The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (64 page)

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you are indeed a hopeless romantic. We applaud you and lament you in equal measure. And though we love a hopeless romantic, we fear for your heart and hope it will not be too frequently broken (see: Broken heart). As a first defense against the inevitable heartache that will come your way, we urge you to turn to
The Go-Between
. Read at the beginning of spring each year—when romance is most likely to blossom—it will protect you from complete heartbreak by preshattering it just enough to prevent full-scale wreckage later on.

In the novel’s prologue, we meet Leo Colston as an old man, stumbling upon a diary he wrote in 1900, when he was twelve. The little book triggers a terrible sense in Leo that he has wasted his life, as something that happened to him during the year of his Zodiac-decorated diary has marred his ability to have a happy relationship forever after. And so the story unfolds. Leo, an only child, is invited to stay with his school friend Marcus Maudsley for a few weeks during the summer holidays. When he arrives at Brandham Hall, he is ill equipped for the aristocratic milieu in which he finds himself,
and his clothes are too hot, itchy, and tight. But he slowly adapts to his new environment—helped by his hosts, who buy him a new, lightweight suit. Over the course of his stay, he is drawn in to the relationship Marcus’s older sister Marian is having with local farmer Ted Burgess, becoming their go-between, delivering letters from one to the other that help them meet up. Leo, in his naïveté, is completely unaware of the social consequences of this affair of the heart until he is too enmeshed in the web. The deadly nightshade in the woodshed that so fascinates and repels him is a symbol of the secrets at the heart of the novel, lurking in the dark and working their poisonous magic on their unwitting satellite.

We know from the prologue that Leo will be at least partially destroyed by the events of this stifling summer. But we discover only at the end that he is still, at his core, a hopeless romantic. Rather than scaring him off romance for life, he continues to idolize and worship the idea, treating the players in the story like the gods of the Zodiac, with himself as Mercury the messenger. This is why his life has not worked out. He is like the driver of a car with a shattered windshield, unable to see where he is. Don’t make the same mistake. Bury those romantic ideals along with your diaries. Take a hammer to the glass and move on.

See also:
Sentimental, being

See
:
Stuck in a rut

See:
Bitterness
•
Broke, being
•
Job, losing your
•
Murderous thoughts
•
Rage
•
Unemployment

The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B

J. P. DONLEAVY

W
hen we are sad, our bodies move toward our bookshelves with the same irresistible, invisible force by which the tides are drawn by the moon or migrating birds are lured back home. To land with inexorable precision on
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
. A novel so steeped in sadness, so embodying its lilting melodies, that the emotion seems to seep from the page by osmosis and mingle with our own, providing comfort in the inescapable knowledge that, in this world, deep sadness exists. Because no one understands this better than the Irish American writer J. P. Donleavy. Who drops his pronouns and active verbs as naturally as the melancholy drop their false cheer when they come inside and close the door. Who poses questions without question marks, and observes the subtle changes in the light with exquisite brevity (“And this evening a fresh green darkness over Paris”). If you are sad, immerse yourself in the warm, tender humor of this novel. To begin the long, slow uplift out of sadness that it effects.

Born into wealth in “the big house off Avenue Foch” in Paris, Balthazar B is a famously shy, elegant young man whose life is littered with loss and an endless search for love. His father dies, leaving him to his neglectful mother (see: Abandonment) and a “reservoir of riches.” And so he attaches himself to “Nannie,” her cheeks round and smiling, and Uncle Edouard, mad balloonist and adventurer, who regales the wide-eyed boy with tales of narrow escapes from bears and how he once persuaded a hot-air balloon to go up by venting his bowels over the sixteenth arrondissement. Dispatched in his white stockings and buckled shoes to a heinous English boarding school, where boys rise shivering “clutching towels” in the mornings and where his blue stuffed elephant Tillie is torn to shreds before his eyes, Balthazar finds solace in the carrot-headed Beefy, his only friend. Beefy stitches Tillie together and comforts Balthazar with thoughts of margarine and marmite for breakfast, and how they’ll put salt in the masters’ coffee, and how they will survive the beastliness of life by doing, whenever possible, the
in
decent thing. And then Beefy is expelled, and Balthazar is alone again.

There are wondrous joys along the way, but it is the ever present, ever gentle humor that keeps us going, including Uncle Edouard’s advice on how to live—“lighthearted on the boulevard, gay in the café, a good shot at the shoot,” with a flower in the buttonhole every day and the “roar of a lion” with every morning bowel motion. Keep this novel on a shelf by your bed and dip into its well of sadness whenever your own is threatening to overflow. By mingling your sadness with that of the emotion’s grand master, you will come to know it, as he knows it, as a painful but tender and sometimes funny thing.

See also:
Cry, in need of a good

Tender Is the Night

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

•   •   •

Bound

ANTONYA NELSON

N
o author has written more perceptively and sensitively about the emotional scars of the human heart than F. Scott Fitzgerald in
Tender Is the Night
, his novel about the difficult marriage of the mentally fragile heiress Nicole Warren and her psychologist husband, Dick Diver. In addition to grieving over his
wife’s frequent breakdowns, Dick is burdened by guilt for his inability to cure her.

After one of Nicole’s collapses, following the birth of their second child, Dick “harden[s] himself about her, making a cleavage between Nicole sick and Nicole well.” He does this in order to protect their marriage by keeping his love for Nicole’s healthy self intact. Though Dick’s intentions are good, he worries that, in neglecting the damaged part of his wife’s psyche, he’s fostering “an emptiness” that depletes her. And when Nicole has yet another breakdown, Dick worries that his professional detachment has made him callous. It hasn’t, of course; if anything, he feels too much—not too little—even though he doesn’t want to admit it to himself. He muses: “One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick, but wounds still.”

We all have them. What varies is how deep they run and how well you keep them hidden—both from yourself and others. And what is the best thing to do with your wounds, anyway? To air them at every opportunity so as to speed the healing process and keep the scars from forming in the first place? Or to lick your wounds in private and keep them buried, to protect the sanctity of your suffering?

Cattie Mueller, one of the protagonists of
Bound
, by Kansas-born Antonya Nelson, chooses the latter option. She would hate to be pitied. As the novel opens, Cattie’s mother, Misty, has died in a car crash, but Cattie doesn’t yet know it. A rebellious teen, she’s on the run from a boarding school out east when her mother dies. The news catches up with her days later, when she at last checks her cell phone; she and her mother had been playing a game of telephone tag just before the accident, neither of them wanting to be the one who felt the need to call—or “loser caught caring,” as Cattie puts it. “Proud, stubborn, superficially tough, secretly tender: these were the traits shared by mother and daughter,” Nelson writes. “They’d rather throw a punch than shed a tear, burn bridges than mend fences.”

Antonya Nelson’s novels and short stories focus on men and women in the American West and Southwest who carry a lot of emotional baggage, which they either hide or flaunt like a badge of honor. Her scapegrace characters have messed-up love lives and work lives, but they move forward with a scavenger’s instinctive, opportunistic persistence, like coyotes along the highway—coyotes who self-medicate with Jack Daniel’s. Absorbing Cattie’s edgy reserve in this American story of wounds and resilience will fill you
with respect for those who bear their suffering bravely, and will help you medicate your own wounds not with whiskey, but with the author’s healing insights.

See also:
Demons, facing your
•
Haunted, being

Skin Tight

CARL HIAASEN

I
f you’re unlucky enough to have a serious scar on your body, you may spend time fretting over how to conceal it. Vitamin E cream, cover-up cosmetics, temporary or permanent tattoos, even plastic surgery may be options you have considered. Fret no more. Artful positioning of a novel—tipped nonchalantly, for instance, over that unsightly flaw on your chin—will either hide or steal all the attention away from your scar, especially if the title is intriguing enough. Observers will be far more interested in seeing what you are reading than in the underlying blemish.
*

However, we digress. Our novel approach to healing your scar is Carl Hiaasen’s
Skin Tight.
Like all Hiaasen’s novels, it’s set in Florida among the tourists and criminals of the Everglades. The antihero is Chemo, a man whose skin has erupted into horrific Rice Krispie puffs after an unlucky electrolysis incident. Chemo enters into a bargain with a plastic surgeon: facial reconstruction in return for the disposal of an inconvenient witness to the accidental death of one of the surgeon’s other unfortunate patients.

At six foot nine Chemo is not the most discreet of hit men. He’s also not gifted with enormous intelligence. To make matters worse, Rudy Graveline, the unorthodox plastic surgeon without a certificate to his name, has a backlog of mysteriously unfinished, dead, or otherwise unsatisfied patients. There is one woman, however, whose anatomy even the unscrupulous Rudy Graveline won’t tamper with: the actress Heather Chappell, whose body is as
perfect as bodies get. Heather does not think so, however, and wants a boob job, a tummy tuck, rhinoplasty, and a chin implant. Her desperation to improve her nonexistent faults serves as a reminder that we often see flaws where observers do not.