The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (42 page)

Perhaps because of the wonder drug, or perhaps not, things take quite a turn in Ecuador. Even better than Natasha, he finds the beautiful and highly politicized Brigid, who speaks in alluringly foreign tones. Whether it is the Abulinix or the psyche-altering hallucinogenic they take in the jungle—or, in fact, a fundamental shift of consciousness—Dwight begins to make proactive choices for the first time in his life.

Take this novel with you, go find your Abulinix and/or your Brigid and/or your jungle drug equivalent, and be prepared to wake up to a newly decisive life. Or, on the other hand, don’t.

See also
:
Starting, fear of
•
Vacation, not knowing what novels to take on

See:
Apathy

Les Enfants Terribles

JEAN COCTEAU

T
here is nothing so heady, so sweet, or so intoxicating as being in the throes of a serious crush. Whoever your love object, to be lost in the admiration of a fellow being is one of the most absorbing and deliriously pleasurable ways to lose great chunks of your life. But for all the pleasure of this state, there is a price to pay. The love object may well not feel the same way, for one thing. And by its very nature, infatuation is blind to practicalities. It is an unreasoned, extravagant love, feeding off itself more than off the returned affections of the love recipient (see also: Love, unrequited). And though not as dangerous as obsession, it can be a precursor to this state, rendering the sufferer incapable of seeing his or her own folly and the inadequacies of his or her object.

Cocteau’s enigmatic little novel is a paradigm of intoxication. It illustrates a perfectly puzzling love maze, in which a brother and sister score points by transferring their infatuation with each other to other young men and women, then back again. Paul and Elisabeth nurse their mother in a Parisian apartment with one huge room (rather like a stage). Eventually, they are left alone there, with their imaginations and neuroses to grow like hothouse flowers. At school, Paul had been infatuated with Dargelos, a beautiful boy who threw a snowball at him with a stone inside it. This sends the delicate Paul to bed for several weeks, where as an invalid enjoying the “sweet delights of sickness,” he learns to love his sister a little too much. On recovery he meets Agathe (who closely resembles Dargelos), and Paul transfers his infatuation to her. Meanwhile, Paul and Elisabeth have perfected “the Game,” a means of deepening their relationship by wounding each other in a series of circling conversational attacks. As their mutual infatuation becomes more extreme, they withdraw from the world into a make-believe existence where all that matters is the Game.

It cannot but end badly—it is all too heady, too intense, and prismatically refractive. And it’s only a matter of time before we hear the shatter. If you are in the throes of a similarly intense infatuation, switch the object of your fascination from life to the page. Cocteau was known in artistic circles of his time (whose members included Picasso, Modigliani, Proust, and Gide) as the “frivolous prince,” and inspired infatuation many times himself. His sensual prose and mercurial imagination are equally ravishing. He wrote
Les Enfants
Terribles
during a period of withdrawal from opium, and you can feel the call of the author’s blood for the drug in each heightened sentence. “The world owes its enchantment to . . . curious creatures and their fancies,” he muses. “Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.”

Don’t let yourself be blown to perdition by currents of whimsical desire. The pleasure to be found in aesthetic heights will last forever; your mortal crush will not.

See also:
Disenchantment
•
Lovesickness
•
Lust
•
Obsession

The Scarlet Letter

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

•   •   •

Sister Carrie

THEODORE DREISER

•   •   •

Half-Broke Horses

JEANNETTE WALLS

B
reathe a sigh of relief: Hester Prynne, the disgraced unmarried mother of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel
The Scarlet Letter
, is dead. That is to say, she never existed, of course, being fictional. And the misfortune of being vilified as Hester was—for having a baby but no wedding ring—is much rarer today than it was when Hester’s woeful story took place four centuries ago. The current age is, on the whole, a better moment for the cheeky “sadder but wiser” girl who is as good, or as bad, as she wants to be and doesn’t spend much time worrying what church elders might think of her behavior.

Still, if you’ve been fretting remorsefully that you’re naughtier than most or if you’re pining for the simplicity of your younger, better-behaved years, read Theodore Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie
to remind yourself why you shouldn’t (necessarily) bemoan your experience or give too much thought to what others think of your conduct. Dreiser’s flowing, disapproving sermon of a novel about a girl who leaves rural Wisconsin and goes to Chicago (and, later, New York) to make something of herself will likely make your blood boil, stirring you to defend assertive women and giving you strength to flout the opinion of moralizers who would pin your wings.

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things,” Dreiser warns. “Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she
rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” Oh, puh-
leeze
. Dreiser’s writing is so beguiling and enveloping, and so fascinatingly evocative of a now vanished social world, that you will get sucked into his storytelling and want to read every page to see how Carrie’s reinvention progresses. But unlike the author, you will likely applaud his heroine’s transformation into a more interesting, audacious, fulfilled person. As a star of the New York stage rather than an unremarkable chaste drudge on a nameless farm, Carrie inarguably become less pure, but who can blame her?

For another take, read Jeannette Walls’s gutsy and refreshingly pragmatic novel
Half-Broke Horses
. Rosemary escapes hardscrabble beginnings to become a teacher and daredevil horse racer on ranches in the American West. Her sister, Helen, is prettier but has less self-confidence. While struggling to make it as an actress in California, Helen succumbs to the wiles of a “series of cads.” Worrying that her sister is headed down the wrong path, Rosemary writes letters to her, “warning her not to count on men to take care of her and to come up with a fallback plan.” When, as Rosemary has foreseen, Helen gets pregnant, she runs to her sister’s side, despairing at her ruined reputation. Watching her sister’s tear-streaked face as she sleeps, Rosemary has no inclination to blame her for her lost innocence: she thinks she looks “like an angel, a slightly bloated, pregnant angel, but an angel nonetheless.” Rosemary rejects the idea that loss of innocence is an irrecoverable tragedy; but Helen is much harder on herself, with tragic consequences. Reading about the attitudes of these sisters will show you the error of judging yourself or others too harshly for the messy missteps that we humans—male and female—so often make; simple accidents that don’t deserve the brand of “shame.”

See:
Madness

The House of Sleep

JONATHAN COE

•   •   •

The Book of Disquiet

FERNANDO PESSOA

E
veryone suffers from insomnia occasionally. But if you suffer from it nightly, it can wreak havoc on your relationship, your career, and your ability to get through the day. It traps you in a vicious circle, the problem feeding on itself. As your level of exasperation rises with your accumulating fatigue, nothing is more likely to stop you from sleeping than the anxiety that you might not be able to sleep.

Insomniacs often turn to reading as a way to endure those lonely wee hours. We heartily agree that there is no better way to spend this otherwise wasted time. Jonathan Coe’s
The House of Sleep
is one invaluable tool for exploring your sleeplessness, but it should not be read at night unless you are prepared to accept that you will be up until dawn—despite its title, the novel is far from peaceful. Pick it up during the day, when you are wide awake and prepared for a thorough analysis of why you can’t get to sleep.