The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (44 page)

But, frankly, the gods alone cannot be blamed for all his meanderings. Many of his diversions are self-induced—such as when Odysseus foolishly shouts his name to Polyphemus, triggering Poseidon’s pursuit of him in the first place. In the end, after twenty years of tardiness, Odysseus returns just in time to save his wife from an enforced remarriage.

Don’t let your life go by in your absence. By the time you finish reading this ancient epic, meandering in its adventures but introspective in nature, you will have had enough vicarious travels to last a lifetime. Now get on with life in the place where you are.

See also:
Dissatisfaction
•
Happiness, searching for
•
Jump ship, desire to
•
Wanderlust

Henderson the Rain King

SAUL BELLOW

I
f you’ve never even heard of this ailment, you’ve clearly never met the long-suffering hero of Saul Bellow’s
Henderson the Rain King
. Because Gene Henderson—a fifty-five-year-old millionaire with big, “blustering” ways, a large nose, and more children than he can remember the names of—has had itchy teeth all his life. In fact, all his pain, physical and emotional (and there’s a lot of it), congregates in his teeth. When he’s angry, his gums ache. When he’s faced with heartbreaking beauty, his teeth itch. And when his wives, his girls, his children, his farm, his
animals, his habits, his money, his violin lessons, his drunkenness, his brutality, his hemorrhoids, his fainting fits, his face, his soul, and—yes—his teeth all start giving him grief at once, he decides to gate-crash his friend Charlie’s honeymoon in Africa, and from there go “in country,” to find himself.

It doesn’t work. What he finds is the same blustering fifty-five-year-old millionaire he left behind. And what’s more, while he’s away he breaks the bridge at the side of his mouth, ruining many dollars worth of complicated dentistry and leaving him spitting fragments of artificial molar into his hand.

Itchy teeth is a rare complaint, but it has its sufferers—and not just in Bellow novels. Those afflicted experience almost unbearable torment. The only thing that can drive a person madder than the itch of the teeth itself is having everyone else doubt their dental woes. This uproarious battering ram of a novel will elicit sympathy for those afflicted at last.

Life of Pi

YANN MARTEL

•   •   •

The Inimitable Jeeves

P. G. WODEHOUSE

J
ams come in many flavors, hues, and consistencies, but they do not get any stickier than that of Pi Patel, who finds himself stranded on a lifeboat at sea with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a three-year-old Bengal tiger. The young hero of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize–winning novel
Life of Pi
is under no delusions about how dangerous the tiger is (for soon it’s just him and the tiger, the laws of natural selection swiftly dispatching the other three). And when he and the tiger first confront each other, the tiger with its eyes blazing, its ears “laid tight to its head,” and its fangs and talons drawn, Pi’s response is to throw himself back overboard and sweat it out in the sea.

Which is the correct response. As is building a raft alongside the lifeboat so that he and the 450-pound carnivore can occupy separate quarters. But it’s what he does next that wins our admiration. Spotting the tiger’s weakness—seasickness—he draws on the training skills he acquired by osmosis in his father’s zoo and wages a battle of minds with the tiger that reduces the magnificent creature to a state of begrudging obedience. The face-off that clinches the boy’s authority is the best staring contest in literature. Keep this novel at hand whenever you are attempting to find a way out of your own
(we hope, less sticky) jams. The potential for mastery in even so slight and hungry a boy as Pi is inspiring.

For those facing jams of the social variety—finding yourself backed into a corner from which there’s no dignified escape, for example—we recommend a companion in the mold of Jeeves, the valet in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse. If you can’t afford a real one, the fictional one will do. This smooth-tongued, eyebrow-raising valet, as well versed in Dostoyevsky as he is with the right way to wear a scarlet cummerbund,
*
is forever getting the hapless Bertie Wooster out of scrapes. Rich in status but poor in good sense and sound judgment, Wooster knows he wouldn’t survive a day without Jeeves or his curative cups of tea—although he’d never admit it.

Whenever things get hairy, hit too many snags, or start to bubble too fast—be it with a tiger or something slightly more commonplace—imagine what Pi or Jeeves would do, and adjust the temperature accordingly.

See also:
Stuck in a rut

Venus in Furs

LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH

U
nlike envy, which is the coveting of something another person has, jealousy is the tendency to torture oneself with the thought that someone else may take what you have. This results in an urge to cling ever more tightly to what you have, becoming needy and insecure and full of fury at the potential absconder. Blind to reason, it’s a supremely destructive force, and if left unchecked will eat away at your self-esteem and ultimately prevent you from having a healthy relationship with the thing you guard with such desperation. Whether it’s jealousy among siblings for parental attention (see: Sibling rivalry), jealousy over a promotion at work, or jealousy over a suspected rival in love, those in the grip of this affliction would do well to recognize that they are more likely to lose their love object than those free of its taint. Luckily, jealousy—of whatever sort—is self-inflicted, and the person who has created it also has the power to spirit it away.

Our cure, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s
Venus in Furs
, shows very clearly the self-inflicted nature of jealousy. Unique for its time (the novel was published in 1870),
Venus in Furs
explores the lure of sexual subjugation. One afternoon after dozing off in front of a magnificent painting entitled
Venus in Furs
, the narrator and his friend Severin share a dream about this deity, and both admit to their predilection for beauty dressed in haughtiness. Our narrator picks up Severin’s memoir, which we then read over his shoulder. It describes Severin’s relationship to a woman named Wanda—Venus’s mortal embodiment. Wanda is a cruel and beautiful tyrant of a woman who alternately loves Severin unreservedly—entertaining him, philosophizing with him, titillating him—and then abusing him, whipping him, locking him up, calling him her slave, and taunting him with her interest in other men.

Severin laps it all up. When she talks about another lover, Severin is seized with passion—a “sweet madness”—and when we realize that he gave up on a far more gentle relationship for this, we begin to see how unhealthy his love for Wanda is. He wants to be treated badly—the harsher, the better—and he obeys her edicts abjectly, his body trembling with resentment. And so begins a series of humiliations, ecstasies, and terrors, which at one point have him fearing for his life.

Only at the end of his “confession”—which constitutes most of the book—does Severin stand back and see the relationship for the self-torture it really was. “Whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped,” is the moral he draws. It’s no accident that Masoch gave us the word for this pleasure in pain: “masochism.” Your jealousy is similarly masochistic—it comes from the lashes of your own crop. Bear witness to Severin’s self-hate, then hang up your crop and walk free.

See also:
Anger
•
Bitterness
•
Neediness
•
Paranoia

See:
Dizziness
•
Exhaustion
•
Headache
•
Insomnia
•
Nausea

See
:
Bullied, being
•
Career, being in the wrong
•
Job, losing your
•
Monday morning feeling
•
Stuck in a rut

Bartleby the Scrivener

HERMAN MELVILLE

•   •   •

Lucky Jim

KINGSLEY AMIS

L
osing your job can be a hideous blow, both to your pocket and to your ego. The best way to deal with it is to try to see it as an opportunity—a chance to take a break from the daily toil, reconsider your options, and perhaps expand into new territories. Rather than conclude that you were a bad fit for the job, decide that the job was a bad fit for you (see also: Career, being in the wrong). If you’re not convinced, consider all the occasions on which, in your job, you did not want to do the things you were asked to do. Like Bartleby.

Herman Melville’s Bartleby is a scrivener, and when he first arrives for duty at the narrator’s law office, “pallidly neat” and “pitiably respectable,” his employer thinks his sedate nature will have a calming influence on his other employees. And at first Bartleby does seem to be the model worker, industriously copying out letters in quadruplicate. But then he begins to rebel. When his employer asks him to check over his writing, Bartleby gives the response: “I would prefer not to.” It soon becomes apparent that he will do nothing beyond the most basic elements of his job. If asked to do anything more, “I would prefer not to” comes the inflexible reply. A dire impasse develops in which his employer can’t bring himself to fire the scrivener because he’s so meek and seems to have no life whatsoever beyond his desk. And Bartleby will do only what he wants.

Be inspired by Bartleby’s act of resistance. To what degree did your job entail compromising over what you really wanted to do? Bartleby’s rebellion saw him refusing to leave his desk at all. You, however, now have a chance to move on and find pastures new.

Perhaps you can even begin to celebrate the demise of your job. When Jim Dixon is appointed lecturer in medieval English history at a nondescript university in
Lucky Jim
, he has no intention of messing things up. He duly accepts his boss Neddy Welch’s invitation to attend an “arts weekend” in the country, realizing that he needs to keep “in” with Welch. But once there, he can’t seem to avoid getting himself into trouble. Farcical scenes ensue, including burning bedsheets, drunken madrigal singing, and various sexual entanglements. It’s when he gives his lecture about “Merrie England,”
however, that he blows things most spectacularly, delivering the final moments “punctuated by his own snorts of derision.”