The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (48 page)

A
n exemplary model of short-windedness, and to illustrate its effectiveness as a cure, we, having just reread it, will say no more.

See:
Hope, loss of

See:
Faith, loss of

See:
Job, losing your

See:
Drugs, doing too many
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Madness
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Senile, going

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Fatherhood
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Identity crisis
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Identity, unsure of your reading
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Lost, being
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Selling your soul
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Trapped by children

Please Look After Mom

KYUNG-SOOK SHIN

T
o lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,” Lady Bracknell says severely in
The Importance of Being Earnest
. For Oscar Wilde, her remark was a joke, but if you’ve ever gotten lost, you know that the experience is no joking matter. Maybe you’ve lost your compass, misread your maps, and found yourself at nightfall on a spooky, desolate mountainside that you’ve climbed in search of a ruin . . . not knowing that you would
end up being the ruin. Perhaps you’re standing, bewildered and hungry, among mazy alleyways lined with endangered species in cages, trying to decipher street names that look like hieroglyphs, and fuming that your partner refused to spend the holidays in Umbria, as you’d wanted. Or maybe you’re at the mall with young children when you suddenly notice that they have disappeared. The sensation produces an adrenaline rush, cold sweats, and recriminations. It’s tempting to make it somebody’s fault, but often hard to pin down who deserves the blame.

Kyung-sook Shin’s melodramatic, tear-jerking novel
Please Look After Mom
tells the cautionary tale of a selfless, rural South Korean mother, So-nyo Park, who gets lost during a visit to her grown children in Seoul. When she fails to follow her husband into a crowded subway car before the door closes, she gets stranded. Illiterate and ashamed of it, she doesn’t know how to navigate the city. Why didn’t one of her children pick their parents up at the station as usual?

Shin builds her story by alternating narrators—the children’s accounts, as well as the father’s and So-nyo’s. And, along the way, we see that her children’s dormant consciences slowly revive and come back to bite them. Beautifully told and rich in detail of South Korea’s rural traditions,
Please Look After Mom
perceptively documents generational change, showing how the close, familial world that long characterized South Korea has given way to an anonymous, urbanized world. Mothers like So-nyo—familiar to any reader—seem to have lost their rootless children even as they are looking at them face-to-face.

One Day

DAVID NICHOLLS

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Me Before You

JOJO MOYES

W
hat is the cure for doomed love? We prescribe a wrenchingly good cry, provided by a vicarious wallow in the heartbreak of heroes and heroines whose suffering quite possibly (we hope) exceeds your own. Love born under a maligned star—like Tristan and Isolde’s, Cathy and Heathcliff’s, Tess and Angel Clare’s—is terrible to watch. It is also terribly cathartic.

If you’re in the clutches of a hopeless passion, making a fool of yourself over someone who doesn’t know you exist, or obsessing over a lover who
behaves like the villain of a blues ballad, then it’s time you gained some perspective. Dive into
One Day
, David Nicholls’s delectable slow-burn novel about the long-deferred romance between the cocky, self-centered toff Dexter Mayhew and the goofy, unconfident Emma Morley. Emma and Dex hook up briefly and inconclusively as students, and remain in each other’s orbit ever after, mostly unhappily. One of them, usually Dex, veers away just when they might get close. As you accompany the two of them through two decades of near misses, you can revisit the eighties and nineties in Nicholls’s faultlessly conjured evocation, from shabby college rooms where “you were never more than six feet from a Nina Simone album” and every girl has a photo of Nelson Mandela on the wall “like some dreamy ideal boyfriend,” to the coked-up London media parties of the nineties. When Dex is off his head (often), he finds himself thinking of Emma: “It’s Emma that he wants to see the most. Why isn’t she with him tonight?” he thinks. Answer: because he’s a moron. Yet, somehow, they can’t shake each other. Why? Because they’re made for each other, don’t you know. When will they figure it out? Will they? The suspense will make you tear your hair and forget, for the protracted, captivating moment of the novel, your own love woes. When Dex at last declares himself, Emma tells him, “It’s too late.” Luckily, it turns out not to have been, quite, and we can breathe a sigh of long-deferred relief. By the time they’ve woken up to the love they have wasted, they’re battle scarred enough to appreciate what they have, while it lasts.

If you wish to submit to still more drenching floods of tears, take up Jojo Moyes’s rending
Me Before You
, whose bright, matter-of-fact voice lures the reader into a lovelorn labyrinth that is all the more poignant because the lovers themselves remain unaware, for so long, of the emotions that have overtaken them. Louisa “Lou” Clark is a no-nonsense working-class girl who supports her parents, sister, nephew, and grandfather with her paycheck. When the café where Lou works closes, she finds a job as a caregiver to a man who has been paralyzed from the neck down in a motorcycle accident. That man, Will Traynor, is the thirty-five-year-old son of the most prominent family in Lou’s little town. Before the accident, he had been a rich, arrogant businessman who traveled the world and had his choice of flawless, leggy, model-thin girlfriends. After the accident, he’s furious at his straitened life, and annoyed by Lou’s efforts to improve it.

Lou is as small, dark, and invisible as Jane Eyre, while Will is as irascible and rude as Mr. Rochester. Even though Will is trapped in a wheelchair, Lou is initially cowed by him. But her self-respect and her sensible nature give her the gumption to persevere, and when Will lashes out peevishly at
her, she retorts, “I’m not employed by you. I’m employed by your mother.” Then she declares she will continue to work for him no matter what: “Not because I particularly care about you, or like this stupid job, or want to change your life one way or another, but because I need the money. Okay? I really need the money.” Her show of pique amuses and impresses him. For once, he’s not being pandered to. He begins to make her a kind of pet project, leading her to read books, watch foreign films, and travel, nurturing her mind as she nurtures his spirits. As they grow closer, Lou’s boring boyfriend, Patrick, quarrels with her, resenting her for giving so much attention to another man. But when she accuses him of being jealous, he denies it churlishly: “How could I be jealous of a cripple?” he says. But Patrick, Will’s mother, and Will’s main caregiver, Nathan, realize far earlier than Lou and Will how their relationship has changed and deepened. But how can such a doomed love end? Read it and weep.

See also:
Mr./Mrs. Wrong, ending up with
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Wasting time on a dud relationship

See:
Appetite, loss of
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Concentrate, inability to
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Dizziness
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Infatuation
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Insomnia
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Lovesickness
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Lust
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Obsession
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Optimism
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Romantic, hopeless

See:
Falling out of love with love

See:
Happiness, searching for
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Mr./Mrs. Right, holding out for
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Mr./Mrs. Right, looking for
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Shelf, fear of being left on the

Bel Canto

ANN PATCHETT

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The Sorrows of Young Werther

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

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Far from the Madding Crowd

THOMAS HARDY

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First Love

IVAN TURGENEV