The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (5 page)

Let
Once a Runner
inspire you to change your relationship with your body completely. Push it to the limit in a positive way. Put it to work and see what it can do. While Firmin in Lowry’s novel wishes away the minutes between drinks, Cassidy in John Parker’s breathes space into every second, getting the most out of each. The pure joy—and pain—of running, the sweat and ruthless determination of the race are as far a cry as you can get from the nihilism of the alcoholic. Buy yourself a pair of sneakers and serve this novel up to yourself instead of after-dinner drinks. May it be a symbol of your commitment to ditching the booze.

See also:
Antisocial, being
•
Cold turkey, going
•
Hangover
•
Hiccups
•
Libido, loss of
•
Rails, going off the
•
Sweating

See
:
Baldness
•
Stress

The Crimson Petal and the White

MICHEL FABER

I
f you find yourself watching everybody else’s race but your own, or even that you’re still standing on the starting line, you need a novel to galvanize you into setting some finishing posts, then pelting toward them. There’s no better novel for the job than
The Crimson Petal and the White
.

Our young heroine starts life in a place most would say was so far from the possibility of even competing that she might as well give up before she starts. Sugar was forced into prostitution by her mother at the tender age of thirteen and grows up believing she has no choice but to submit to the gentlemen who come to her bed “to keep her warm.” But she yearns to rise above this base existence. Her way of going about it is to become the best in the brothel—and then the best in Britain. Soon not only has she acquired phenomenal accomplishments in the bedroom, but she knows how to make a man feel eloquent, witty, and full of vitality, simply by the way she listens and flirts. But underneath her charming exterior, she still finds her work grotesque and pours her disgust into a novel she writes in secret at her desk.

Her big break comes when she meets William Rackham of Rackham Perfumeries, who discovers her through the pages of the gentleman’s magazine
More Sprees in London
. Rackham is so smitten with Sugar that he arranges to keep her for his exclusive use. Eventually she becomes invaluable to him, not just for her charms and beauty, but for her brains, being more astute and more in touch with her customer’s needs than he is himself. It’s not long before Sugar is the guiding force behind his advertising campaigns and overall business strategy.

Faber portrays in minute detail a Victorian world of social inequality and rigid convention. “Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them,” he exhorts at the start of the novel. Follow Sugar (though not into prostitution), and rise wisely, determining your own fate rather than those of others. As Oscar Wilde put it: “Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us.”

See also:
Apathy
•
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Lethargy

Great Expectations

CHARLES DICKENS

S
ome of us have too little of it, others too much. According to the Taoist philosopher Lao-Tzu, ambition—in its best ratio—has one heel nailed in well, “though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.” When neither heel is nailed down firmly, and we overreach our innate talents and social limitations, we are in danger of losing our purchase completely.

This is what happens to Pip in
Great Expectations
. Orphaned Pip lives with his older sister, the harsh and unsympathetic Mrs. Joe, whose face looks as if it has been “scrubbed with a nutmeg grater” and who believes in bringing him up “by Hand” (though she is tempered by her gentle husband, Joe, who shows kindness to Pip throughout his turbulent life). When Pip meets Estella, the beautiful but ice-hearted ward of eccentric Miss Havisham, who is still wearing the wedding dress in which she was jilted at the altar forty years ago, Pip is encouraged by his sister to nurture a hope that this strange old lady has plans to groom him for Estella. The hope turns to a conviction, giving him the green light to behave “like a gentleman”—not necessarily of the best sort—and look down on his origins, including his friend Biddy, who sees the way that Pip is going and doesn’t like it.

Pip and his sister are proved horribly wrong. Though Pip does land a surprise inheritance, and outwardly this makes him a “gentleman,” worldly success is shown to be naught to success in love. Fortunes can be lost as easily as they are won. Pip would have saved a lot of time and heartache if he had never been “raised up.” Let Pip’s mistake stand as a warning. By all
means look to the skies. But keep at least one foot on the terra firma of your origins.

See also:
Greed
•
Selling your soul
•
Social climbing
•
Workaholism

See:
Limb, loss of

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

LAURENCE STERNE

I
f you’re anally retentive, you’ll know all about the importance of order, logic, and neatness. A maker of lists, your life consists of accomplishing tasks that you can then tick off. Anything that comes between you and your task—an unexpected telephone call, a sunlit field calling you to take a stroll, an uninvited guest dropping by for tea—is grossly unwelcome. Your single-track mind cannot wander from its course. Now is your moment to swap psyches with Tristram Shandy. After 480 pages of living inside the head of this lovable philosopher and accompanying him on his remarkably prolix ramblings, you will be cured of your anal retentiveness forever.

Published in successive volumes from 1760 to 1767,
Tristram Shandy
is perhaps the first interactive novel, inviting the reader to take Sterne’s proffered hand and join in the author’s game. Like Italo Calvino two hundred years later, the authorial voice intrudes often and merrily, asking readers to consider the ways in which he has advanced their understanding of a character.

Shandy’s determination to write his memoirs is unstinting, but it takes him until volume three to arrive at his birth. Because this memoir, and indeed his life, consists entirely of diversions from the point. While he was still a mere homunculus inside his mother’s womb, the road to his existence was
disturbed, at the very moment of procreation, by his mother asking his father if he had remembered to wind the clock. This interruption to the act of conception results, he believes, in his prenatal self falling prey to “melancholy dreams and fancies” even before he came to fully exist. And when his name, which his father considered of enormous importance to his nature and fortunes, is accidentally mangled by the time it reaches the curate, and he is inadvertently christened Tristram—apparently the least auspicious of names—rather than Trismegistus as intended, he believes himself to be even less blessed by the fates.