The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (63 page)

The Sense of an Ending

JULIAN BARNES

I
t’s one thing to steer clear of bungee jumping, wrestling alligators, or playing mumblety-peg. Risks like those are best left to thrill-seeking daredevils who thirst to expose themselves to needless danger. But if you are someone whose pathological timidity and fear of embarrassment lead you to dodge such everyday tests of mettle as asking for a raise, leaving a job you don’t like, moving homes or to a new city, or pursuing the person you love, your risk averseness will maroon you in a sad half-life of missed opportunities. If you find this thought consoling rather than distressing, you are in need of a radical reading cure. It comes in the form of Julian Barnes’s compact and powerful novel
The Sense of an Ending
, which is drenched in regrets for an underlived life.

Throughout his adulthood, narrator Tony Webster successfully endeavored to keep “passion and danger, ecstasy and despair” at bay. He began this campaign of excessive caution in college, when he kept the heat low on a love affair—which could have been a raging
grande passion
—to protect himself from “an overwhelming closeness I couldn’t handle.” Now sixty, he has been divorced for twenty years from a woman he’d had tepid, manageable feelings for. “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe,” he thinks. “We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly.” Of late, Tony has stopped taking satisfaction in his long career of repression. Looking back, he reflects that he had “wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded.” As he sits alone in his poky, aging bachelor lair, he occupies his idle hours with meaningless tasks: “I restrung my blind, descaled the kettle, mended the split in an old pair of jeans.” Too late, he finds himself “in revolt against my own . . . what? Conventionality, lack of imagination, expectation of disappointment?” At least, he comforts himself, “I still have my own teeth.”

Stirred by an uncharacteristic impulse to show romantic initiative, Tony musters the courage to attempt a rapprochement with his college flame, but when the two of them meet up, she puts him off with annoyance. “You just don’t get it . . . You never did, and you never will,” she says. Tony, feeling “foolish and humiliated” after this rare exercise of bravery, needs no further excuse to retreat back to the kettle and linoleum of his solitary kitchen.

Don’t let Tony’s regrets become yours. Live, love, risk, dare . . . not once, but many times. And with luck, you will end up having more than your teeth to keep you company when you sit nodding by the fire in your autumn years, with “time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?”

See also:
Coward, being a
•
Goody-goody, being a
•
Organized, being too
•
Procrastination
•
Seize the day, failure to

Breath

TIM WINTON

•   •   •

Notes from the Underground

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

I
f you are a natural daredevil, prone to giving your nearest and dearest the heebie-jeebies by skiing off piste with yaks, crossing undulating rope bridges in a Zorbing ball, or white-water rafting through military war zones, you need to temper these tendencies with some daring, yet ultimately sensible, literature.

Start with
Breath
by Tim Winton. A novel about the desire of adolescent boys to push their limits, this takes the friendship of two young men as its focus. As teenagers, Bruce Pike (Pikelet) and his friend Loonie have the habit of diving into the local river, competing to see who can stay under the longest, and enjoying the panic this generates in anyone watching. Then one day they meet Sando, an older man whose obsession is surfing. “How strange it was to see men do something beautiful,” muses Pikelet, who is drawn to the grace of the surfers as a direct antithesis to his fisherman father’s inability to swim. The boys take up surfing too, with Sando egging the boys on to greater and greater feats of daring. “In time we surfed to fool with death—but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.”

One day Pikelet pushes himself out on his board into a terrifying riptide, with no one around to rescue him. He knows he is not ready for it, but is powerless to resist the urge. Surviving his ocean baptism, he befriends Sando’s wife. An ex-surfer herself with a permanent injury, she plays her own games with him, flirting with other alarming activities as a substitute for the thrill of the waves. It’s a novel that will vicariously fulfill your desire to push your limits. With several near-death experiences, let it serve as a warning about what happens when you go too far.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s tragicomic
Notes from the Underground
illustrates the consequences of a man’s radical denial of his own natural drive. In this novel, short in length but huge in its implications for world literature (containing as it does the seeds of
Crime and Punishment
), Dostoyevsky inhabits the disintegrating mind of a man who has deliberately chosen to do nothing with his life at all.

Writing from his present existence as a bitter and misanthropic
forty-something, the unnamed narrator looks back at his younger self, when an encounter with a prostitute named Liza could have changed everything. “I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow,” he writes. But he is a man who thinks instead of living and who “consequently does nothing.” A purveyor of paradoxes, he puts forward a convincing argument for the pointlessness of taking any action at all, let alone risks (see also: Pointlessness). We’re not suggesting that you follow his example and reject a life of action altogether, but rather seek to achieve a halfway point between your audacious leanings and complete inertia.

Between the extremes these two novels represent there lies a middle path; you can walk this path without fear.

See also
:
Carelessness
•
Confidence, too much
•
Gambling
•
Optimism
•
Regret
•
Selfishness

I
nstead of jumping out to assault the incompetent driver blocking the lane in front of you, stick one of these novels in your stereo. Some are angry, exhilarated, loud, to dissipate and divert your fury; others invite quiet meditation and reflection.

See also:
Anger
•
Rage
•
Violence, fear of

Crash
J. G. BALLARD, READ BY ALASTAIR SILL

2001: A Space Odyssey
ARTHUR C. CLARKE, READ BY DICK HILL

Heart of Darkness
JOSEPH CONRAD, READ BY KENNETH BRANAGH

Hopscotch
JULIO CORTÁZAR, READ BY KEVIN J. ANDERSON

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving
JONATHAN EVISON,

READ BY JEFF WOODMAN

On the Road
JACK KEROUAC, READ BY MATT DILLON

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
ROBERT M. PIRSIG,

READ BY JAMES PUREFOY

Anywhere But Here
MONA SIMPSON, READ BY KATE RUDD

The Miracle at Speedy Motors
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH,

READ BY ADJOA ANDOH

Fear and Loathing in Las V
egas
HUNTER S. THOMPSON,

READ BY RON MCLARTY

See:
Wanderlust

The Go-Between

L. P. HARTLEY

D
o you scatter rose petals on your bed every night, expect your suitors to climb up to your balcony bearing chocolates, and leave love notes inside your partner’s fridge? Would you travel thousands of miles to pick the first alpine strawberry of the season to present to your soul mate for breakfast? And expect him or her to do the same for you?