The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (21 page)

O
ne of the twentieth century’s best-known fictional cowards is Yossarian, the lily-livered bomber pilot at the center of Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
. Captain Yossarian has flown many successful missions but is completely terrified by his job. Malingering in the military hospital, he postpones returning to active duty for as long as he can because he has become obsessed by the idea that, as he explains to an officer named Clevinger, “They’re trying to kill me.” “No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger tells him. “Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asks. “They’re
shooting at
everyone 
. . . They’re trying to kill everyone,” Clevinger answers. “And what difference does that make?” Yossarian retorts. Joseph Heller’s breathtakingly funny and sad tale of the violence and pointlessness of war demonstrates that just because a man is cowardly doesn’t mean he’s wrong to be afraid.

Despite his overt cowardice, Yossarian is one of the most rational of all the characters in Heller’s novel. Before judging your failure of nerve too harshly, ask yourself if, like Yossarian, you’re actually in the sort of dangerous circumstances that any normal person would want to evade. If the answer is yes, get help! If, however, after some self-examination you conclude that you face no life-threatening challenges and are actually just being a wimp, buck up and try to learn from the example of some of literature’s whiners.

Think, for instance, of the doleful narrator John Dowell of Ford Madox Ford’s
The Good Soldier
, who is too naive and weak-willed to acknowledge his wife’s evasions. “I can’t believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks,” he reflects, the precision of his dates hinting at a retrospective awareness of the exact length of his lapse. Dowell suffers enormously from his passivity. Let his experience embolden you to face up to disagreeable truths rather than prolong the agony of a poisoned relationship (see also: Confrontation, fear of).

While John Dowell is motivated (to an extent) by concern for others, the craven protagonist of George Orwell’s
Burmese Days
has no such credit to his name. James Flory, a self-pitying English expat in Burma, indulges himself in the lazy sort of cowardice that hurts others while benefiting no one. Though Dr. Veraswami is Flory’s best friend, someone he dines and hunts with, Flory refuses to endorse his membership to the exclusive European Club because it would be slightly awkward. “It is a disagreeable thing when one’s close friend is not one’s social equal; but it is a thing native to the very air of India,” Flory self-servingly muses. He admits to himself that, “in all probability, if he had the courage” he could get Dr. Veraswami in. Even though he knows that “in common decency it was his duty to support the doctor,” he does not do so. Flory does not have common decency. He’s a coward—nobody’s role model, but an excellent deterrent for anyone who knows that cowardliness can get in the way of doing the right thing.

See also:
Risks, not taking enough
•
Seize the day, failure to
•
Superhero, wishing you were a

S
ometimes you just need to let the misery out, whether it’s a broken heart, a broken heirloom, or out-of-control hormones. Take these novels with tissues and brandy.

See also:
Tired and emotional, being

A Lesson Before Dying
ERNEST J. GAINES

The Fault in Our Stars
JOHN GREEN

Tess of the D’Urbervilles
THOMAS HARDY

One Day
DAVID NICHOLLS

Doctor Zhivago
BORIS PASTERNAK

Kiss of the Spider Woman
MANUEL PUIG

The Notebook
NICHOLAS SPARKS

Sophie’s Choice
WILLIAM STYRON

The Story of Lucy Gault
WILLIAM TREVOR

My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You
LOUISA YOUNG

Amity and Sorrow

PEGGY RILEY

•   •   •

American Pastoral

PHILIP ROTH

J
oin us, wear strange clothes, get castrated, and then drink poison.” This was the message, if not the slogan, of the American cult Heaven’s Gate, whose members were brainwashed into believing that by committing mass suicide they would escape the imminent “recycling” of planet Earth and transport themselves to a waiting alien spacecraft.

Being in a cult, it seems, may not give you the best chance of long-term happiness, or indeed survival. Should you ever find yourself receiving an unnervingly enthusiastic welcome by a previously unheard-of community with a single, charismatic leader; if your previous
culture, community, or habits are roundly criticized and rejected by them; and if you are encouraged to break ties with family and friends and give all your resources away, a cult will have just made you one of its members. If it’s already happened, we’re too late. If it hasn’t, vaccinate yourself immediately with Peggy Riley’s luminous novel
Amity and Sorrow
, an account of the trap—and lure—of life in a cult. In this case, it’s a fundamentalist, polygamous community in the far north of Idaho.

If you are not inclined to resist cult membership on your own account, consider the woe that your indoctrination will bring upon your family. Philip Roth’s searing novel
American Pastoral
shows the destruction that a daughter brings to her family when she is brainwashed beyond recognition. Seymour “Swede” Levov rises from immigrant beginnings to become an all-American success story. But one day his daughter, Merry, who has grown to be an angry, sullen teenager, disappears. To his horror, Swede learns that she has joined a Jainist cult. Still worse, she has killed four people in a bombing, and doesn’t regret it. Reeling in disbelief, Swede tells himself Merry is “in the power of something demented” and tracks her down, yearning to rescue his little girl. He cannot bear to admit to himself that the emaciated cultist freak who calls him Daddy can be his child. Altered beyond recognition, filthy and rank, she is utterly indifferent to her father’s emotion. “No!” Swede bellows, grieving like an American Lear. “This will not do!” But “this” has already been done. After chanting, zombielike, “The truth is simple. Here is the truth. You must be done with craving and selfhood,” Merry shuts her mouth and refuses to speak. Swede pries open her mouth as if he can find some real sense inside.

Reading of Swede’s heartbreak and his daughter’s ruin, even the surliest rebel may come to see that, appealing as it may seem to attach yourself to a passionate cause, joining a cult is not a prudent outlet for it.

See also:
Bullied, being
•
Family, coping with
•
Family, coping without
•
Outsider, being an
•
Self-esteem, low

Zuleika Dobson

MAX BEERBOHM

•   •   •

The Rachel Papers

MARTIN AMIS

•   •   •

Elliot Allagash

SIMON RICH

O
scar Wilde once said that the cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Cynicism is an attitude many of us outgrow as life lengthens, time shortens, and the satisfaction we once derived from attributing base motives to everyone else loses some of its spark. That said, there would be no tabloid magazines or stand-up comedians if the scathing, mocking power of cynicism did not serve some purpose.

Perhaps because this affliction is most acute during youth, the novels that best treat cynicism tend to be set at school.
Zuleika Dobson
, Max Beerbohm’s elegantly scathing riff on Edwardian Oxford, is an early exemplar. Beerbohm wrote mean-spiritedly about his heroine—Zuleika—portraying her as a heartless, vain young adventuress who takes pride in the fact that her beauty drives hundreds of love-struck college boys to kill themselves. What were Zuleika’s sins? She was beautiful and alluring, and she knew it. She was also picky. Does that make her hateful? Beerbohm paints Zuleika as a cynical creature, but it’s his starchily entertaining caricature of her that’s truly drenched in cynicism. If a pretty woman doesn’t return the love of every stranger who pines for her, does that make her loathsome? If you, like Beerbohm, have a tendency to ascribe bad motives to people who excel and stand out, reading
Zuleika Dobson
will prompt you to sheathe your barbs.

Martin Amis, writing
The Rachel Papers
decades later, also made his hero a heartless, vain young man. Charles Highway, a “chinless elitist and bratty whey-faced lordling” just turned twenty, keeps a cynical, detailed reckoning of his trysts with willing young women. Here he is recalling one energetic coupling: “During the long pre-copulative session I glanced downwards—and what should I see but Gloria, practicing the perversion known as fellatio.” Isn’t it romantic? But Amis saves Charles’s most thorough, blow-by-blow chronicling for a girl named Rachel, for whom Charles belatedly comes to sense that he might actually have real, uncynical feelings. Telling his story from precocious retrospect, wondering at his patronizing attitude, Charles muses, “I suppose I was just moodier then, or more respectful of my moods, more inclined to think they were worth anything.”
Emerging from his fog of self-absorption, Charles has begun to suspect that other people’s moods deserve respect, too. Take note: this is the first step on the road out of cynicism and toward a more empathetic worldview.

And in America, in the last decade, a witty New York wunderkind, Simon Rich, wrote a delirious satire,
Elliot Allagash
, set in junior high school, in the
gotcha!
world of smug adolescent score keeping. Rich’s Machiavellian title character, a phenomenally wealthy teen, arrives in eighth grade at a Manhattan private school and resolves “purely for sport” to transform a plump, goony nebbish named Seymour Herson into a big man on campus, and to get him into Harvard. Using every underhanded means he can muster (he has a dazzling arsenal), Elliot appears to succeed in his project. Seymour can’t help being flattered by his Svengali’s attention, and exhilarated by his star turn—for a while. Unlike Elliot, though, he has a conscience. As Elliot’s lies and stratagems begin to hurt other people, Seymour loses his appetite for ruthless self-promotion—to Elliot’s fury. He would rather be ordinary and decent than extraordinary and corrupt. If you have been cynically pondering a career in guile, reading
Elliot Allagash
will caution you against it.