The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (45 page)

Have a much needed laugh, then start looking for a job that is even more suited to you. Because there is an unexpected denouement to Jim’s very public disgrace. Seeing someone make a pig’s dinner of his job—and still coming out on top—will boost your morale immeasurably.

See also:
Anger
•
Broke, being
•
Failure, feeling like a
•
Unemployment

The Reader

BERNHARD SCHLINK

•   •   •

Pobby and Dingan

BEN RICE

I
t is tempting, especially in youth, to go around forming instant and strong opinions about others. To judge, to pronounce, to label—such things can seem to an immature mind to be synonymous with strength and confidence. But having strong opinions must never become a mandate for being judgmental, which is the tendency to judge a thing or person based on one quality or attribute alone. A judgmental person will insist, for instance, that all criminals are terrible people, that all fussy eaters are bad in bed, and all teenagers are naive and judgmental.
*

To stamp out your judgmental tendencies, we recommend you immerse yourself in the complex tale of Nazi guilt, personal shame, and retrospective horror that is Bernhard Schlink’s
The Reader
, a novel that explores the question of how postwar generations should approach the Holocaust and those implicated in its tarry atrocities. Michael Berg is just fifteen when he begins a relationship with thirty-six-year-old tram conductress Hanna. Their assignations, which often involve bathing together—a hint at a Lady Macbeth–style need to scrub away past sins—also revolve around books, for Hanna likes Michael to read to her (
The Odyssey
in Greek,
War and Peace
), something we wholeheartedly approve of (see: Loneliness, reading induced; Non-reading partner, having a). Only later, when Michael is a law student sitting in on a war crimes trial, does he recognize one of the faces on the dock. His
first love was once an SS guard, complicit in the deaths of hundreds of women. And she has another secret of which she is even more ashamed.

Michael spends his whole life struggling to come to terms with what Hanna did—and what she has done to him. And while she suffers remorse, and even allows herself to be judged for shouldering more responsibility than she actually had, Michael’s decision not to reply to her letters from prison causes her pain. Thus Schlink brings the reader into the ethical fray. Do you allow yourself to be moved by Hanna’s suffering or continue to condemn her along with her crime? Herein lies your test. May this novel show you that holding strong opinions and being nonjudgmental do not by necessity cancel each other out.

If you lack the stomach for such heavy ethical questions, a gentler cure is available. If ever a novel—or novella—could trick you into dousing your judgmental fire, Ben Rice’s slim debut
Pobby and Dingan
is it. Kellyanne, little sister to narrator Ashmol, has two imaginary friends: Pobby and Dingan. As one would expect from any self-respecting older brother—especially one raised in the hard-bitten opal mining community of Lightning Ridge, Australia—Ashmol has no time for such childish things. Would you, after years of being instructed to set places for Pobby and Dingan at the table and being told you can’t come to the pool because, with Pobby and Dingan in the backseat, there’s no space for you in the car?

By the end of the novel, yes. Because when Kellyanne announces that Pobby and Dingan have died, and is made so ill by her grief that she winds up in the hospital, Ashmol does a wonderful thing: he goes around town putting up signs offering a reward to anybody who can find his sister’s friends (“Description: Imaginary. Quiet.”). And from this moment you, too, will want to be on the side of those who buy in to the little girl’s fantasy, not those who sniff and sneer.

Remain open. There is good, bad, mad, and sad in everyone, and you don’t have to condone or believe in every element to be kind to the whole package. This also applies to yourself. If you tend to write yourself off as hopeless at everything (see: Self-esteem, low), start by practicing a nonjudgmental attitude toward yourself.

See also:
Antisocial, being

Rabbit, Run

JOHN UPDIKE

W
hen you feel the urge to jump ship—from your relationship, your job, your life—we beg you not to do so until you have read
Rabbit, Run
. The urge to jump generally strikes when the ship we’re on appears to be sinking—and it’s more likely to feel this way if it started out high in the water. This is certainly the case for Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom (the nickname is a result of the nervous twitch beneath his “brief nose”). For Rabbit was once a teenage basketball star, a local if not national hero, who now, at twenty-seven, spends his days demonstrating the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler, married with a son and another on the way, the best of his life behind him. Or so he feels. Coming home from work one day, Rabbit joins a scuffle of kids shooting balls in an empty lot. Exhilarated to find he still has his “touch,” he decides in a moment of positivity to quit smoking and throw away his cigarettes. But when he gets home, the sight of his pregnant wife, Janice, slumped mindlessly in front of the TV, drinking, leaves him suddenly infuriated. As he later tells the local vicar Jack Eccles, he can’t stand the fact that he was once first-rate and now—well, “that thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.” And so he jumps—or, as Updike would have it, runs.

Almost immediately, Rabbit meets someone who knows that running away doesn’t work—at least not without a definite plan. “The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you go there,” points out a gas station attendant when Rabbit admits he doesn’t know where he’s heading. And later—too late, because by this time tragedy has struck—Rabbit’s old basketball coach, Tothero, struggling to formulate the words following a stroke, spells out one last lesson: “Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky . . . We make them,” he says. Then: “Invariably . . . misery follows their disobedience. Not our own.” Rabbit hasn’t so much as paused to think about the consequences his running might have on other people.

And he still doesn’t now. Tothero’s wisdom penetrates us, but it doesn’t penetrate Rabbit. He just carries on hating Janice and running away. Sure, we feel sympathy for Rabbit, but we soon see that his problem is not so much that he’s trapped by Janice as that he’s trapped by ignorance, not knowing how to help Janice—or himself. Join in with Tothero and tell it to Rabbit,
then to yourself: The thing is, Rabbit, it’s better to stay on board that ship, do what you can to plug its holes, and redirect its course. Because if you jump, you jump into the sea. And if you are the one holding the tiller, you won’t be the only one who’ll drown.

See also:
Commitment, fear of
•
Itchy feet
•
Wanderlust

Roxana

DANIEL DEFOE

I
f you happen to stumble on a party—or hear one going on next door—what do you tend to do? Grab a glass, concoct a cocktail, and leap into the fray? Or do you recoil in horror from the blaring music, complain about the folly of setting off fireworks, and frown at the mess and the drunkenness? Are you, in short, a party pooper, a sourpuss, a spoilsport—one of life’s killjoys?

If so, it’s time to awaken your inner Roxana and learn to be the life and soul of the party. Daniel Defoe’s most controversial and psychologically complex novel follows the fortunes of a young woman who falls on hard times when her husband absconds with the family’s accumulated wealth, leaving her with five children to feed. What, in those days, could a poor girl do but make use of her natural assets? Foxy, fluent in French, and a nimble dancer, Roxana has plenty of offers and—parting from her children “to avoid having to watch them perish”—becomes a paid mistress to various men. She soon becomes adept at seducing not only new lovers, but entire seventeenth-century ballrooms. Her moment of glory occurs when she appears in full Turkish dress at a ball, dazzling the masked guests so effectively that she’s showered with money, attracts the attention of the king, and earns herself the exotic name by which we know her.

Roxana may be forced into her role of party girl, but her ability to bring
a buzz to proceedings even when her chips are down makes her an ideal mentor. You don’t have to be in a party mood to begin with; just be willing to plug in and give it your all. The mood will come. Like Roxana, you’ll bring smiles to the faces of others—and may even catch the eye of some interesting new friends in high places.

See also:
Antisocial, being
•
Goody-goody, being a
•
Humorlessness
•
Misanthropy
•
Nobody likes you
•
Teetotaler, being a

See:
Busy, being too
•
Busy to read, being too
•
Children requiring attention, too many
•
Exhaustion
•
Fatherhood
•
Motherhood
•
Pregnancy
•
Tired and emotional, being
•
Workaholism

See:
Pregnancy