The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (8 page)

The Leopard, Don Fabrizio Corbèra, Prince of Salina, feels as if he has been dying for years. But even now, in his old age, he is Appetite writ large. He still has the energy, at seventy-three, to go to brothels, and is still delighted to see his favorite dessert—a rum jelly in the shape of a fortress, complete with bastions and battlements—on the dining table (it’s rapidly demolished beneath the assault of his large, equally lusty family). There are ravishing descriptions of desire of many different kinds: the daily pursuit of a hare in the “archaic and aromatic fields,” and the intense and overwhelming attraction of young Tancredi and Angelica as they chase each other around the palace, forever finding new rooms in which to yearn and dream, for “these were the days when desire was always present, because always overcome.”

One cannot help but revel in the old patriarch’s appreciation for the
sensual world. This is a novel that will help you rediscover your appetite—for food, for love, for the countryside, for Sicily with all its history and rampant beauty. And, most important, for life itself.

Pride and Prejudice

JANE AUSTEN

•   •   •

Angel

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

•   •   •

Mildred Pierce

JAMES M. CAIN

A
rrogance is one of the greatest crimes in literature. We know this because when Mr. Darcy snubs Elizabeth Bennet at Bingley’s ball—refusing to dance with her, dismissing her beauty as just “tolerable,” and generally turning sour on the inhabitants of Longbourn—he is immediately written off by everyone, even Mrs. Bennet, as the “proudest, most disagreeable man in the world.” And this is despite being much more handsome than the amiable Mr. Bingley, despite his having a large estate in Derbyshire, and despite his being by far the most eligible man for a twenty-five-mile radius—which, as we know, means a great deal to Mrs. Bennet, with five daughters to marry off.

Luckily, the playful Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Austen’s heroine in
Pride and Prejudice
, knows how to bring him down to size. She uses a combination of teasing (“I am perfectly convinced . . . that Mr. Darcy has no defect,” said to his face) and blunt, hyperbolic rejection (“I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry”), which not only corrects his flaws but displays the “liveliness of [her] mind” to such a degree that he falls in love with her all over again—and properly this time. If you are inflicted with similar arrogance, learn from this novel how to spot intelligent teasing and courageous honesty—and welcome it. You should be so lucky to be turned into the perfect man/woman by someone like Elizabeth.

Sometimes, however, the arrogance is so deeply instilled that nothing and no one can shift it. The eponymous heroine of
Angel
, by Elizabeth Taylor—not the Hollywood actress but the mid-twentieth-century British writer—is just fifteen years old when we meet her, and to say she thinks she’s the bee’s knees is an understatement. An incorrigible liar, this strange child is vain, bossy, and utterly devoid of humor. She feels nothing but contempt
for her classmates, is unmoved when one of them is taken to the hospital with diphtheria, and fantasizes about a future in which, dressed in emeralds and a chinchilla wrap, she’ll be able to employ her own, tiresome mother as her maid. Naturally, her mother is pretty appalled by the daughter she’s raised—just as Mildred is horrified by her similarly monstrous daughter Veda in James M. Cain’s
Mildred Pierce
. Veda drains the family coffers to support her extravagant lifestyle and steals her mother’s new man. It’s not hard to see why Mildred tries to kill the monster she’s created.

Fascinatingly, Angel’s über-confidence carries her a long way—all the way to those emeralds, in fact. Veda, too, gets exactly what she wants. Neither discovers humility. Rejection—in Angel’s case, from publishers and critics; in Veda’s, by her own mother—has no sobering effect on either of them.

Do not be an Angel or a Veda. When you inspire rejection, question what you might have done to deserve it. Instead, be a Darcy. Though he’s initially angered and mortified by Elizabeth’s refusal of his proposal—and her accusations against his character—he knows the difference between right and wrong and craves the good opinion of someone he admires. Be glad when others pull your leg—chances are, they’ll be improving you.

See also:
Confidence, too much
•
Vanity

See:
Neediness

See:
Anger
•
Bitterness
•
Hatred

See:
Manners, bad

See:
Taste, bad

See:
Grumpiness
•
Irritability
•
Killjoy, being a
•
Querulousness

Blow Fly

PATRICIA CORNWELL

•   •   •

Sun Dog

MONIQUE ROFFEY

•   •   •

Shine Shine Shine

LYDIA NETZER

I
f you have a shiny pink pate on which nothing grows—and you catch glimpses of its outward spread reflected in windows as you pass—you may feel dismay at the passing of your locks, and perhaps with them, a sense of virility. You envy the thick manes you see around you and wish that some of their excess could be transferred to you. But think of the evolution of man from ape to
nearly hairless human. You are the superior being, your high-domed forehead more evolved. It is the mop-headed brutes who should feel shifty in your presence and who would surely shave it all off if they had enough brains to think it through.

If these sentiments don’t reassure you, Patricia Cornwell’s seventeenth novel,
Blow Fly
, will. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne was born with a fine down of black hair—not just on his head but covering every inch of his body. As a child, he was treated as a worrying curiosity, hidden from the public by his embarrassed parents. As an adult he has assumed the role of monster, a “wolfman” repellent to the eye—not merely because of his pelt, but because the condition brings with it a deformed body and a terrifyingly bestial face.

Hair hangs around this novel, clogging sinks, coming out in tufts in people’s hands, and left incriminatingly on dead bodies. Forensic science brings a magnifying lens to these hairs with medical examiner Kay Scarpetta on the case (and in fact she has met this hirsute beast before). As Scarpetta and Chandonne sharpen their claws on each other’s armory, you will be increasingly repelled by the sheer ickiness of all the hair and will run your hand over your smooth scalp with untold relief.

And if you need further convincing that bald is best, read Monique Roffey’s
Sun Dog
. Her protagonist, August, is a man who can change his bodily attributes with the seasons. In the autumn he has blood orange hair that leaps from his head “as if from a burning attic.” In winter he turns blue and emits snowflakes. In spring, buds emerge from his armpits, nipples, and ears. And in summer his hair comes off in swathes. It is then, at his baldest and most vulnerable, that August meets his true love. Luckily, she has no interest in whether he’s tufty or smooth; she loves him for himself.

It was the alopecia of Sunny Mann, the bald heroine of Lydia Netzer’s novel
Shine Shine Shine
, that endeared her to her first love, and later husband, Maxon Mann, a math-minded astronaut with a touch of Asperger’s. He and Sunny fell in love as teenagers, when they would sit in their local planetarium looking up at the stars. Maxon longed to draw the constellations on Sunny’s smooth skull and was fond of imagining her head lighting up like a celestial globe. Sunny is comfortable in her own scalp, and she secretly looks “askance” at women with long hair, feeling they are somehow “overcompensating.” All the same, she can’t help dreaming of a miracle cure, and after she and Maxon marry, she starts wearing a blond wig so as to fit in with the other wives in her neighborhood. When that wig accidentally flies off, Sunny feels wildly liberated: “She woke up out of her sleep, she dropped out
from her orbit, scattered across the sky on every different vector, every crazy angle.” She becomes, in short, her genuine, glorious, undisguised self, which her friends turn out to like just as much as her bewigged incarnation. “Own it,” Sunny says to herself. “Own the bald.” If baldness is your bugbear, be like Sunny: Fear it no longer. Accept your shining pate.

See also:
Aging, horror of

Tess of the d’Urbervilles

THOMAS HARDY

F
or reasons medical science has never explained (although, naturally, we have our own hypothesis; see below), it’s physically uncomfortable to keep a secret bottled up, and a great relief to let it out. And confessing—or spilling the beans—can bring not only immense relief, but also sometimes a sadistic pleasure. The look on someone’s face during the moment of spillage can be both entertaining and gratifying (see: Schadenfreude). But these positive emotions are usually short-lived, particularly if the spilling of the beans has caused pain or anguish in the spillee, or the beans were not yours to spill. Before such spillages are indulged in, therefore, the short-term gain (for you) of spilling must be weighed against the long-term consequences (for you and others). Because beans, once spilled, cannot be unspilled, and it may be better for everyone if you live with the discomfort of keeping them pent up inside instead.

If Tess Durbeyfield had lived with her beans—as her mother Joan advised her to—her marriage could have been saved and a happy ending secured. Tess’s confession to her husband, Angel Clare, on their wedding night about her tarnished past with Alec d’Urberville is made after Angel owns up to a previous liaison of his own. She, understandably enough, sees this as the perfect moment for them both to clear their consciences. But Angel, to his great discredit, fails to forgive Tess as she has forgiven him. He rejects his sullied Tess and heads off to Brazil in a serious sulk.

All might have been well if Tess had kept her beans inside her and waited until such time as Angel was man enough to see the situation for what it
was—she as the victim, Alec as the assailant. By this time she would also have realized (as she eventually does) that the beans were not hers to feel guilty about in the first place—that they were in fact Alec d’Urberville’s beans and should have been his all along. Tess is an innocent victim of nineteenth-century patriarchy, of course, but the emotional truth still holds: she should have kept those beans inside.

A word of warning, though. If your secret is a guilty one through and through, and having weighed the pros and cons you’ve decided to keep the secret inside, be prepared that the discomfort may get worse over time—whether it indicts you or someone else. Bottled-up beans, like actual beans, give off a sort of gas that expands, producing flatulence and indigestion until they eventually erupt without warning, usually at the very worst possible moment. This is a situation worth avoiding at all costs and indicates that your secret has more guilt attached than you may have realized. If you suspect that your beans might turn gaseous, find an intermediary on whom to off-load them, who can then spill them in a more considered and controlled fashion—or help you to. See: Guilt, for an example of an intermediary at work in this way.

See also:
Goody-goody, being a
•
Regret

Bed

DAVID WHITEHOUSE

P
erhaps you have a headache or a hangover (see: Headache; Hangover). Perhaps you hate your job and have declared a Duvet Day. Perhaps your central heating is on the blink and you can’t get warm. Perhaps everything seems pointless (see: Pointlessness) or you’re depressed (see: Depression, general). Whatever the reason, if you know that sometimes staying in bed seems a much better idea than emerging into your day, keep this volume under your pillow (so you don’t have far to stretch). Read it once, and then during subsequent attacks of the condition you will need only a brief dip to send you leaping out from under your duvet and thence into anything other than the small suburban bedroom and freak show of a life depicted within its pages.

Malcolm Ede has stayed in bed for so long that his skin is as “white as an
institution.” He is deprived of sunlight and drained of life. Weighing in at more than half a ton, he is pinned to the bed by an “umbrella of fat.” After deciding, for complex reasons, on his twenty-sixth birthday to simply never get out of bed again, he’s been there ever since. Cared for and fed by his hopelessly devoted mother, his dreamy dad, and his broken brother, he is the planet around which they orbit. A great big hot-air balloon of a planet.