The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (55 page)

The Great Fire

SHIRLEY HAZZARD

•   •   •

Agapanthus Tango

DAVID FRANCIS

•   •   •

Waiting

HA JIN

C
ompromise is unavoidable once you’re married, but those refusing to compromise
before
they’re married are opting for a risky strategy. Whole lives can pass by in the waiting, and there’s no guarantee that, at the end of it all, you’ll find your hoped-for prize.

Those holding out need encouragement to keep their nerve, because the alternative is worse. (If you’re in any doubt, see: Mr./Mrs. Wrong, ending up with.) Take heart from the story of Aldred Leith in Shirley Hazzard’s magisterial
The Great Fire
. Thirty-two but feeling older, Leith is emotionally beached after the trauma of World War II and a dissolved “war marriage” to Moira. He expects nothing from life from here on out. But in the damp hills near Hiroshima, where he has come to write a government report, he meets two remarkable children: Helen Driscoll and her terminally ill brother, Ben. The fragile siblings have nothing in common with their oafish father and insincere mother, who represent everything that Leith despises. But together they have created a little haven of intellectualism, reading aloud to each other—“they live in literature and make free with it.” Leith finds, almost to his embarrassment, that he has met his true love match in Helen. With her small breasts only just showing beneath her dress, he guesses she is no more than fifteen.

At first he puts it down to a need for comfort in an “entire world” that needs comforting, but they experience true happiness when they meet. Shirley Hazzard makes what might otherwise be an inappropriate pairing (see: Age gap between lovers) beautiful and real by the force of her zealously unsentimental prose. Leith and Helen wait for each other, spanning their separation with letters while also having to cope with the antipathy of Helen’s parents and the transplantation of their relationship to a different country. But the certainty with which they recognize—and we, too, feel—their rightness for each other is inspiring to anyone holding out for the same. Their confidence is well placed, in the end.

If you believe you have already met your Mr. or Mrs. Right but are forced to hold out because
he or she
fails to see it, we urge you to read
Agapanthus Tango
, David Francis’s gem of a novel set partly in the parched Australian outback and partly in the green fields of America’s horse-racing country. We won’t make any promises for a happy ending here, but Day’s feelings for Callie are so evidently real, the two of them so clearly suited, that our hearts sit on a cliff edge as we watch the eighteen-year-old Australian boy being continually rebuffed by the untamed Callie.

Day has run away from home following his mother’s death and lands himself a passage to America along with a thoroughbred racehorse. Offering himself as a stable hand to the horse’s new owner there, he meets the sixteen-year-old Calliope Coates, another runaway. Unreachable, cocky, troubled, smelling of damp hay, and with a cruel streak in her that sees her whipping her horses, she is all that Day wants, from that moment on. Day, recognizing another damaged spirit, understands her and accepts her as she is, and simply doesn’t give up. Is Day a fool to suffer the wounds and rejections and still hold out hope? Or does he exhibit real emotional bravery? Those finding themselves tempted to be rocklike for someone unavailable like Callie must read right to the end of this exquisitely written novel to find out whether such strength of spirit pays off.

In
Waiting
by Ha Jin, Lin, a doctor in the city, keeps his girlfriend, Manna, waiting for eighteen years because first he must divorce Shuyu, the illiterate village girl with bound feet his parents forced him to marry. Each year Shuyu agrees to a divorce, but each year he arrives at the courtroom only to find she has changed her mind. Manna, head nurse at the hospital where Lin works, wastes her thirties waiting for Lin, and her resentment turns to bitterness (see: Bitterness).

She’s not the only one damaged by the years of waiting. Shuyu endures a hard, lonely life bringing up their daughter Hua in the countryside, and only belatedly does Lin realize what a poor father to Hua he has been. Eventually, Manna has waited so long for Lin that it becomes too late
not
to keep waiting. Yet by that time, Lin’s romantic passion for Manna has faded and his own shilly-shallying has caused him to lose self-respect. “I know your type,” Lin’s roommate tells him. “You’re always afraid that people will call you a bad man.” Lin knows his weakness has ruined all their lives, and even when the waiting is over, there is more waiting on the horizon. Let this novel be a warning: don’t let your whole life become one big wait.

See also:
Change, resistance to
•
Commitment, fear of
•
Indecision
•
Optimism
•
Procrastination
•
Risks, not taking enough
•
Romantic, hopeless
•
Wasting time on a dud relationship

The Pursuit of Love

NANCY MITFORD

•   •   •

Emma

JANE AUSTEN

•   •   •

Pride and Prejudice

JANE AUSTEN

•   •   •

Joshua Spassky

GWENDOLINE RILEY

•   •   •

Bel Canto

ANN PATCHETT

F
inding your ideal partner—best friend, lover, companion, bankroller, chef, artfully combined in one winsome package—is generally considered to be the jackpot in the great lottery of life, the best way to secure happiness, good health, and longevity. For many, it is the major obsession of early life, and, if the search fails, the primary cause of unhappiness in later life (see: Shelf, fear of being left on the; Mr./Mrs. Wrong, ending up with; Loneliness). Since the nineteenth century, novels have shared—or reflected, or fueled, depending on your take—this obsession. Hundreds of searches for Mr. and Mrs. Right have been presented for our entertainment and edification. But have two centuries’ worth of reading about them made us any better at it? Have we, in fact, merely become such perfectionists that we are in danger of seeking an ideal that doesn’t exist (see: Mr./Mrs. Right, holding out for; Happiness, searching for)?

It doesn’t seem so. Many of us still follow the terrible example of Linda Radlett in Nancy Mitford’s
The Pursuit of Love
, who, despite starting out with the conviction that true love comes only once in a lifetime, goes about it using the method by which she later buys clothes: trial and error. That is, she marries two Mr. Wrongs before she finds what she thinks is the real thing, at last, in the wealthy French duke Fabrice. Fabrice funds her shopping sprees and for a while makes her the happiest woman in the world—but not, alas, for long. Oh, that she had not been in such a rush and held out for “the one”!

Of course, we often
do
meet Mr. or Mrs. Right early on—sometimes staring us in the face, in fact—but we fail to recognize it, whether through our own failings or someone else’s. The former is the case with Jane Austen’s Emma, who takes the span of a whole novel to develop enough self-awareness to be struck by the arrow informing her, with absolute, wondrous certainty, that her Mr. Right is her neighbor Mr. Knightley. The latter is the case with Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
, whose Mr. Darcy has a few
character flaws to be ironed out before he can be a Mr. Right for her (see: Arrogance).

And both are true with the drink-befuddled, damaged pair in Gwendoline Riley’s
Joshua Spassky
. After five years of on-and-off dating and failed sexual encounters, Natalie and Joshua take themselves off to Asheville, North Carolina, where they lie in a motel room and try to work out whether or not they’re in love. If you
don’t
find it maddening to watch them deliberate, and do feel a great sense of relief when the emotionally frozen Natalie finally announces that she feels like a bottle of milk “that’s just been taken out of the fridge”—suggesting an emotional thaw is finally on its way—you’re probably equally scared of commitment (see immediately: Commitment, fear of). Don’t be too hasty to dismiss the friends in your immediate circle when you’re looking for love; many of the happiest partnerships are between people who don’t have to look far to find each other.

But sometimes Mr. or Mrs. Right is very far away indeed. This is the case for Mr. Hosokawa, the boss of a Japanese electronics company who would surely have gone on believing he could feel true love only for opera rather than another human being if he hadn’t been thrown into unlikely circumstances: when he’s taken hostage during a concert in his honor. In one of the best stories we know about love blossoming where it’s least expected, Ann Patchett’s brilliant
Bel Canto
sees the emergence of three true loves: Mr. Hosokawa with the beautiful soprano Roxane Coss; his highly educated interpreter, Gen, with a completely uneducated peasant-turned-terrorist; and the French diplomat Thibault, who until recently has taken his elegant wife, Edith, for granted. Transformed by the beauty of Coss’s singing—Patchett writes tremendously about the almost painful, visceral capacity of music to move—and forced to live in the heightened moment by the constant threat of death, the extraordinary outcome for those in the cocoon of the vice president’s mansion (where they are being held) is that everyone, hostages and terrorists alike, gravitate to culture and art—to singing, reading, learning, cooking, playing chess—and, of course, to love.

All of which is not to say, of course, that you should go get yourself taken hostage. The takeaway here may be to not look too far or try too hard, for your Mr. or Mrs. Right may just be closer to you than you think. Cultivate your passions, live your life, grow and develop in interesting ways, and enjoy it while you’re at it. Then—who knows—maybe your Mr. or Mrs. Right will find
you
.