The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (80 page)

I
f you’re lost for words because you’re in shock, wait for the shock to pass and the words will return. If the words won’t come because you have a stutter or a stammer, see: Speech impediment. But if you’re lost for words because eloquence is not your strength, and the right words seem to desert you whenever you need them most, then take as your companion the narrator of
Lolita
, Humbert Humbert, a man who is as far from being afflicted with this ailment as a person can get.

By rights Humbert Humbert should be the one shamed into silence. He has used a young girl for the selfish pursuit of his own illicit pleasures. But instead, as he waits in prison for the trial that will determine his fate, words are his greatest friend. In fact, Humbert Humbert can’t wait to speak. Here, in prison, he no longer has to keep secret the despicable self he has been repressing all these years. At last he can indulge in the rapturous specifics of what, and who, he has loved.

And one of those things is language. For Humbert Humbert, words are a plaything—he loves allusions and double meanings, and finds in them both an outlet for his humor and a catharsis. But they are also a tool of seduction—and this time it’s the reader who’s being seduced. What Humbert Humbert is famously doing is seducing us with his tongue. From the very first paragraph, with its sensuous dismantling of her name into its three delectable syllables—
“Lo-lee-ta”—we are as entranced by his descriptions of Lolita as he is by the girl himself. We want more of this “exasperating brat,” because we want more of the language in which she’s revealed to us. Thus ensnared into the rhapsody, tainted by the joint titillation, how can we condemn Humbert Humbert without condemning ourselves? Such is Nabokov’s cunning game. By the end, we are captivated by this confession of rape, murder, pedophilia, and incest, with its “bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies,” as if it were an aboveboard romance between two consenting adults. Nabokov has made a sordid thing into a divine work of art.

What separates you, tongue tied and anxious eyed, from Humbert Humbert—erudite, literary, a French speaker with a predilection for
le mot juste
as well as little girls—is that this loquacious criminal has an unwavering sense of his right to speak. Take a page from Humbert Humbert. Steep yourself in his elegant rhythms—though not his inelegant activities. Think of words—though not nymphets—as your playthings, as sources of private and shared amusement. Let his charm—though not his charming of young girls—become your charm, tripping off your tongue from the palate to the tip “to tap, at three, on the teeth,” giving your anxious tongue license, at last, to speak.

Capital

JOHN LANCHESTER

•   •   •

Under the Greenwood Tree

THOMAS HARDY

See:
Job, losing your
•
Unemployment

O
ne of the most vexing dilemmas about being a workaholic is that, were you to turn up to a Workaholics Anonymous session seeking support for your addiction (yes, such sessions exist), nobody else would be there . . . Well, being workaholics, they’d all decide they were too busy to go to the meeting. And face it, so would you. The hamster wheel of workaholism is hard to jump off, particularly when your workaholism yields status, nice possessions, a roof over your head, food for your table, and school fees for the children. As a result, the only surefire way to exit the wheel is to be pushed.

In John Lanchester’s novel
Capital
, his dazzlingly perceptive overview of
the contrasting lives of a handful of Londoners of wildly divergent backgrounds, a workaholic City banker named Roger Yount realizes first gradually, then suddenly, that his unending toil has been in vain. His spoiled, grasping, frivolous wife, Arabella, complains endlessly about the time he spends at the office, but spends every penny he earns (or she anticipates him earning) on the trappings of privilege she takes as her due. Roger has counted on his one-million-pound Christmas bonus to cover their mogul excesses. Waiting for his envelope, he entertains hopes that his bonus might be even higher than expected: two and a half million pounds “would, once he’d paid for all the things he had to pay for, salted some away in the pension . . . and all that, leave him with a fair few quid left over. It was said you could get somewhere pretty habitable on Ibiza for a million quid. Worth thinking about.” But it’s not worth thinking about once Roger, feeling sick, sees the real figure: thirty thousand pounds. With so “little” money, any thought of a second (or third) home flies out the window—they might not even be able to hold on to their first. Can they possibly make do with less work, less money, less
stuff
? You could almost pity Roger if you didn’t feel he had it coming—and Arabella certainly needs to learn a lesson or two. But how can they learn to cope once Roger jumps off the wheel?

The answer is to wean themselves from relentless acquisition (see: Greed) and steep their overachieving, overcraving souls in something very simple, very rustic, very small. To effect this transformation, we suggest Thomas Hardy’s gentlest, most innocent novel,
Under the Greenwood Tree
. The members of the Mellstock parish choir are a motley crew. Gathering in rain or shine with their fiddles to sing and play—a labor of love, not money—they have not forgotten the important things in life: a little music, a little cider, a little cheer for old and young alike.

Realistically, it’s too late for the Younts to find much relief in such humble escapism; Arabella’s interests don’t include nineteenth-century novels, just the stately country homes in which they are set. But, assuming a vacation home in Ibiza is not in your sights, it’s not too late for you to reform your workaholic ways. Take a lesson from Roger’s comeuppance: downsize your workday, connect more fully with the life outside your desk, and take a page from Hardy’s soothing prescription.

See also:
Busy, being too
•
Busy to read, being too
•
Cope, inability to
•
Schadenfreude
•
Stress

See:
Anxiety

I Capture the Castle

DODIE SMITH

T
he remedy for writer’s block inflicted upon the novelist father in
I Capture the Castle
is nothing short of genius. But—darn it—to tell it would be to give away one of the plot twists in this unutterably charming novel. Mortmain, as he is known by his second wife, Topaz, achieved great critical success with an experimental novel called
Jacob Wrestling
. But he has not been able to put pen to paper since an unfortunate incident involving a next-door neighbor who foolishly intervened when Mortmain brandished a cake knife at his first wife while they were having tea in the garden. He ended up spending three months behind bars, writer’s block set in, and the family has been penniless ever since.

While Topaz and the three children struggle to feed and clothe themselves and their ruined castle crumbles around them, Mortmain drifts around reading detective novels and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and staring into space. He’s ditched all his friends and has more or less stopped talking to his family. Eventually Rose, the elder daughter, can stand it no more and decides to marry her way out of poverty. But the younger, wiser narrator daughter Cassandra soon realizes it’s time to force their father’s writing hand. Her plan—which involves a Freudian regression to the moment at which the block began—works to a T.

Sufferers of this unfortunate condition should not necessarily attempt to copy Cassandra’s cure. It is somewhat extreme and in any case would not work with your own consent. But read between the lines of this book and a fuller, more complete picture of how Mortmain’s block dislodges will emerge. As you read, gather the things you need around you: a person of like mind, someone to do the cooking, and, yes, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.

Feedback on the success rate of this remedy would be greatly appreciated.

I
f you find yourself fearing or even loathing those from countries other than your own, bathe in these books from foreign parts. Written by authors native to the setting, they reveal the essential sameness of us all beneath the skin and will remind you of the humanity common to us all.

Once Upon a River
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

See Under: Love
DAVID GROSSMAN

The Blind Owl
SADEGH HEDAYAT

Waltenberg
HÉDI KADDOUR

The Garlic Ballads
MO YAN

Cities of Salt
ABDELRAHMAN MUNIF

Q & A
VIKAS SWARUP

Harp of Burma
MICHIO TAKEYAMA

House of Day, House of Night
OLGA TOKARCZUK

Cutting for Stone
ABRAHAM VERGHESE

Silk

ALESSANDRO BARICCO

T
o long—painfully, endlessly, fruitlessly—for something you believe will satisfy a deep, persistent need in you is a painful, endless, fruitless way to spend your life. It’s also irritating to all who have to witness it. Life is too short. Luckily, we have a cure so short that we needn’t spend much time prescribing it and you won’t spend much time administering it.

It is not that Hervé Joncour doesn’t appreciate his loving wife, Hélène, who waits for him patiently when he makes his annual, hazardous trip by land and sea to the Japanese village of Shirakawa to smuggle back silkworm eggs, an illegal trade at the time. It is just that, were it not for the yearning he feels for the young concubine who captures his heart in Shirakawa—and with whom he exchanges only missives written in Japanese—he would have appreciated her even more.

Do not prize what you do not know above what you know. Love and cherish your true friends and family rather than cultivating some distant, impossible dream.

See:
Homesickness