The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (46 page)

See:
Anger
•
Bitterness
•
Broke, being
•
Failure, feeling like a
•
Job, losing your
•
Unemployment

See:
Adolescence
•
Ambition, too little
•
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Lethargy
•
Procrastination

The Member of the Wedding

CARSON MCCULLERS

S
ometimes it can feel as if we are being intentionally excluded, left out of the fun. If we’d chosen not to join in, then it would be all right—not all of us are party people. But when we want to join in yet somehow the welcome hasn’t arrived, we can end up feeling extremely sorry for ourselves, and begrudging of those selfish, oblivious others who’ve failed to do anything about our distress. The natural response often takes one of two misguided paths: to force ourselves upon the group or to reject the group that has rejected us.

Neither strategy works. Twelve-year-old Frankie, the motherless heroine of
The Member of the Wedding
, one of Carson McCullers’s odes to loners and
oddballs set in the small-town American South, tries them both. It all starts going wrong when her best friend moves to Florida and her father asks who this “great big long-legged twelve-year-old blunderbuss” is who’s still sleeping in his bed. She takes up some worrying habits after that—shooting her father’s pistol in a vacant lot, stealing a knife from Sears and Roebuck, committing a “queer sin” with Barney MacKean in his family’s garage. None of it stops her feeling “unjoined,” and when the neighborhood kids have a party in the clubhouse, she listens from the alley behind.

At first she decides the answer is to become a “we” with her older brother, Jarvis, and his fiancée. She’ll become a “member” of their wedding, and after the wedding she’ll go out into the world with the two of them. When Jarvis and Janice fail to catch on to this idea, she decides to run away instead. But like most twelve-year-old runaways, she doesn’t get very far.

The solution, when it appears, brings with it a “shock of happiness.”
The Member of the Wedding
will strike a chord with all those who feel they’re on life’s sidelines. Read it and be reminded: Don’t force things, and don’t run away. Have patience. Your ticket to the party will come.

See also:
Different, being
•
Foreign, being
•
Loneliness
•
Nobody likes you
•
Outsider, being an
•
Shyness

The Sheltering Sky

PAUL BOWLES

•   •   •

Don Quixote

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA

Y
ou may have made it out of bed, but you have about as much bounce in your stride as a pregnant hippo. When you’re overcome by physical or mental lethargy, dragging your heavy limbs and empty of motivation, it is notoriously hard to shift. To combat lethargy you need energy—but where does the initial injection of energy required to reverse the inertia come from?

Our two-part tonic begins by immersing yourself in the sort of stagnant environment in which lethargy thrives. Paul Bowles’s inimitable
The Sheltering Sky
—subtle, grave, intense, and filled with a sense of doom—is such a place. Port, his wife, Kit, and their “astonishingly handsome” friend Tunner—Americans who have shunned their homeland yet have failed to
find anything better—are drifting through the North African desert. A strangely featureless, restless group, they spend their days mostly in avoidance of one another, the local inhabitants, and any real engagement with life. An unspecified menace seems to exist between them and the Arabs they meet—dark figures that lurk and cannot be trusted. Stones are thrown from unseen hands, wallets are almost pinched. And so the trio move on with no particular destination in mind, an ominous wind at their backs and a “limpid, burning sky” overhead.

Kit is the most dysfunctional. Some days she is so filled with a prophetic sense of doom that she turns inward and can barely function. Tunner bores her, and she finds his morning greetings “offensively chipper.” For Port, meanwhile, the only certainty is an “infinite sadness” at the core of his being—reassuring because of its familiarity. When Kit tells Port one day, “We’ve never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life,” she hits the nail on the head. Their lives are like petri dishes in which the bacteria of lethargy breeds: full of languor, uncertainty, miscommunication, and alienation. Take a good look at yourself and ask whether those petri dishes are present in your life too.

The second half of our cure must be taken as soon as you’ve turned the last page, as it will zap your body with the electric shock of contrast. Cervantes’s lovable, excitable Don Quixote—who styles himself on the knights-errant in the courtly romances to which he is addicted and stays up all night to read—is everything the characters in
The Sheltering Sky
are not. He rises early, he dons his grandfather’s spruced-up coat of armor, and he sallies forth in search of adventures—a damsel in distress to rescue and love, a rascal to run through with a lance. Could lethargy grow here? By sooth, we’d say not! While Bowles’s disaffected Americans reduce the mystery and beauty of the desert to odd, untrustworthy parts so that it cannot hurt them—denying it the magnificence or epic resonance that would give them a place in history—Don Quixote turns plain roadside inns into castles with silver pinnacles, windmills into an army of giants. And all this with an irrepressibly jaunty, blithesome disposition, immune to the cautions of his trusty squire.

Take it neat, spilling from the pen of Cervantes with its breathless upswing and cavalier call to arms, its romance and zest. For those who are sluggish and slow, it’s the most electrifying tonic that literature has to offer this side of the law.

See also:
Ambition, too little
•
Apathy
•
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Boredom

In Praise of the Stepmother

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

W
hen your sex drive takes a nosedive, glean inspiration from this wicked little prank of a novel by the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. Each night, after his fastidious nighttime ablutions, Don Rigoberto takes his wife, Doña Lucrecia, into his arms and murmurs: “Aren’t you going to ask me who I am?” Doña Lucrecia knows the game. “Who, who, my love?” she implores. And Don Rigoberto—a sensualist, a lover of art, a widower who cannot believe his luck at finding love again in midlife and a stepmother for his teenage son, Alfonso—begins to talk from the point of view of a character in a famous painting.

Because what turns him on is for him and his wife to inhabit the figures in these paintings in their fantasies. One night he is the King of Lydia in a work by the seventeenth-century Dutch master Jacob Jordaens, proudly extolling the virtues of his wife’s voluminous buttocks. The next he is aroused and titillated by François Boucher’s
Diana at the Bath
, imagining Lucrecia as the goddess of the hunt having her body rubbed with honey and her toes sucked one by one by her female lover. On a more complicated night, it’s Francis Bacon’s anguished and unprepossessing
Head I
that gets their juices flowing.

Possibly they take it too far. Cast as Venus in Titian’s
Venus with Cupid and Music
, Doña Lucrecia is aroused so much by her husband’s descriptions of Cupid tickling her with his wings and “roll[ing] about on the satiny geography of her body” that she finds herself entertaining dirty thoughts about her angelic stepson, Alfonso. Perched on the cusp of his nascent sexuality, the golden-haired boy is only too keen to egg her on.

There’s nothing wrong, though, with borrowing a little inspiration from art and literature to fan the flame of desire in a tired conjugal bed. In the spirit of Don Rigoberto rather than Doña Lucrecia, we hope you may find something to steam up the windows in your home.