The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (76 page)

I
f you’re suffering the exquisite pain of a toothache, you will sympathize with Vronsky in Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
: “He could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong teeth, that were like rows of ivory in his mouth. He was silent, and his eyes rested on the wheels of the tender, slowly and smoothly rolling along the rails.”

What cures Vronsky, in the very next moment, is the displacement of the physical pain by a searing emotional pain—a memory that sets his “whole being in anguish” and makes him forget his toothache completely. Looking at the rails, he suddenly recalls
her
, or at least “what was left of her,” when he found her sprawled on the table in the railway station cloakroom, among strangers, her body bloody and limp, the head lolling back with its weight of hair, the eyes awful in their stillness and openness, the mouth still seeming to emit the “fearful phrase” that she had uttered when they had quarreled: that he would be sorry.

If this image of Anna’s broken body hasn’t done the job, think of another shocking tableau from the pages of literature (for our own favorites, see: Hiccups). Then meditate on it while you schedule an appointment with your dentist.

See also:
Pain, being in

See:
Nobody likes you

The Millstone

MARGARET DRABBLE

•   •   •

Notes from an Exhibition

PATRICK GALE

S
ometimes, when we find ourselves seeking refuge in the closet beneath the stairs, our children rampaging around the house, we read Margaret Drabble’s
The Millstone
, kept there for just such emergencies. Because even the happiest of parents can feel trapped by their children at times.

Rosamund Stacey is catapulted into motherhood by her very first sexual encounter. She nevertheless has a brisk approach first to her pregnancy, and then to life with her unplanned child. While not initially thrilled to be pregnant—she makes vague, botched attempts at an abortion (gin, a hot bath)—in the end she “fails to decide not to have it.” And though she has plenty of other calls on her attention, she becomes utterly devoted to the beautiful creature she produces. So much so that she never feels the millstone around her neck that her friends predict. Suddenly, in our closet beneath the stairs, we realize we are not trapped by children, but surrounded by love.

You’ll find more of this sudden, unexpected joy in Patrick Gale’s
Notes from an Exhibition
, in which we meet bipolar mother Rachel. Rachel’s mothering style is unique. She spends months locked away in her studio, painting and more or less ignoring her children. But on special days such as birthdays, she plunges in with total body and soul, keeping them home from school and letting them choose the pleasures of the day. On top of this, she is most inspired artistically when she’s not on her medication, and loves being pregnant—when she’s forced off the drugs—for this reason. And so through her children, and children to be, she heads to her biggest highs.

Of course, it’s not as easy as that. After the highs come the lows, and the consequences of those live on in the bones of your children. But there’s an encouragement here to live more intensely with our children than we, perhaps, always remember to do—to delight in them and celebrate them for whole days at a time.

See also:
Children requiring attention, too many
•
Claustrophobia
•
Fatherhood
•
Identity crisis
•
Jump ship, desire to
•
Motherhood
•
Single parent, being a

In the Cut

SUSANNA MOORE

F
irst of all, we have to decide whether someone is worthy of our trust or not. Most of us have a fairly good idea of this from the start. Trust this first impression. After that, continuing to trust someone when things get bumpy is an act of generosity. When in doubt, remember this: the degree to which you are prepared to trust is a measure of the degree to which others can trust you. Give up on people too easily, and they’ll know that you, too, will let them down.

When you’re a single girl in New York with a gift for the combative one-liner, you’re making decisions about whom to trust all the time. When you also have an interest in risqué sex, making the right decision can mean the difference between life and death. Susanna Moore’s
In the Cut
follows such a character in Frannie, who teaches English at a school for gifted low achievers. When the fast-talking, anecdote-rich Detective Jimmy Malloy calls on her to investigate the murder of a young actress in her neighborhood, she is immediately attracted to him, despite his many quirks (and cheap drugstore cologne). As Frannie becomes involved with Malloy and meets his colleagues at the homicide bureau—including his partner, Detective Rodriguez, who carries a yellow plastic water pistol in his holster—the first murder is followed by a second, and the tension ratchets up fast.

Test yourself with this novel: whom would you trust, and when and why would you stop trusting? It’s worth getting good at it. As Frannie’s fate testifies, one day your life might depend on it.

See also:
Lying

Home

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

T
o be in turmoil is to be in a state of great and terrible disturbance. Perhaps you’re at a fork in the road and you don’t know which way to turn. Overwhelmed and confused, you need to find calm and clarity—the still center at the eye of the cyclone. Lucid, clear, and cool,
the prose in Marilynne Robinson’s
Home
will provide that calm in the storm.

At the age of thirty-eight, Glory has returned home to look after her dying father, a Presbyterian minister, after a disappointment in love. Once there, she begins to think the lifestyle suits her, and she discovers some much needed peace. But then her brother Jack turns up after a twenty-year absence. Jack’s prodigal return fills his father with delight—he is a strong, silent type, and has a calm about him. But his silence is a complicated one: dark secrets lurk within, and there are things that cannot be discussed in front of their dogmatic father. Glory becomes increasingly troubled by what may or may not come out.

Yet she finds some comfort in Jack’s presence, her thoughts drifting back to pleasant childhood memories. Once, she recalls, Jack taught her the gentle word “waft” while breathing on a feather. When Jack entered the room, the “stir of air” had floated the feather out of her hand. He’d stood in the doorway and watched the feather circle against the ceiling in the air, then caught it lightly in his hand and gave it back to her.

As you let the prose of this novel do its work on your troubled psyche, notice how turmoil coexists with calm.
Home
, an elegy to forgiveness, is that still room in which a single feather can waft unharmed, floating on a gentle current of air, then return to your hand.

See also:
Anxiety
•
Cope, inability to
•
Stress

Old Man Goriot
HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Stranger
ALBERT CAMUS

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
MICHAEL CHABON

I Cannot Get You Close Enough
ELLEN GILCHRIST

The Buddha of Suburbia
HANIF KUREISHI

One Hundred Years of Solitude
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The Group
MARY MCCARTHY

Goodbye, Columbus
PHILIP ROTH

The Secret History
DONNA TARTT

Sexing the Cherry
JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

HARUKI MURAKAMI

T
hose out of work need a dose of quintessential Murakami. Because Murakami, the most popular Japanese novelist to be translated into English, specializes in passive protagonists with a lot of time on their hands and a tendency to get mixed up in entrancing, dreamlike adventures.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
begins in suburban Tokyo with Toru Okada, who has left his legal job for no particular reason, doing the sort of things unemployed people do—cooking spaghetti at ten o’clock in the morning, listening to a radio broadcast of Rossini’s
The Thieving Magpie
, fending off his wife, Kumiko, who calls to tell him about jobs for which he’s unsuited and wouldn’t enjoy. He goes out to look for their lost cat, Noboru Wataya, so named because it has the same “blank stare” as Kumiko’s brother of the same name, whom Toru hates because he believes he’s a sellout.

The search for the cat leads Toru to two strange women, down a dried-up well, and into the arms of yet another strange woman. What matters in all this is Toru’s response: however bizarre and unconnected the events seem, he accepts them with neither surprise nor judgment—as we, too, become trained by the novel to do. And though the meaning of all the incredible events eludes him—and us—it is his openness to this transforming, liberating journey that will inspire.

See also:
Ambition, too little
•
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Boredom
•
Broke, being
•
Job, losing your
•
Procrastination
•
Seize the day, failure to

See:
The Novel Cure
(Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin)

See:
Traffic cop, being a