The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (86 page)

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And that means
now
.

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Give or take a few.

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The technical name for this is “erythrophobia.”

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Studies have shown that accurate numbers aren’t any more useful than the ones you make up.

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If there is, send it to us on a postcard, damp with tears.

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If this strikes a chord with you, see: Baldness.

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While we assume that most readers will not question our categorization of this predicament as an ailment, we would like to suggest that those who do turn instead to: Common sense, lack of; and Love, unrequited. Only then, if the predicament still persists, should they return to this cure.

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If you do not see why this predicament is unfortunate, please turn first to: Adultery; Love, unrequited; and Optimism.

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Used as a teething balm for babies.

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A popular cough suppressant.

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Known for its benefits in dental surgery.

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Do not, however, align yourself with Mr. Polly so much as to attempt your own suicide and insurance scam. Mr. Polly survives only by chance, and such eventualities are unlikely to happen more than once, whether in fiction or reality.

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But don’t fall too hard. If you do, see: Romantic, hopeless.

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This is the system of organizing books we espouse, although Susan Sontag’s insistence that to have Pynchon next to Plato “would set her teeth on edge” has definitely given us pause. We also on occasion arrange according to geography.

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Unless you have the much more serious strain known as man flu, in which case it’s the other way around. See: Man flu.

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Forget it. You never do.

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If this cure works, it proves that you didn’t actually have the flu in the first place but just a bad cold (see: Cold, common). The search for a literary cure for the flu goes on.

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British author Dan Rhodes did—although he hid his shame at having used such a tasteless premise for this delightful trifle of a novel by passing it off as the work of one Danuta de Rhodes, an authoress several years his junior who works “in the fashion industry.”

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Because of this, neuroscientists have worked hard to investigate the neurobiology of hate. A few years ago they announced that they’d pinpointed the specific areas of our brains responsible for the venomous emotion. These areas included the middle frontal gyrus, the right putamen, the premotor cortex, and the frontal pole. We tell you this mostly because we wanted a reason to write “middle frontal gyrus” and “right putamen,” but also because we find it amusing to point out that some of these areas of the brain—the putamen, for example—had previously been pinpointed by neuroscientists as the specific areas of our brains responsible for the feeling of love. Which either goes to show that love and hate are indeed closely related or shows nothing at all. Luckily, we have literature as a backup to science.

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If you do the same, leave
The Novel Cure
out of it.

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While falling in love, with the wrong person at least, frequently is. See: Love, unrequited; and Love, doomed.

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Don’t.

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They are right about the last one.

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Scientists cannot explain why this ailment affects only men, but it does.

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No one is good enough for your child, of course, but it’s still a cliché.

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However little you actually like him or her.

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Though you would not have chosen him or her yourself.

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Albeit mistaken.

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Even though your darling is always in the right.

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The perceptive will notice that the house shares its name with Captain Nemo’s submarine in Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
.

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Except on Sundays.

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Yes, we are hypocrites.

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Paris.

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The novel also contains a more complicated cure for obesity, though this isn’t included in the price of our book. You will have to read it and work it out for yourself.

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Dickens.

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As Susan Hill says in her lovely
Howards End Is on the Landing
, “You don’t have to pay its rent just because it is a book.”

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Actually, it’s about something far more interesting than you. It’s about perpetual motion, entropy, LSD, an underground postal system, and an era in American cultural history that we wish we could have experienced ourselves. But read on. Because we will cure you of your paranoia by proving to you, during the act of reading this novel, that if you look hard enough for something, you will find it. Rather than look for the conspiracy theories you want to find, therefore, let Pynchon’s fantastically complex and curious worldview take you on a journey into the curious mind of Oedipa Maas as she investigates her own conspiracies. By the time you’ve run around San Narciso with this maiden in search of a knight of deliverance, you’ll be hooked on her story rather than your own false terrors, and looking out, instead of within.

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Following this line of argument, the novel was born (with
Robinson Crusoe
) in 1719. On other days, though, we follow other lines of argument.

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But don’t take it too far. See: Optimism.

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In fact, it is perhaps a series of novels, or even—you’ve guessed it—a very manual for existence. Perec liked games—mathematical ones, circular ones, unanswerable ones.
Life
is full of them (which is one of the points of the novel). A member of the group Oulipo, from the French
Ouvroir de littérature potentielle
(roughly translated as Workshop of Potential Literature), he and the other members gave themselves deliberate constraints, which they then followed when writing. See if you can work out the constraints Perec placed upon himself in writing
Life
. We will give you a small clue: there are ninety-nine chapters in the book, which describes an apartment block in which there are ten floors, ten rooms on each floor, and the narrative structure of the novel is dictated by the “knight’s tour,” which sees the novel as a chessboard.

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The point of this is never made clear.

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There are points all over the place in this masterpiece; it makes more points in more ways than almost any novel we have read.

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Conveniently for our purposes, the novel is written in the second person.

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The following titles are particularly good at distracting your interlocutors from your scars (this strategy, sadly, will not work with e-books):
I Still Miss My Man but My Aim Is Getting Better
(Sarah Shankman);
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
(Stephen Chbosky);
John Dies at the End
(David Wong);
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
(Jonas Jonasson);
Gun, with Occasional Music
(Jonathan Lethem);
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
(John Fante);
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
(Philip K. Dick).

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Many of us have, in fact, been reading and enjoying speculative fiction for years, without even realizing it. Remember that novel about a man who could time travel and the effect it had on his wife? If the publishers had chosen to package Audrey Niffenegger as a sci-fi author, many thousands of enchanted readers wouldn’t have touched her with a lightsaber.

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Indeed some say it died forever, with Lady Di.

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In fact, if we’re honest, it’s barely a novel at all. But, being stressed, you don’t need to know this.

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Yes, if you’re a recovering alcoholic. In which case this cure is not for you. Please skip and go instead to: Alcoholism; and Dinner parties, fear of.

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Frances’s dying could be interpreted as her taking revenge on her newborn child for the pain he inflicted on her. It’s just an idea.

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Cathy’s death could be interpreted as an act of revenge on Heathcliff for taking revenge on her by marrying Isabella.

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Interestingly, Isabella does not die after giving birth. This could be interpreted as her taking revenge on Heathcliff. However, she does die later.

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See?

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We are not sure whether this is an act of revenge, or, if it is, whom it is an act of revenge against.

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Replace as required with relevant country/city/founder/transport method/tourist attraction/climate as required, and with the relevant novel cure from the Ten Best list. These novels have been chosen for their length (i.e., to incapacitate for two or three weeks at a time), as well as their ability to transport the reader without leaving home.

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Not that we are biased or smug.