The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (36 page)

We’re not suggesting you renounce goodness and turn to evil. We’re just saying liven up, get an edge. Don’t go twisting off heads like Behemoth, but do throw scandalous parties. Keep a glint of mischief in your eye, a shard of wickedness up your sleeve. It will make you a lot more fun.

See also:
Beans, temptation to spill the
•
Organized, being too
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Risks, not taking enough
•
Teetotaler, being a

Union Atlantic

ADAM HASLETT

•   •   •

The Pearl

JOHN STEINBECK

•   •   •

The Colour

ROSE TREMAIN

G
reed is good,” the soulless moneyman Gordon Gekko declared in the movie
Wall Street
twenty-five years ago. For a while, this philosophy sounded not only defensible but exhilarating, as housing bubbles and things called “derivatives” and “credit default swaps” (which nobody understands) created fortunes far and wide. Ordinary people began to think they’d struck it rich as the value of their homes climbed up, up, up, year after year. Cars were bought. Summer homes were acquired. The occasional yacht set sail. And then the bubble popped, and all of us suddenly remembered. Untrammeled greed is bad for the soul—not to mention for the security and well-being of billions of people. Too late, we recognized the error of cheering on the unsavory speculators whose machinations inflated our retirement funds . . . then burst them.

Adam Haslett’s urgent, fast-paced novel
Union Atlantic
(named for a reputable bank that turns rotten just before the 2007 crash) will cure you of any impulse you may have to become a Captain of the Universe dripping with ill-gotten gain. Under the management of a greedy money spinner named Doug Fanning, the bank “brazenly commenced acquisitions” that Doug knew were illegal but that he correctly anticipated would be approved—they were so profitable that rival banks were sure to start exploiting them too.
That’s right: one of the worst things about greed is that it catches on. Once somebody visibly gets away with something, human nature makes everyone else try to join the gravy train. Only a pair of handcuffs can restrain Fanning’s acquisitive zeal, and in his fall he brings down with him everyone who joined his hunt for undeserved reward.

But as we all know, greed can deform the psyche even when the stakes are far lower than what they were for the corrupt bankers of Union Atlantic. John Steinbeck demonstrates the power of greed to destroy a simple family in his allegorical tale
The Pearl
. Kino and Juana have what he portrays as the perfect life: they live in a shack by the sea, where Kino makes his living by diving for pearls. One day their infant son, Coyotito, is bitten by a scorpion and becomes dangerously ill. Unable to pay for medical treatment, Juana prays that Kino will find a pearl of great value so that their son can live. Miraculously, Kino finds exactly the pearl of their prayers. Not only can they now afford a doctor for Coyotito, but they can give their son an education. But no sooner is the pearl in Kino’s possession than their world begins to unravel. Other people hear about the pearl and want it for themselves. Soon, Kino will do anything to protect the pearl. His wife immediately sees the potential for trouble and tries to persuade Kino to hurl the pearl back into the sea. But he won’t let his dream of wealth go. Before long they are forced to leave their village—and will soon lose more than they know.

In Rose Tremain’s
The Colour
, it’s not the lure of gold that brings Joseph Blackstone to New Zealand. His motivation for upping sticks from his Norfolk origins and buying land in the New World for a pound an acre is to start a clean slate after past misdeeds threaten to catch up with him. But when the settler finds flecks of gold in the creek on his farm, his innocent dreams alchemize into something more. The modest rewards of farming suddenly seem small and petty compared with the wealth that gold would bring him, and he turns his attention to the search for “the colour.”

Tremain vividly conveys the desperate lengths that men will go to in order to satiate their lust for gold—up to their necks in mud, sleeping in rat-infested tents, walking for days over treacherous terrain to find the longed-for virgin seam. When Joseph’s wife, Harriet, turns up at the digging site, Joseph is horrified, viewing her as a potential thief of his meager findings. His awakened greed becomes the unholy twin of the evil deed that caused him to run away from England in the first place. But Harriet’s reasons for joining him have nothing to do with greed at all—she has come looking for her husband’s love.

Let Harriet and Juana be your mentors, the calm voices of reason in the
face of temptation. If you allow greed to put down roots inside you, it will take over your life. No good comes of avarice, but plenty good comes from taking the moral high ground.

See also
:
Extravagance
•
Gluttony

See:
Broken heart
•
Death of a loved one
•
Sadness
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Widowed, being
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Yearning, general

The Island of Doctor Moreau

H. G. WELLS 

I
f you are as grumpy as Doctor Moreau in H. G. Wells’s antivivisection polemic of 1896, beware of the effect you are having on friends, colleagues, and cohabitants. Peevish demeanors are infectious—so much so that you’ll soon find yourself surrounded by other truculent, ornery people, when they were previously sunny and light.

Moreau, in the privacy of his island in the Pacific, is attempting to turn various four-legged animals—hogs, hyenas, dogs, and leopards—into human beings, using a mixture of surgery and behavioral conditioning. Witness to his experiments is Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked Englishman who is rescued by Moreau only to find himself being held captive. At first Prendick misunderstands the project and fears for his life, believing Moreau’s intention is to turn humans into beasts. Then he realizes it’s the other way around. Moreau is only partially successful; his semihuman creations have a tendency to revert to their bestial natures, going down on all fours and chasing rabbits—hence his bad mood. And in the end, Prendick has nothing to fear from the Beast Folk. But by the time he has spent many months on this island, he’s as crabby as Moreau, having been exposed for far too long to the scientist’s grumps.

Don’t bring everyone down with you. Keep your grumpiness to yourself.
Or, better yet, aim to lighten up and see our cures for: Irritability and Misanthropy.

See also:
Dissatisfaction
•
Querulousness

Crime and Punishment

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

H
ave you compromised your own standards of conduct, or violated a moral code? Or does your guilt spring from something you should have done but didn’t?

Some people have an inability to feel guilt, and they are best avoided (psychopaths, babies, to name a few). For the rest of us, guilt and its little sister, shame (see: Shame), should perhaps be embraced, as these conditions are essential to the collective morality that binds society together. Our cure for this debilitating, if at times useful, affliction is the most radical and profound exploration of guilt in all of literature: Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
.

Written when Dostoyevsky was nearly destitute and deeply in debt, this book contains many autobiographical elements, and it’s hard to shake the sense that the author must have felt many of the same things as his hero. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is a former student in need of a job, living in a tiny garret on the top floor of a run-down apartment building in St. Petersburg. Bilious, dressed in tatters, and broke, he has an unnerving tendency to talk to himself, but he is, on the other hand, good looking, proud, and intelligent. From the start we learn that he is contemplating something desperate and dreadful: he has resolved to murder an old woman for her money, having persuaded himself that, being a pawnbroker, she is morally moribund, and her death therefore justifiable. He’s caught in the act by the old woman’s half sister and, in the heat of the moment, murders her too.