The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (52 page)

Taking this medical advice to heart, the man uses his settlement money to employ legions of actors to enact banal scenes, over and over, to permit him to accumulate a kind of video library of lifelike occurrences. The more intricate these reconstructions become, and the more thoroughly the man engages in his new life, the more he worries that he has lost the capacity to be “real.” “My movements are all fake. Second-hand,” he tells a man named Greg, who was his friend before the incident. He feels as if he’s always acting, as if he can no longer just authentically “be,” he complains. Provocatively, Greg asks, “Do you think you could before?”

Is your spine tingling a little by now?
Remainder
toys with the philosophical question of what really makes us who we are. Our memories, this
novel suggests, resemble fluid archival footage in our heads, which we change and reconstruct over the years into a story that usefully explains who we were and, more important, who we are now. We are constantly losing old memories and acquiring new ones. Identity may be memory, but if so, identity is also flux.

So if you have forgotten who you are, whether momentarily or more permanently, take comfort in knowing that this is, in some sense, the story of all human consciousness.

See also:
Amnesia, reading associated

The Summer Before the Dark

DORIS LESSING

•   •   •

Miss Garnet’s Angel

SALLEY VICKERS

•   •   •

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

REBECCA MILLER

I
t may be the end of your monthly cycles, but it doesn’t need to be the end of you. In fact, for many women, reaching menopause triggers a desire to dig out the “you” that was buried or thrust aside by the distractions of the fertile years. Whether you had children early or late or not at all, the deposing of your ovaries from their throne allows you to throw off a certain motherly mantle and cloak yourself in something more exciting instead.

Take as your role model Kate in Doris Lessing’s sixties classic of female self-discovery,
The Summer Before the Dark
. For a number of years, forty-five-year-old Kate has been holding back the tide—tinting her hair, keeping control of her weight, and “scaling herself down” in order to look and be the part of housewife and mother from her middle-class London suburb. But the youngest of her four children is now nineteen and ready to leave home, and though she is not yet menopausal, her family speaks about her as if she were. When a job comes her way—her first, as Kate chose to get married rather than have a career—she leaves her old clothes behind and buys sexy, sophisticated dresses that “would admit her, like a passport,” to a life in which she’s no longer Mrs. Brown, but Kate Ferreira.

Kate soon bores of this, though. The reason she’s so good at her job, she
realizes, is that she continues to play a diplomatic role—as if she were secreting some sort of “invisible fluid” that made “a whole of individuals who could have no other connection.” In short, she’s being everyone’s mother. She continues to try on, then reject a series of other roles—and clothes—but finds them all variations on the mothering theme. This discovery sends her spiraling into a breakdown—although, in Lessing’s world, breakdowns are always purgative. What shines through all the confusion is an epiphany she has halfway through her summer of change. Her future will not be a continuation of her immediate past, but will pick up where she left off as a child: the intelligent, feisty, and, yes, sexy Kate she used to be.

If you are past caring about sexiness, turn with relief to thoughts of art, self-education, spirituality, and self-discovery. In this,
Miss Garnet’s Angel
should be your accomplice. A spinster of just past sixty, and still a virgin, Miss Garnet has occasional regrets that she has never been loved by anyone enough to marry. But now that her flatmate—“the only person she had ever eaten with”—has just died, all she wants is a little adventure somewhere exotic. Quite randomly, she decides on Venice. There, Miss Garnet opens herself to experiences in a way she never has before, making friends easily and being sucked into an intriguing art theft, as well as a near romance. Most important, though, she discovers the angel Raphael. Invigorating, wise, and refreshingly free of sex, Miss Garnet’s late flowering will inspire you to higher things in life.

But if you’re not done yet with the reckless adventures of youth, grab Rebecca Miller’s
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
. From the terrible tedium of a retirement community—albeit one for the filthy rich—where Pippa Lee looks doomed to spend her middle age with her more senior husband, Herb, who’s eighty-one, we travel via memories of her troubled childhood and speed-crazed twenties into the arms of the younger Chris, a recovering Christian. Art and angels may have their place, but so, sometimes, does postmenopausal sex. Take this novel to bed—it’s never too late for new love.

See also:
Fiftysomething, being
•
Headache
•
Insomnia
•
Libido, loss of
•
Sweating
•
Tired and emotional, being

Girl, 20

KINGSLEY AMIS

•   •   •

The Year of the Hare

ARTO PAASILINNA

•   •   •

The Art of Fielding

CHAD HARBACH

A
re you trying to figure out how you can “bribe your own daughter to do camouflage duty so that you and your mistress can have an evening out against her boyfriend’s wishes behind her stepmother’s back?” If the answer is yes, and said mistress is seventeen, and you’re three times her age, then congratulations. You have landed in an epic midlife crisis of the kind that Kingsley Amis commemorated in his 1971 novel
Girl, 20
. The book ages remarkably well. The freshly knighted violinist and conductor Sir Roy Vandervane has never been particularly faithful to his second wife, Kitty, but after ten years of marriage, Kitty senses “he’s getting ready for another of his goes.” She should know—after all, she was the one who pried him away from his first wife, during a pre-midlife crisis. Roy feels no regret. “I know all this makes me look a right shit, and probably be a right shit,” he tells his go-between, Douglas Yandell, “but I am in love with this curious little creature, and perhaps that doesn’t justify anything, but you can’t imagine how it makes me look forward to each day.”

If you’re past the first bloom of youth and find yourself tempted to follow Sir Roy down a similarly destructive devil-may-care path, then take up
Girl, 20
and focus on Douglas’s attempts to reform the randy Roy and soothe his betrayed wife. With luck, Douglas’s hand-wringing will chasten you and bring you back to your senses.

If you’re only on the verge, then seek preventive care for the midlife malady in the form of the gently humorous 1975 Finnish novel
The Year of the Hare
by Arto Paasilinna. A journalist named Vatanen has tired of his job and his wife in Helsinki, and sets off on a road trip with a friend. On the way, he adopts a wild hare, which they had injured on their drive and which becomes his traveling companion. He ends up, much refreshed, in a rustic cabin in Lapland. Slip this slim volume into your overnight case the next time you’re on a business trip, and refer to it whenever that midlife crisis urge comes upon you. Better Lapland than lap dance.

For some, a midlife crisis is a chance to embrace the life they hadn’t gotten around to living. In Chad Harbach’s
The Art of Fielding
, we follow the taciturn stripling Henry Skrimshander from the cornfields of South Dakota
to a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin called Westish. Skrimshander, silent and unremarkable in most respects, is a natural at baseball, an outfielder with a “transcendent talent” for fielding that enables him to catch the most elusive balls. Westish gives the boy a full ride so its baseball team can benefit from his magic arm. There, young Skrimshander meets the college’s widower president, Guert Affenlight.

At the age of sixty, Affenlight falls hard for Skrimshander’s roommate, the self-assured, breezy, brilliant Owen. Affenlight “didn’t think of himself as gay,” he reflects, as he sits on a love seat with Owen, reeling at what has just transpired between them. He hadn’t even thought of himself as sexual, after a protracted dry spell. But at once he senses that this affair will be life changing. “From here on out,” he thinks, “he’d be with Owen or no one. No one or Owen.” His ecstatic transformation shakes him. Owen is comfortable in his own skin, but Affenlight definitely is not. As their relationship progresses, Owen recognizes that they must keep a low profile on campus but bristles at being hidden away like a shameful secret. “I know we can’t just walk around holding hands,” he complains to his august lover, but “what if we were in New York, or San Francisco, or even down the road in Door Country? What if you came to Tokyo with me? Would you walk down the street with me then?” Or, he adds, “Would that be too gay for you? Better to stay right here, in the heart of the problem, where your restrictions will protect you.”

“You’ve been reading too much Foucault,” Affenlight retorts. But love trumps literary criticism. There’s no question that Affenlight’s May-December affair with Owen wreaks havoc on his life. But it also lets him start living, at last. Sometimes, a midlife crisis can be a welcome wake-up call.

The Holy Sinner

THOMAS MANN