questioning whether you are, in fact, a good friend to others and, in turn, a good person.