The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (35 page)
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Authors: Ella Berthoud,Susan Elderkin
This sorry state of affairs is captured in all its poignancy by William Maxwell in his exquisitely written novella
So Long, See You Tomorrow
. Clarence Smith and Lloyd Wilson are tenant farmers on adjacent properties in rural Illinois. They’re marooned on the vast grasslands, and the only lights that can be seen from one house are the lights of the other. Over the years
the two men come to depend on each other. When Lloyd has a sick calf, he calls Clarence before calling the vet. When the blades of Clarence’s mower jam, Lloyd hears the sputtering engine from a quarter mile away and goes straight over to help out. Each man is the only friend the other has.
Fifty years on, the novel’s elderly narrator—a man who grew up nearby and has an equally moving story of his own, which we won’t go into here—looks back at the painful journey of Smith and Wilson and its tragic endgame. There is no judgment of either the betrayer or the betrayed, for each friend has his own side of the story, and the author shows compassion to both points of view. What is left is a weight of sadness that the narrator still finds difficult to bear. Maxwell’s slow, elegiac prose, rising up like mist from the page, takes you beyond a simplistic “he said, she said” to a place concerned with the ineffability of grief, the terrible fact of shattered lives.
If it’s not too late, do whatever you can to mend your friendship—new friends are hard to come by the older you get, and you can never replace all that shared history. If the hurt or resentment feels too great or you cannot win your friend’s forgiveness, Maxwell’s deeply understanding novel will help you feel your loss and grieve—and ensure that you’ll never again treat a friend in a way you’ll regret.
See also:
Loneliness
•
Regret
•
Sadness
See:
Left out, feeling
•
Loneliness
•
Outsider, being an
•
Unpopular, being
GAMBLING
The Dice Man
LUKE RHINEHART
G
rab some dice. Write down six actions you could take today. Think sublime. Think ridiculous. For example:
- Shave off all your body hair.
- Invite to dinner the next person that walks past you, regardless of age, sex, or species.
- Blindly stick a pin in a world map and go wherever it lands.
- Send this book to your boss, highlighting all the ailments he or she needs to cure.
- Take a bucket and spade and walk all the way to the sea.
- Read
The Dice Man
by Luke Rhinehart to cure you of your addiction to gambling.
Make a solemn promise that you will do whatever the die tells you.
Now you know what to do.
See also:
Broke, being
•
Risks, taking too many
See:
Brainy, being exceptionally
READING AILMENT
Give up halfway through, refusal to
CURE
Adopt the fifty-page rule
S
ome readers cannot bear to leave a novel unfinished. They’ll plow on doggedly, joylessly, until they’ve reached the bitter end—either so that they can say, “I’ve read it,” without blushing, or so that they aren’t left with an unfinished story, however dull or irksome, dangling in their overdutiful head.
Life is too short. Read the first fifty pages of every novel you start, preferably in a maximum of two sittings. If, after that time, the book has failed to infiltrate your solar plexus, abandon it. As a reader it’s important you learn to trust your judgment and your knowledge of your own literary taste: every book you read or try to read helps to map your future reading path (if you need help with this, see: Identity, unsure of your reading). Don’t bludgeon yourself into taking routes that are not fruitful or enjoyable to you. Give every book you don’t finish to someone who may like it better. This is a gesture of respect to the book and the effort the author put into writing it, and an insurance policy against ending up with a houseful of unfinished books staring at you balefully every time you walk past.
READING AILMENT
Give up halfway through, tendency to
CURE
Read in longer stretches
I
t may be that you are reading a terribly slow book. Although some have momentum from the very first line and others start slowly but reach full speed by the midway point, some are defiantly, or obliviously, slow for the duration. But if you notice a recurring tendency in yourself to launch in with great enthusiasm but slow to a dawdle, then grind to a halt; if your books are all studded with telltale bookmarks that never move, chances are the problem is not the books, but you.
The most likely diagnosis is that you don’t give books a chance. You read in very short snatches—perhaps only five or ten minutes at a time—and therefore never get into the book. This is not fair to either book or author. Stories worth telling take time to tell: characters, like houses, must be built on firm foundations, and we need to care about them before we can be moved by what happens to them.
Do not attempt to begin a new book until you can devote at least forty-five minutes to the first and second sittings. Hopefully, by then the book will have wound itself around your innards and will keep you coming back for more. But if you’re an inveterate giver-upper, try not to read for less than forty-five minutes
every
time you read. And if that still doesn’t work, you’ve no option but to take a day off work, tie one of your limbs to the leg of your chair, and not release yourself until you’ve reached the end.
See
:
Childbirth
See:
Give up halfway through, tendency to
•
Hope, loss of
•
Smoking, giving up
The Debt to Pleasure
JOHN LANCHESTER
G
luttony is an overindulgence in food, drink, or other consumables to the point of excess or waste. In other words, being a greedy pig. If gluttony is your malady, indulge in this juicy novel before you sit down to eat. (If it’s a friend who’s the pig, leave this novel on his or her plate and serve up supper two hours late.) The cure it effects will arrive in three courses, as follows.
For starters: This book is impossible to gulp down quickly and will delay the eating of your dinner, perhaps indefinitely. Tarquin, the narrator, expresses his thoughts so precisely, with such relish for the words themselves, that you’ll want to read every paragraph twice, then copy it out in your reading journal to chew over as you would a morsel of calf’s liver. Read not just before eating, but between courses too, to slow the meal down. You might even get up from the table to try out one of the recipes it contains (
blinis
, omelet, and salt marsh lamb, to name a few). For this novel, as with this part of your cure, is an almost eternal digression, using recipes as an excuse to reminisce, philosophize, and hint at where we are really going with this meandering yarn.
For your main course: The lingering delight that Tarquin takes in each ingredient will teach you how to savor, rather than scoff. Each edible you come across reveals a surprise. Peaches, for instance, remind Tarquin of his brother, Bartholomew—not just because they spent a summer gorging on this furry fruit in boyish delight, but because as a six-year-old our culinary enthusiast could not resist an early experiment in jam making, peach kernels and all, accidentally releasing the cyanide in the pits and causing a near fatal case of poisoning.
And for dessert: There is none, after all. Sorry. Because by now you will have the disconcerting sense that there is something sinister going on—and that you need to watch your waistline (see: Obesity).
This novel will teach you to relish more but eat less—and get to know the exact origin of every ingredient before it makes its way to your stomach.
See also:
Toothache
The Master and Margarita
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
W
hen the devil appears in a Moscow park one fine spring evening in the 1930s, he inserts himself between two bookish types deep in discussion on a bench. One is Berlioz, the bald, portly editor of a literary magazine. The other is Bezdomny, a young poet. The devil has no trouble seizing control of the conversation, which is about the existence or otherwise of Jesus Christ. For the devil—expensively dressed in a gray suit, “foreign” shoes, a gray beret cocked jauntily over one eye—has more charisma than both men put together. “Oh, how delightful!” he exclaims when his two new friends confirm they are atheists. The devil has an unpredictable, childlike mind, easily bored and always on the lookout for a joke—ideally at someone else’s expense. One minute he’s bursting into peals of laughter loud enough to “startle the sparrows out of the tree”; the next he is cruelly predicting Berlioz’s death by decapitation under a tram. (It comes true.) And when Berlioz asks him where he’s going to stay while in Moscow, he winks and says, “In your flat.”
The devil has edge; he has wit. As in
Paradise Lost
, he has all the good lines and keeps everyone on their toes. When Bezdomny feels an urge for a cigarette, the devil—or Professor Woland, as it says on his calling card—reads his mind and whips out an impressive gold cigarette case with just the right brand inside. He and his bizarre retinue—which includes a large, crude, vodka-swigging cat named Behemoth—astonish the audience at the theater by causing a collection of Parisian haute couture
—
hats, dresses, handbags, makeup—to materialize onstage and then inviting all the ladies to strip and re-dress.
And, of course, the devil holds the best parties. Moscow has never seen the likes of it before or since: a midnight full-moon ball at which the guest of honor—Margarita—is washed in blood and roses. There’s champagne in
the fountains, scarlet-breasted parrots screeching “Ecstasy! Ecstasy!” and an orchestra conducted by Johann Strauss. This is the devil, though, and it’s not all innocent fun and games. Apart from Margarita, the guests at the ball arrive in various states of decomposition, having come straight from hell.