The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (49 page)

U
nrequited love is a particular kind of love that can only ever go one way. To prove our point, we’ll borrow Ann Patchett’s definition of it in her novel
Bel
Canto
(also one of our cures for: Mr./Mrs. Right, looking for). Trapped in adjacent seats
on an eighteen-hour flight, the young Swedish accompanist to the famous soprano Roxane Coss blurts out a confession of undying adoration that makes the singer wince. Coming out of the blue and without any basis in mutual friendship or attraction, it is too much, too soon—and stinks of recklessness: “The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned,” Patchett writes. How can the object of your love see someone worth loving in return when you are willing to throw yourself at his or her feet, exposed and bleeding like a piece of uncooked meat?

It’s only a matter of time before the accompanist sacrifices himself literally, for the poor sot is well and truly lost to the masochistic destructiveness of his hopeless love. When the terrorists who have taken both the soprano and her audience hostage offer freedom to anyone needing medical help, the love-struck man keeps mum, even though he’s a diabetic requiring regular injections of insulin to stay alive. Staying to “protect” Roxane will mean certain death. Well, thanks a lot, Swedish accompanist, for dumping the guilt of your death on my hands, Roxane would be within her rights to point out. You call that love?

Literature is teeming with similarly tormented foolish types, dying to die for the love of someone who never asked for it in the first place. And it’s not a pretty sight. The worst of the bunch is Werther in Goethe’s
The
Sorrows of Young Werther
, the sensitive soul whose hopeless love of the peasant girl Lotte—already happily engaged to someone else when they meet—drives him to take his own life in despair. He even has the audacity to arrange for Lotte to send him the pistol that will be the instrument of his death. Following this novel’s first publication in 1774, sensitive artistic types from Ostend to Naples began dressing in the signature outfit of young Werther; appallingly, some killed themselves in copycat suicides with a pistol and an open book. It became known as the Werther effect. Goethe was quick to denounce the overblown emotions of the Romantic movement—known as Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”)—from which his novel had sprung. We do too. If you suspect you’re the type to revel in the tragedy of your own unrequited love, we instruct you to steer well clear of
The Sorrows
. Turn to
Far from the Madding Crowd
instead.

This Hardy stalwart, set in the Wessex he loved, is the best novel in the business for showing how to, and how not to, love. Everyone gets it wrong at the beginning. Gabriel Oak—though lovable from the very first line with his beaming smile that reaches to “within an unimportant distance of his ears”—is somewhat simplistic in his approach to courting. Bathsheba—pretty, marriageable, soon to be rich—is vain and full of herself. She’s also a
tease, and though this works for Gabriel—for a prize worth winning has to be a little hard to get—the Valentine’s card she sends in a moment of impetuous silliness to her neighbor William Boldwood is an act of irresponsibility she lives to regret. Hitherto unaffected by the good looks of his neighbor, the card gives Boldwood the idea of loving her, and soon he has plunged headfirst into a Werther-esque rush of unrequited love, sacrificing himself quite unnecessarily in its depths.

Bathsheba’s third suitor, Sergeant Troy, is essentially a good man, though he, too, thinks a little too much of his looks. But he has done something even more reprehensible than Bathsheba, having gotten a woman pregnant and left her in the lurch. Gabriel Oak is the only one who comes through, and he does it by standing firm, by being a loyal friend to Bathsheba throughout the whole messy business with the other two men, and by waiting for Bathsheba to see his worth—as well as to prove her own.

If you insist on reveling—just for a while—in the ecstasies and agonies of unrequited love, do it with Turgenev’s
First Love
. In this sun-drenched novella, young Vladimir, sixteen, is besotted with twenty-one-year-old Zinaida. She has a whole deck of suitors at her disposal, and though she treats him as a young confidant, she does not take his advances remotely seriously. She plays with all her infatuated lovers—and it becomes apparent only at the end who the true object of her affection is. It all, of course, ends in tragedy. Have one last revel in your love along with Vladimir, but decide thereafter to keep your cards close to your chest. Only then will you start winning the suits.

If the love you feel is not returned, pause in your foolish gushing and ask yourself the following question: in your eagerness to love, have you made yourself unlovable, lacking in self-respect? If the answer is yes, you’ll be incapable of inspiring more than a guilty no. Buck up. Look yourself in the eye and tot up your worth. Then demonstrate that worth with the sort of behavior that someone as wonderful as the person you love surely deserves in return.

See also
:
Infatuation
•
Jealousy
•
Love, doomed
•
Mr./Mrs. Right, holding out for

The Price of Salt

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

L
iterary heroes and heroines have been pining away from lovesickness for ages. Case in point: Palamon in Chaucer’s fourteenth-century “The Knight’s Tale,” who, having caught sight of fair Emily through the window of the tower where he is imprisoned, nearly wastes away from the effects of seeing, but not having, her. It is only in our less romantic era that psychiatrists are called in and drugs prescribed. Our drug-free cure is a bracing dose of love requited.

Highsmith’s second novel was inspired by an incident in her own life, when she was working in a department store selling children’s dolls, just like Therese in
The Price of Salt
. She was so bowled over by a customer who seemed to “give off light” and made her feel that she had seen a vision, that she went home and sketched out the story in two hours. The tale is one of unexpected passion between two women: Carol, in her thirties, with a daughter and a husband she’s in the process of leaving; and Therese, nineteen, drifting from job to job but with a flair for set design. It is Therese, the shopgirl, who initiates their affair.

At first Therese is openly besotted, and Carol remains playfully aloof. Therese’s boyfriend is disconcerted; she has made no attempt to hide her obsession from him. “It’s worse than being lovesick,” he tells her, “because it’s so completely unreasonable,” failing to believe in the possibility of same-sex love. But what is true love but the triumph of emotion over reason? When Carol and Therese take off on a road trip across the States, Carol opens up to Therese and they become fully entwined.

When the two suddenly find themselves apart—they believe forever—Therese experiences extreme lovesickness: total lassitude and despair. “How would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?” Only Carol can save her from her lovesick state. And she does.

See also:
Appetite, loss of
•
Broken heart
•
Concentrate, inability to
•
Dizziness
•
Infatuation
•
Insomnia
•
Lust
•
Nausea
•
Obsession
•
Romantic, hopeless
•
Sentimental, being
•
Tired and emotional, being
•
Yearning, general

Girl with a Pearl Earring

TRACY CHEVALIER

L
ust has its place, of course. We wouldn’t feel alive without it. But when it comes to exercising judgment, let lust take a backseat. Human desire is immensely powerful, but it is also entirely unreasonable, irrational even, and should not be influencing our decision making.

Take a leaf from Griet, the considered, measured maid-cum-muse of Johannes Vermeer in Tracy Chevalier’s
Girl
with a Pearl Earring
, a reconjuring of the moment behind the painting from which this novel takes its name. The humble girl captures the painter’s interest when he notices that she’s arranged her chopped red cabbage and carrots in such a way that the colors do not “fight,” realizing at once that she has an instinctive painterly eye. By the time she sits for him, they have come to respect each other, working peacefully in his studio side by side. Griet has begun to refer to him as “her master” and, more tellingly still, as an unnamed “he.” Both have taught the other new ways to see. And there’s been a highly charged touch: Vermeer places his hand over Griet’s to show her how to use the muller stone, causing such a powerful sexual charge to pass through her that she drops it. By the time the painting is made, the lust—his, but also hers—is there for all to see, in the glinting whites of the eyes, the moist lips just falling apart, the gently twirled and hitched fabric of the headdress, and, of course, the shine from out of the shadowy neck of that incongruous, lustrous pearl.

Griet knows full well that in seventeenth-century Delft a girl from her background can’t tangle with a man from Vermeer’s class. This is highly dangerous territory, and with the sexual tension blistering on the page, we know Griet’s future is on the line. Chevalier’s careful, concise sentences model the restraint required by her characters. Will they keep their passions in check, or will lust break through?

O lusty reader, when your hormones threaten to prevail over your head, take yourself off to a quiet place with
Girl with a Pearl Earring
. Let those elegant, disciplined sentences temper your passions, rein in your lust. Pause, slow down, rethink. Is your attraction for someone with whom you can share your carrots and cabbages? If not, enjoy the arousal for what it is, then take a deep breath and move on.

See also:
Infatuation
•
Lovesickness
•
Sex, too much

Atonement

IAN M
C
EWAN