The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (24 page)

If you’re out of work and have plenty of time, read this charming, picaresque novel and stumble on the jobs yourself. You’ll see that a life that takes in so many different roles—not all of them entirely honest—ends up a somewhat shapeless thing, to which Saul Bellow’s baggy narrative testifies. But its go-with-the-flow opportunism, its eye for a laugh, its shrug, its easygoing all-American swagger are precious commodities in these highly competitive, pared-down days, and Augie’s winding trajectory will help free you up when mapping your own path.

Apart from forcing us all to tighten our belts (which for some might be no bad thing; see Extravagance), one of the first casualties of economic depression is the funding of public services: health, education, the arts. For a sobering reminder of the hard-won advances we are in danger of seeing slip away, read Winifred Holtby’s
South
Riding
, set in the north of England just before the formation of the welfare state. It tells the story of local schoolmistress Sarah, a feisty redhead swimming with ideals who falls in love with tortured, married landowner Robert Carne, whose wife is mentally ill. Part
socialist idealist meets conservative traditionalist, the tale shows how the members of a rural community work with and against one another with varying degrees of selflessness. One of the characters, Joe Astell, knows he is dying of tuberculosis, but becomes an alderman—an elected member of the local council—in the hope of rescuing the town from being the “waste-paper basket of the South Riding.” Perhaps Holtby modeled him on herself, for she, too, was dying as she wrote this fervently political book.

As public funding dwindles, values and individuals are trampled underfoot. Let Holtby remind you that, in times of austerity, we must strive not just for ourselves but for the collective good.

See also:
Broke, being
•
Job, losing your
•
Unemployment

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

MILAN KUNDERA

•   •   •

The Bell Jar

SYLVIA PLATH

•   •   •

Mr. Chartwell

REBECCA HUNT

•   •   •

The Marriage Plot

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

D
epression is a sliding scale. At the mild end, where most of us dip in a toe from time to time, are those occasional days or periods when nothing goes right, it seems as if we don’t have any friends, and we are plunged into a state of gloom (see: Failure, feeling like a; Left out, feeling; Sadness; Grumpiness; Pointlessness). At these times, we need a novel that shifts our perception of the world, reminding us that it can be a place of sun and laughter too. See our list of the Ten Best Novels to Cheer You Up below for a positive pick-me-up read that will open the window and let in a blast of fresh air.

But at the other end of the scale, sufferers experience a heavy black cloud that descends without warning, for no particular reason, and from which they can’t see any way out. This is clinical depression, a severe form of mental illness that is hard to treat and can recur. If you are unlucky enough to be prone to this kind of depression, your spirits are unlikely to be lifted by a light and breezy read. Such a novel may well make you feel worse—guilty that you can’t muster a chuckle, irritated by anything that strikes you as naively optimistic, and hating yourself even more. It sounds
counterintuitive at first, but at such times a novel that tells it like it is—with characters who feel as depressed as you do, or with an uncompromisingly bleak view of the world—is likely to hit home, encourage you to be gentler with yourself, and support you in a more appropriate way. If you’re in this situation, you need a novel that can accompany you into your dark melancholic place, acknowledging and articulating it, so that you realize that others have been there too, and that you are not, after all, so different, or so dreadfully alone.

The mental torment and nightmares experienced by Tereza in Milan Kundera’s novel
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
may help in this regard. Tereza’s anguish is triggered by her lover Tomas’s inveterate womanizing; having cut himself off from his failed marriage and young son, Tomas has chosen to embrace the life of a libertarian bachelor. But from the start we see that Tereza is weighed down by life: the heaviness to Tomas and his mistress Sabina’s lightness. Kundera divides people into two camps: those who understand that life is meaningless, and therefore skim its surface, living in and for the moment; and those who cannot bear the idea that existence should come and go without meaning, and insist on reading significance into everything. When Tereza meets Tomas, she knows that she has no choice but to love him forever, and when she turns up in Prague to see him again, with her worldly goods in a suitcase, she also brings a copy of
Anna Karenina
—a novel that perhaps sums up more than any other the suffering that results when meaning breaks down. Much as he loves her, Tomas knows she will be a heavy presence in his life. When she is pushed to the brink of insanity by Tomas’s refusal to give up other women, Tereza berates herself for her weakness at wanting Tomas to change. At her lowest ebb she tries to take an overdose. Whenever you have sunk to such depths that it seems impossible for anyone else to reach you, pick up this novel and let Tereza keep you company down there. She, too, wants to live and rise above her sadness—and she finds a way to do so in the end.

A disproportionate number of writers suffer from depression. Some say creative types are more vulnerable to it, others that writing about one’s illness is cathartic. The American novelist Richard Yates would spend hours staring blankly at the wall in a state of catatonic depression. Ernest Hemingway, too, was increasingly plagued by depressive episodes, and drank heavily (if this is your choice of escape, see: Alcoholism). He lost his battle with depression in the end, as did Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath, but not without leaving the invaluable gift of their experience behind. These gifts—novels about the experience of mental illness—are there for us to make use
of, so that we can find solace where these writers did not.

Plath suffered from bipolar disorder, and in her powerful autobiographical novel
The Bell Jar
,
she documents through her young heroine Esther Greenwood the bewildering mood swings that caused her to be searingly happy one moment—“lungs inflating” in a rush of delight to be alive—and unable to rise to any emotional reaction at all—“blank and stopped as a dead baby”—the next. Esther’s voice is a great comfort for depressives. What makes this novel so readable is the lightness of Plath’s prose, and the way that even in the most disturbing passages Esther’s humanity and youthful zest shine through. Remember this when you can’t imagine ever feeling happy—or even just plain “normal”—again. Others can see the potential for lightness in you, even when you can’t.

Learning to perceive your depression as something separate from you—such as a big, black, smelly dog—may seem a bizarre notion, but it can be a useful way of distancing yourself from your illness so that it doesn’t define who you are. Rebecca Hunt’s bold first novel,
Mr. Chartwell
, will take you through the process. Mr. Chartwell is the manifestation of Winston Churchill’s “black dog”—the depression that haunted the august politician for much of his life—and which also moves in with his temporary secretary, Esther Hammerhans. Visible only to his victims, Black Pat (as the dog is called) arrives on the second anniversary of Esther’s husband’s death by suicide, ostensibly answering her advertisement for a lodger. Soon he is making free with her house, crunching bones outside her bedroom door, and even doing his best to join her in bed. Black Pat may have revolting habits, but as only sufferers of depression will understand, he has a peculiar charm that is hard to resist and Esther receives him with a mixture of despair and fascination.

She is not the first of his victims—not only has Black Pat been visiting Churchill, but Esther deduces that he’s lived in her own house before, unperceived by her. As she begins to understand more about her husband’s illness, and therefore her own, her relationship with the shaggy mutt heads toward its resolution. You’ll have to read the novel to find out if she overcomes her depression; we all know Churchill managed to hold down a job through it all. And when Esther and her elderly mentor first realize that they can both see the dog but are afraid to mention it—such is the taboo surrounding mental illness—Churchill’s tactful circling around the giant black creature’s malodorous presence and his rousing encouragement to Esther to “stand firm” is touching and reassuring to Esther and reader alike.

If you are not depressed yourself but are close to someone who is, you
may identify with Madeleine, the heroine of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel
The Marriage Plot
, in which three college seniors at Brown University in the 1980s get caught up in a love triangle. Leonard, brainy, haughty, and erratic, has concealed his manic depression from Madeleine, his adoring, bluestocking girlfriend. And when a severe episode engulfs him, he ditches her rather than divulge his secret. But when Madeleine gets a phone call on graduation day informing her that Leonard is in a psych ward, she at last understands why he has been so mystifyingly, and upsettingly, hot and cold during the course of their romance. His moods are beyond his control: “The smarter you were, the worse it was,” he thinks. “The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.” Seeing her boyfriend in the hospital, levelheaded Madeleine wishes she’d known about his manic depression before they’d got involved. But it’s too late—Madeleine loves Leonard and will not give up on him. She succumbs to the trap Eugenides knowingly identifies: the desire to save him. If you find yourself struggling to cope with loved ones who suffer as Leonard does and who have perhaps pulled you into the vortex of their illness, this novel will help you stand back, understand what they’re up against, and figure out if and how you can help them—and yourself, too.

In serious cases of depression, bibliotherapy is very unlikely to be enough. But we urge sufferers to make full and imaginative use of fiction as an accompaniment to medical treatment. Whether you require a novel to take you out of your funk or one that joins you in it, novels can often reach sufferers in a way that little else can, offering solace and companionship in a time of desperate need. Stand firm with Churchill, the two Esthers, and Tereza. Take reassurance from the fact that they—and the authors who created them—know something of what it’s like to live with depression. And if their experience doesn’t overlap with yours, maybe one of the others on our list of the Ten Best Novels for the Very Blue will (see below). You might not be able to see a gap in the clouds, but the knowledge that you’re not the first to lose your way beneath them will keep you going as you wait for them to pass.

See
also:
Antisocial, being
•
Anxiety
•
Appetite, loss of
•
Despair
•
Exhaustion
•
Hope, loss of
•
Indecision
•
Insomnia
•
Irritability
•
Lethargy
•
Libido, loss of
•
Nightmares
•
Paranoia
•
Pessimism
•
Self-esteem, low
•
Tired and emotional, being
•
Turmoil

Wake Up, Sir!
JONATHAN AMES

Auntie Mame
PATRICK DENNIS

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
FANNIE FLAGG

Cold Comfort Farm
STELLA GIBBONS

Fever Pitch
NICK HORNBY

Absurdistan
GARY SHTEYNGART

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
HELEN SIMONSON

I Capture the Castle
DODIE SMITH

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
WINIFRED WATSON