The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (56 page)

The Interestings

MEG WOLITZER

•   •   •

Middlemarch

GEORGE ELIOT

•   •   •

The Ginger Tree

OSWALD WYND

B
efore you slap your head with recognition, thinking to yourself, “Yes, yes,
that’s
my problem—my partner has blighted my happiness!” read Meg Wolitzer’s wise and generous novel
The Interestings
, in which a handful of couples fall in and out of love with their spouses, and in and out of fortune’s favor. The main characters in the book meet as teenagers one summer in an arts camp; decades later, they still struggle to live up to their youthful high opinions of one another. Jules, who has married an unartistic, depressive, but supportive man named Dennis, often thinks she’s married beneath her. “If you want to get out of this marriage, then just do it,” Dennis tells her at one point, fed up with invidious comparison. But grown-up Jules is no barrel of laughs herself; she has long abandoned her comedy dreams and works as a therapist. When Dennis rebels against her unrealistic standards, defiantly proclaiming his “absolute lack of specialness,” Jules realizes that he is, after all, special. And she needs him. “In a marriage, they both knew,” Wolitzer writes, “sometimes there was a period in which one partner faltered, and the other partner held everything together. Maybe that was even a definition of marriage.”
The Interestings
shows that maturity and understanding can turn Wrongs into Rights.

Then again, sometimes a mismatched couple is doomed from the start. George Eliot’s masterful novel
Middlemarch
ruthlessly, unsentimentally examines the consequences that result from an obviously incompatible union. The misery the reader feels when the peerless Dorothea Brooke throws herself away on fusty old scholar Casaubon brings home the enormity of such a mistake. Although Dorothea doesn’t think she’s making a mistake, we know it’s only a matter of time before she sees him for the dried-up pedant he is. The “large vistas and wide fresh air” she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind, she ultimately sees, are in fact “anterooms and winding passages” leading nowhere.

Dorothea is saved from a lifetime of grim servitude when the Grim Reaper comes knocking for her husband. But the dashing young doctor Lydgate, Dorothea’s friend, is not so lucky. He and Rosamond, drawn blindly
to each other by romance, face a lifetime of torment when their actual personalities begin to emerge from beneath their facades. Rosamond’s spending habits stymie Lydgate’s ambitions, and when her motivation for marriage is exposed as having been little more than social advancement, bitterness corrodes their bond. Trapped in a loveless marriage, they might have avoided their fate if only they’d looked past superficialities and truly gotten to know each other before taking the plunge.

If it’s too late for you, too, take heart from Mary, the feisty heroine of Oswald Wynd’s
The Ginger Tree
. True, her Mr. Wrong abandons her when she has an affair with the Japanese count Kentaro (see: Adultery), but Mary has a habit of picking men who run off with her children as well, and loses two in the course of the story. Fortunately, this stoic young woman—marooned first in China by her cold, military attaché British husband, and then forced to flee to Japan—is keen to understand and adapt to the cultural differences around her in order to survive. Like the ginger tree of the title, which “remains the stubborn stranger” in the garden, she manages to maintain a strong sense of self within her alien culture, outcast or not, while doing so. Written in the form of journals and letters to her mother in Scotland and her friend Marie, this novel will have you shedding the tears Mary rarely sheds for herself. Be inspired by Mary to either grow in new directions, within the garden you find yourself in, or to find a door in the garden wall to let yourself out.

See also:
Dissatisfaction
•
Divorce
•
Murderous thoughts
•
Non-reading partner, having a
•
Regret
•
Stuck in a rut

W
hen the world seems awfully humdrum, you need to discover the transporting capacities of fantasy fiction. And we don’t just mean Harry Potter—we love him too, but there’s more to fantasy fiction than Hogwarts and Quidditch. Spread your wings with the list below. They will take you into the realm of the miraculous and the marvelous.

See also:
Boredom
•
Disenchantment
•
Dissatisfaction
•
Malaise, twenty-first century

Zoo City
LAUREN BEUKES

Nights at the Circus
ANGELA CARTER

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
SUSANNA CLARKE

A Wizard of Earthsea
URSULA K. LE GUIN

A Game of Thrones
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

Dragonflight
ANNE MCCAFFREY

Small Gods
TERRY PRATCHETT

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The Hobbit
J. R. R. TOLKIEN

The Once and Future King
T. H. WHITE

Thérèse Raquin

ÉMILE ZOLA

E
veryone has them. Even kids. Even cats. So don’t pretend you don’t. You live with someone. They put their tea bags in the sink. They leave long, ginger hairs in the soap. They lean in a bit too close. They make sounds as they eat. And sometimes you want to kill them.

Most of us don’t take it any further than a brief internal rant, followed by a period of secret brooding—at which point we come to our senses. However, some do take it one step beyond, and begin to plot. If you ever catch yourself doing this, Zola’s
Thérèse Raquin
is your wake-up call. It describes the abject life of Thérèse and Camille, a married couple who live above their shop in the Passage du Pont Neuf along with Camille’s mother. Zola lays on the desolation with a trowel; the winter light coming in through the arcade glass roof, for instance, throws “nothing but darkness on the sticky tiles—unclean and abominable gloom.”

Indeed they are so miserable that we sympathize when Thérèse turns for some passion and excitement to another man, Laurent, gentleman painter and idle sponge. But when she and Laurent decide to kill Camille in order to clear the way for their love, our affinity with the heroine is challenged.
It’s not that we feel any great affection for Camille—he’s portrayed as a spineless, spoiled sop. But Thérèse and Laurent become progressively more detestable as the novel continues. We won’t give away what happens, but the message is clear: this sort of solution will only lead to bad dreams, bad sex, and yet more homicidal thoughts. So stop your plotting. Breathe deeply. And again. Then see: Snoring; and Married, being.

See also:
Rage
•
Vengeance, seeking
•
Violence, fear of

See:
Short, being

See:
Arrogance
•
Confidence, too much
•
Selfishness
•
Vanity

Brideshead Revisited

EVELYN WAUGH

T
here are few things worse. Excuse our vulgarity, but since recovery is impossible without letting it all come out . . . That’s it. Go on. We won’t look.

Shivery, sweaty, shocked? Still a little queasy, perhaps? Go brush your teeth, then come back here and assume a horizontal position, wrapped in a blanket, propped up with pillows, a heating pad at your side, and your reeling head stilled by the perfectly balanced prose of Evelyn Waugh.

More than any other writer, Waugh can be trusted to put you back on level ground. To take you by the hand—gently, demurely—lift you up to your tiptoes, pause, then bring you down carefully again. Nobody does it better.

From the first paragraph of the first page of
Brideshead Revisited
, his paean
to the privileged, observe how Waugh uses repetition to maintain a state of measured equilibrium: “I had reflected then” is balanced by “and I reflected now.” A little farther down you’ll find “a quarter of a mile” in one clause echoed in the next. Drop your eyes to the bottom of the page and watch alliteration and overlap take over, carrying us forward in precise dancer’s steps: from “the camp stood” to “the farmhouse still stood” to “the ivy still supported.” Semicolons act as brief, unobtrusive pauses—a moment’s holding of a pleasing shape, sustaining the upward lift—while commas accommodate the fluency of flow and twirl thereafter. Not for a moment are we left in doubt as to the beat: “In half an hour we were ready to start and in an hour we started.” Oh, the steadiness, the sureness, the settling of your tummy! This prose is a dance, and Waugh is the graceful, accomplished partner whisking us across the floor.

Whoops! Steady on. If you are afraid of the nausea returning, read on. For Charles, our narrator, whose “rooms” at Oxford are on the ground floor right next to the quad, forges the most intense relationship of his life because of vomit. Sebastian, the teddy bear–dependent younger son of the lord and lady of Brideshead Castle, “magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which . . . sings aloud for love,” has had too much to drink. And, passing Charles’s open window just before midnight, the young aristocrat leans into the room and throws up. Charles is generous enough to see “a kind of insane and endearing orderliness” about Sebastian’s choice, in his moment of need, of an open window, but the roomful of flowers he finds on his return from lectures the next day, and the contrite invitation to “luncheon,” charm him more. Soon he is cast into a world in which hard-boiled plovers’ eggs are offered to guests—a world of beauty, intensity, and dysfunction that will set his youth aglow, then leave him to a lifetime of disappointment thereafter.

But life—and fiction—is made extraordinary by such friendships. If it weren’t for Sebastian’s nausea, he’d never have gone to Brideshead, or met Sebastian’s “madly charming” sisters, or entered the “enclosed and enchanted garden” that gives him, at least for a spell, the happy childhood he never had.

Thanks, therefore, be to nausea, his and yours—and to Evelyn Waugh for making everything better.

True Grit

CHARLES PORTIS

A
re you always asking for help? Unable to do anything on your own? Wanting someone to hold your hand at all times? Asking for help is, of course, a good thing, but complete dependence is not. There comes a time when you need to learn independence and rely on yourself and yourself alone. Like a slushy road, a dose of grit is your cure.

Set in America just after the Civil War, Charles Portis’s novel
True Grit
describes the steely determination of Mattie, a fifteen-year-old girl seeking to bring her father’s killer to justice. The killer is Tom Chaney, an employee of her father’s, who pulled a gun on him in a fit of drunken pique. Mattie has come to Fort Smith ostensibly to fetch her father’s body, but, unknown to her family back home, she has her own agenda.

The first thing Mattie has to do is recoup some money owed her father, then persuade the grittiest ranger she can find to track Chaney down and bring him to justice. Rooster Cogburn is as gritty as they come, but she is grittier. The next thing she has to do is persuade him to take her with him. Cogburn tries to give her the slip, but she won’t be left behind, and as they plunge into the snowy landscape of Arkansas, Mattie endures hunger, gunfights, and the bitter cold without complaining even once.

Mattie’s Presbyterian good sense verges on the pious. But her estimable pluck in the face of outlaws, knives, bullets, snakes, and corpses wins our admiration every time, and will encourage an immediate assumption of independence as you read. And although she uses the people around her to help her to achieve her goals, she relies on herself to see her plan through to its conclusion. It is an older Mattie, looking back on this formative chapter in her life, who tells this tale, and her adult self is very much the product of all this hardship and loss. Steel yourself, reader. Say farewell to mush, and welcome a handful of grit into your soul.

See also:
Coward, being a
•
Seize the day, failure to
•
Self-esteem, low

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

JON MCGREGOR

•   •   •

Cloudstreet

TIM WINTON

I
f it’s your parents who f**k you up, it’s your neighbors who wind you up.

Unfortunately, neighbors can be neighbors for a very long time. Fall out with them and it can make your life a misery. Learn to live with them—and even to like them—and you’ll earn yourself an on-the-spot social life. Plus eggs, milk, and sugar whenever you need it. Sometimes it’s not so much that you’ve fallen out with your neighbors, but that you’ve never actually met them. People live cheek by jowl for decades with little more than a formal nod. Our first cure, then, will have you sticking your head over the fence to say hello. Our second will have you knocking the fence down.

In
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
, Jon McGregor’s lyrical first novel, we know the inhabitants of an entire street in a city in northern England, not by name but by the number on their door: “the young woman from twenty-four,” “the man with the carefully trimmed mustache from number twenty.” McGregor’s narrative takes flashes of consciousness from these myriad neighbors and builds them into a symphony of sound, a blur of activity, a chaos of unlinked events. Except that they
are
linked. Like the “quivering flutter of a moth’s rain-sodden wings,” each tiny happening within this small geographical area conspires to bring remarkable life—and death—to our consciousness. McGregor manages to capture the infinite possibilities of neighborly interaction, from total indifference to selfless love and sacrifice—all of which are available to us, and the people we live among. Throw a street party right away, and enrich your life.

But what if, when we meet them, we can’t stand them? Neighbors could not have less in common than the Pickleses and the Lambs in Australian author Tim Winton’s lovable novel
Cloudstreet
. Which is bad luck for them, or so it initially seems, as they share a “great continent of a house” in Perth. Sam Pickles, a gambling man, can afford to install his family in the monstrosity he’s inherited only if they rent half out. So they build a makeshift fence from old tin signs down the middle of the yard, and Lester and Oriel Lamb and their brood of six move in. Before long, Sam Pickles is looking on in mild astonishment as the Lambs take to their knees on their side of the yard planting vegetables and rearing chickens, and replace their living room
window with the shutter of a grocer’s shop. Suddenly the house looks like an “old stroke survivor paralysed down one side”: a maelstrom of activity on the hardworking Lambses’ side and inert lifelessness on the Pickleses’.

As the linguistically inventive Winton moves between each of the main characters’ points of view, the line between the two sides of the building starts to blur. Cloud Street becomes Cloudstreet—a single entity, and a symbol of teeming life. Though there is plenty for the two families to fight about—noise, religion, gambling—and the odd slipper is lobbed from one side to the other, they take a live-and-let-live attitude. And in the end, neighbors become relations.