The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (47 page)
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Authors: Ella Berthoud,Susan Elderkin
See also
:
Orgasms, not enough
•
Sex, too little
Peter Pan
J. M. BARRIE
• • •
The Third Policeman
FLANN O’BRIEN
T
he loss of a limb is an awful bind and will slow you down for a while, but as literature shows there are ways of using it to your advantage. Make a feature of your missing limb, like Captain Hook in J. M. Barrie’s delightful (even for grown-ups)
Peter Pan
, and wear a hook or other surprising arm or leg replacement with pride. Not only will you stand out in a crowd, but people will know that your suffering has added depth to your personality. Captain Hook’s inability to cope with the sight of his own blood and his terror of crocodiles makes him all the more human to us and Peter Pan.
The one-legged narrator of Flann O’Brien’s daft romp
The Third Policeman
is saved from death by his affliction. A one-legged bandit is about to kill him when he notices their common asymmetry and decides to make friends instead.
Be cheered. Life may be different when you lose a limb, but it need not be less hearty, less active, or less full of friends.
READING AILMENT
Live instead of read, tendency to
CURE
Read to live more deeply
I
t’s simply not good enough to say you’re too busy getting on with the process of living to spend time reading. Because as Socrates was the first to point out, “an unexamined life is not worth living.” Books offer a way of turning inward, reflecting, and analyzing the life that starts up again as soon as we emerge from the book. And besides, how much living can one person actually do?
Books offer us the lives of a thousand others besides ourselves—and as we read we can live these lives vicariously, seeing what they see, feeling what they feel, smelling what they smell. You could argue that living without books is to live only one limited life, but with books we can live forever. Without books it is easy to lose direction in life, and to shrink to something small and mean and clichéd. Books develop our capacity to be empathetic and nonjudgmental, to accept and honor difference, to be brave, to extend ourselves and make the most of ourselves. And they remind us that beyond the minutiae of life, there is another realm of existence common to us all: the mystery of being alive, and what that means. One cannot live fully without spending time in that realm, and books are our ticket there.
T
o pass the time while waiting for the locksmith, you surely need a great detective/crime/spy novel. Keep a stack in your garden shed (where—
ahem
—you should also consider keeping a spare key). You might pick up some ideas for how to break in.
Burglars Can’t Be Choosers
LAWRENCE BLOCK
The Shape of Water
ANDREA CAMILLERI
The Woman in White
WILKIE COLLINS
Angels Flight
MICHAEL CONNELLY
Live and Let Die
IAN FLEMING
Break In
DICK FRANCIS
Bad Chili
JOE R. LANSDALE
A Perfect Spy
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Devil in a Blue Dress
WALTER MOSLEY
The Nine Tailors
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Northern Lights
PHILIP PULLMAN
• • •
I, Claudius
ROBERT GRAVES
• • •
Tales of the City
ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
Y
ou need never be lonely with a roomful of novels—or even just the one you’d take with you to a desert island—and we all have our favorite literary friends. But there are inevitably times of literary drought when you may have no novels at hand at all, and for these times you must be sure to have prepopulated your brain with plenty of characters, ideas, and interesting conversations, gathered from fiction, to ensure your interior world can always be relied upon to keep you company.
One of the best such antiloneliness vaccines is
Northern Lights
by Philip Pullman, as well as the other two novels that make up the His Dark Materials
trilogy. Because in the fictional world that most closely resembles our own—Pullman has created many worlds within the world of these novels—the human characters all have a daemon, an animal companion that sits on their shoulders and keeps them company throughout their lives. Daemons are not just companions, though, but representations of a person’s spirit. If a daemon strays too far from its human, both human and daemon feel physically compromised; if the daemon is in any way hurt, the human feels the pain too. A daemon is part best friend, part partner, part physical manifestation of one’s very soul, and a human with a daemon is never alone.
Terror strikes in this compelling novel when the “Authority”—the religious organization ruling the land—decides to separate children from their daemons, supposedly for the good of their souls. Lyra, a feisty preadolescent, experiences terrible torture as she comes very close to losing her daemon, Pantalaimon, who appears mostly in the form of a pine marten (the form of one’s daemon does not settle permanently until one’s teens). As you are swept up in Lyra’s quest to prevent this atrocity and rescue Roger and the other
children from the “Gobblers” in the frozen North, you will be convinced of the absolute necessity of daemons—and surely will know what form your own would take.
It’s hard to believe that Robert Graves was ever lonely, so heaving with intriguing characters are his large and populous novels. Living in an idyllic corner of Mallorca, he wrote his two most successful novels,
I, Claudius
and
Claudius the God,
as a means to fund his sociable lifestyle—because he not only hosted a garrulous community in his head, but also in his home. Many glamorous writers, artists, and film stars flocked to his house parties and took part in the theatrical performances he organized. Use his novels to keep the party going in your own head.
I, Claudius
is the fictional autobiography of a nobleman who begins life as a stammering fool, derided and ignored by his odious family, only to rise above them all. The sycophants and schemers who surround him make for highly entertaining company, among them the wise Augustus and his conniving wife, Livia, sadistic Tiberius, and the frankly insane Caligula. With his family at constant war with itself and everyone trying to poison one another all the time, Claudius himself is always in a throng. It all adds up to a fascinating, bustling sense of what it must have been like to live in the Roman Empire in the first century AD. You might actually be quite glad about your solitude once you’ve put the novel down.
Sometimes when we don’t have the energy for new friends, it’s old, familiar friends we yearn for. In this case, let the residents of 28 Barbary Lane in Armistead Maupin’s symphony to San Francisco back into your life. (And if you haven’t already met them, it won’t take you more than a few pages to feel part of the gang.) Creations of the late seventies and early eighties, Mary Ann Singleton, Mona Ramsey, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, Brian Hawkins, and their marijuana-growing landlady Mrs. Madrigal are still surprisingly fresh. With its episodic form—the experience is as close to watching TV as literature gets—this novel and its seven sequels are for keeping in your kitchen along with your cookbooks. Don’t eat alone, but with wisecracking Mona making you laugh as she flips you an egg, sunny-side up, Mouse brewing up some reassuringly strong coffee, and Mrs. Madrigal taking the mug from your hands and replacing it with pearls of wisdom and a joint. Who needs to go out on a Friday night when Maupin’s tales of the city are at home?
See also:
Loneliness, reading induced
READING AILMENT
Loneliness, reading induced
CURE
Read in company
W
e all enjoy the pleasure of being left alone with a good book. But sometimes after several hours of immersion we lift our heads and look around, suddenly struck by the quiet, the absence of others. The world outside—and perhaps the world of our book—teems with people interacting with one another. But we are all alone. Something plaintive has entered our soul: we are suffering from reading-induced loneliness.
For some, reading is a way of escaping loneliness in the first place (see: Loneliness); feeling perhaps that nobody understands us, we find great solace in the company of a like-minded book. Sometimes we turn to books to escape the people around us, for there can be loneliness within a crowd too. How contrary, then, that the very thing that first cured us of our loneliness has now delivered us into a different sort of isolation.
The solution is to read in the company of other reading people—whether in a public space such as a café or a library, or in your own home, with your reading friend or partner at the other end of the sofa. Next time you look up, you’ll see someone else similarly engrossed, and you won’t feel alone at all.
Reading can be sociable: if you’re at home, try reading aloud with your friend or partner, either at length or just the bits you’ve underlined. Consider joining a reading group in which everybody takes turns reading aloud from a novel. Reading a book communally is a wonderful way to share an otherwise internal and solitary experience, and you’re likely to come away with a greater insight into and understanding of the book from the reactions of others during and after. It’s also a great way to make new reading friends. Maybe at some point one of them might occupy the space at the other end of your reading sofa.
The Road
CORMAC MCCARTHY