The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (41 page)

For Sarah, a young mother (and grad school dropout) in the 1990s in Tom Perrotta’s
Little Children
, being a stay-at-home mom fills her with anxiety. As she halfheartedly joins in the chatter with other mothers about their various levels of exhaustion and the eating habits of their offspring, she tries to transcend the tedium of her child-bound days by pretending
inwardly that she’s an anthropologist, the Margaret Mead of the modern American playground scene. “I’m a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself,” she tells herself. Might this strategy work for you? Or does it hit too close to home?

To ponder the burdens of domesticity at a soothingly distant remove, pick up Winifred Peck’s 1942 novel
House-Bound
. Rose, the privileged heroine, had “never washed a vegetable” in her life, until the Second World War brought a national shortage of servants. Lacking a scullery maid, Rose must learn to run the house herself. Chaos ensues. As she becomes increasingly enslaved by domestic duties, Rose comes to realize that we are all housebound, not just within our four walls, but “tethered inexorably to a collection of all the extinct memories like bits of domestic furniture, inspected and dusted daily.” You might appreciate the freedom she eventually finds for herself, if not the means by which she comes by it.

Come the sexual revolution several decades on, the comparatively carefree Manhattan hausfrau Bettina “Tina” Balser, in
Diary of a Mad Housewife
, has a mental meltdown even if her life looks hunky-dory to outsiders. She has a maid, a handsome husband, and can float around all day drinking cocktails if she likes. But she’s dissatisfied all the same, and takes to keeping a journal to vent her frustrations and stay sane. “What I really am and have been since midsummer is paralyzed,” she writes. To fill the emptiness, Tina takes up a lover, the appalling George, an A-list celebrity. Meanwhile, her husband, Jonathan, is having a fling of his own, and things at his job are going down the tube. Like the cockroaches trapped inside the clock face in Bettina’s kitchen, squeezed between the two hands, the couple seem doomed to a slow, suffocating marital death. Luckily, they realize what is happening in time.

Breaking free of the husband as well as the house is the only answer for the female inhabitants of
The Stepford Wives
. Ira Levin’s 1972 novel is a terrifying exploration of what could happen if all the men in a small American town were to conspire to transform their spouses into their idea of the perfect wife. By chance, the characters have the necessary technical and practical expertise at their disposal to do just this. We all know what happens next—but it still makes for thrilling reading.

These days, it’s the liberated women—more than their husbands—who are likely to impose wifely transformations on themselves. Meg Wolitzer’s funny and poignant novel
The Ten-Year Nap
describes just such a woman. Amy Lamb has opted out of her law career to become an unimpeachable
mom and housewife. She toys with the idea of going back to work—an idea her husband fully endorses—but the longer she stays out of the fray, the more she fears reentering it. When she finally snaps herself out of her domestic trance, she finds, to her relief, that “it was a pleasure, an honor, weirdly, just to be working.” The old Amy hadn’t gone away; it had just been buried under velveteen rabbits, mops, and coupons for a while.

So when the sippy cups become too much, do not fill them with booze and try to drink away your homebody blues. Remember that, unlike women of the past, you have a permanent ticket out of the nursery, and the children will be leaving it before long anyway. These novels will remind you that, once the children can dress themselves, you will be able to extricate the woman you once were from the mom and cutlery polisher you have become. Still, you may have to give yourself a gentle maternal nudge to be reminded to untie those apron strings.

See also:
Boredom
•
Dissatisfaction
•
Household chores, distracted by

See:
Arrogance

E
verybody’s funny bone requires a different trigger. Use this list to help find what sets you off.

See also:
Grumpiness
•
Killjoy, being a
•
Querulousness

Lucky Jim
KINGSLEY AMIS

Bridget Jones’s Diary
HELEN FIELDING

Tom Jones
HENRY FIELDING

Home Land
SAM LIPSYTE

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
ANITA LOOS

Election
TOM PERROTTA

Straight Man
RICHARD RUSSO

Where’d You Go, Bernadette
MARIA SEMPLE

Care of Wooden Floors
WILL WILES

Joy in the Morning
P. G. WODEHOUSE

Hunger

KNUT HAMSUN

I
n those days when you wander about hungry in a strange city that no one leaves before it sets its mark on him; when you consider, by force of habit, whether you have anything to look forward to today; when you realize you have not a single krone in your pocket, you must seek out Knut Hamsun and you will find yourself so energized by this novel that you will be able to see everything in sharp and perfect detail and have no question that the mere appetite of your body is necessary to satisfy, but that the nobility of your mind is incalculably more important. If only you might sit down and write a treatise on philosophy, a three-part article that you can sell to the paper for probably ten krone; if only you will sit and write it now on a park bench in the sun, then you will have the money to buy a decent meal. Or, alternatively, pawn your jacket, your waistcoat, for one krone fifty ore. Just make sure you don’t leave your pencil in the pocket, like the unnamed hero of Hamsun’s novel does, as then you will never be able to write your article, which will not only earn you money but will help the youth of the city to live in a better way. You’re only pawning it, of course, because it is getting a bit tight for you, and you will pick it up again in a few days’ time, when your article is published. Then you can give a few krone to the man on the street with the bundle in his hands who hasn’t eaten for many, many days, and who made you cry because you could not give him a five-krone piece. Of course, you haven’t eaten either, and your stomach will not hold down ordinary food anymore as it has been empty for too long. Though don’t forget that you gave that ten-krone note that you felt was wrongly yours to the cake seller, you thrust it into her hands and she had no idea why, and perhaps you can go to her stall and demand some cakes that were paid for on account, so to speak. The police might pick you up as you are out in the early hours of the morning, lacking a place to stay—but, then,
how could you wish for anything more than an excellent, clean, dry cell? The police believe, of course, that you are really a man of good character and principles, who has merely been locked out of his house and has plenty of money at home. You can use this experience and write all about it in your next article that you can sell to the paper, and it may even make fifteen krone; and, of course, there is your play, the one you just need to clinch that elusive last act of, and if this is published, you will never have to worry about money again. Before this, you will arrive at the joyful insanity hunger brings, and be empty and free of pain.

The Secret Garden

FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

R
eading
The Secret Garden
serves as a polite reminder that many of our ailments are, in fact, fictional.

Young Colin, confined to his bedroom since birth, is convinced there is a lump on his back that will, eventually, lead to an early demise. Of course, there is no lump, unless you count the vertebrae of his spine. His caregivers have encouraged him to believe he is deformed, doomed never to grow to adulthood, and that fresh air is poison to his blood. Mary, his spoiled cousin, just as capable of throwing tantrums and ordering others around as he is, will have none of it. The only person brave enough to tell Colin that there’s nothing wrong with him, she matches his rage at his presumed fate with her own fury at his inertia. Only a fierce little girl hell-bent on bringing her secret garden to life can pierce the bubble of Colin’s terror and show him the truth.

Mary’s passion for the garden lures Colin out of his sick chamber into the world of buds and birds—a world also inhabited by freckled, irresistible Dickon, the quintessence of health. Let this novel lure you from your bed to find your own secret garden—maybe even your own Dickon—and a lusty return to tip-top health.

See also:
Anxiety
•
Cold, common
•
Dying
•
Man flu

I’m Not Stiller

MAX FRISCH

•   •   •

Atmospheric Disturbances

RIVKA GALCHEN

•   •   •

New Finnish Grammar

DIEGO MARANI

•   •   •

Metamorphosis

FRANZ KAFKA

W
ho are you, reader? A parent, a professional, a student, a child? Are you always yourself, or do you have two selves: one you show only to certain people, one you show to everyone else? Or do you feel that the “real” you has never seen the light of day at all?

Literature is stuffed to the gills with people having identity crises, whether through memory loss, psychiatric breakdown, or more inexplicable processes. The narrator of
I’m Not Stiller
, by the Swiss postwar writer Max Frisch, persistently denies accusations that he is the missing sculptor Anatol Stiller. And indeed, according to his passport, his name is James White. But friends, acquaintances, and even his wife repeatedly identify him as Stiller—a conundrum that confounds us as much as White (or should we say Stiller). As the truth gradually emerges, we are given a rare glimpse into the fragility of our relationship to ourselves.

Rivka Galchen’s novel
Atmospheric Disturbances
flips Frisch’s conceit. A psychiatrist in New York named Dr. Leo Liebenstein has convinced himself that his wife, Rema, has disappeared . . . and been replaced with an exact replica of herself. He doesn’t think
he
has an identity crisis; he thinks
she
does. In other words, he makes his crisis hers. “It was a little uncanny, the feeling I had, looking at that look-alike,” he muses. The “impostress,” as he calls her, continues to come to Leo’s home every day as if it were hers (which she maintains it is) and insists that she is the “missing” person. Leo refuses to believe her, even though she resembles his wife in every particular. She has the same “hayfeverishly fresh” shampoo, the “same baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, same tucking behind ears of dyed cornsilk blonde hair,” Leo concedes. “Same everything, but it wasn’t Rema. It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew.” Leo scours the streets of New York looking for the woman he believes has vanished, and when New York fails to produce her, he decides to journey to Argentina, her native land, and hunt for her in Patagonia. Galchen’s story is Borgesian and intriguing: it hints at the constructed nature of identity. On some level, all of us must invent who we are. And if the results don’t convince ourselves or others, we can labor to build a more satisfactory self.

If both of these novels suggest that it might be wise to carry more than a passport to identify yourself, Diego Marani’s
New Finnish Grammar
certainly ups the urgency of doing so. A man is found clubbed nearly to death in Trieste during the Second World War. The Finnish name tag on his clothes proclaims him to be Sampo Karjalainen, but when the man regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is—and no language. A Finnish doctor is among the passengers on the hospital ship where the man ends up, and he begins to rewire Finnish into the man’s brain, complete with its fiendishly complicated grammar and consonant-rich words. But what if this man wasn’t really Finnish in the first place? What will he become in a different language? What is it that makes him himself? In the end it’s the new relationships that he forges on the boat that reveal his identity to himself.

But if you
are
ever unlucky enough to lose your identity completely, the best cure you can get your pincers around is
Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka. Traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a giant cockroach. He is disgusting not only to himself but to his entire family, and though Gregor tries to continue his life as it was before, it becomes increasingly difficult. Eating is challenging, communication impossible, basic hygiene ever more compromised. Gregor slowly sinks into an empty but peaceful, ruminative state as he starves to death.

Count your blessings that, even if you don’t know who you are, you are at least human. Admire your fingers, toes, the tip of your nose. Revel in the use of your limbs. Read the last paragraph of Kafka’s masterpiece aloud, and
enjoy the fact that your voice is not the terrifying rasping of an insect. Celebrate your humanity—whoever it may belong to.

See also:
Identity, unsure of your reading

The Idiot

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

T
he room goes quiet, and you find yourself the focus of a sea of faces. It dawns on you that you’re the only one who doesn’t understand what’s wrong with what you’ve just said. Then someone starts to laugh, and one by one the others join in.
You feel a hot flush take over your face (see: Blushing), followed by a blood-draining sense of shame (see: Shame). They’re not laughing with you, but
at
you.

We’ve all been there. Feeling like an idiot is almost as inevitable as falling in love. In fact, being an idiot is not necessarily a bad thing.
*
The gentle prince Lev Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s
The Idiot
is an idiot in a social rather than an intellectual sense, standing outside society because he has no comprehension of its mechanisms: money, status, small talk, the subtle intricacies of daily life are all obscure to him. But when we readers think about Prince Lev, it is not with any sense of disparagement, but with absolute fondness and love. Indeed, everyone who encounters the prince in the novel is both exasperated by him and deeply enamored of his profound understanding of a version of reality that most of us do not see.

Next time the room falls silent around you, remember the prince. Look everyone back in the eye, and anticipate affection instead. You’ll probably get it.

See also:
Failure, feeling like a

See:
Homophobia
•
Idiot, feeling like an
•
Racism
•
Xenophobia

Indecision

BENJAMIN KUNKEL

A
re you inclined to get yourself tied up in knots whenever you are called upon to make a decision? Do you see things from everybody else’s point of view except your own? Do you drive yourself and your friends crazy as you bounce between a plethora of paths, unable to choose or commit to any one of them? If so, you
are not alone. You’re suffering from the quintessential ailment of our age: indecisiveness. Because never before has there been more choice—and yet never have we been more paralyzed.

Dwight Wilmerding, the twenty-eight-year-old slacker hero of Ben Kunkel’s novel
Indecision,
finds that he can’t “think of the future until [he’s] arrived there”—a quality shared by many indecisive types. Underemployed, halfhearted about his girlfriend Vaneetha, he makes decisions on whether or not to accept invitations by flipping a coin—the only way to ensure that his “whole easy nature” doesn’t end up seeing him doing everybody else’s bidding. Meanwhile, decisions continue to be made for him. His employers at the pharmaceutical company where he works give him the boot, and when his old school friend Natasha invites him—in a suggestive sort of way—to join her in Ecuador, he goes. And, unsurprisingly, when his friend Dan offers him a new trial drug, Abulinix, which promises to cure him of his indecision, he embraces the gemlike blue capsule. Only after gleefully ingesting it is he told that it has some interesting side effects: satyriasis, or an excessive desire in males to copulate, and potentiating alcohol, meaning that once in the bloodstream, one drink becomes two.