The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (39 page)

The Fit

PHILIP HENSHER

N
obody knows what causes them, but we all have our own favorite method of curing them. John, the narrator of Philip Hensher’s
The Fit
(in which a hiccup is designated by a “!”), has the hiccups for an entire month—starting the morning his wife, Janet, unexpectedly walks out. He tries a litany of cures, from the classic (drinking a glass of water backward, holding his breath, drinking champagne) to the not so classic (smoking a cigarette, being tickled, kissing, snorting cocaine). Several shocks occur, quite by chance—including a German man with three rucksacks who turns up on his doorstep and announces he’s in love with him. None of it works.

But then, finally, something does. You’ll have to read to the end to find out what, but suffice it to say that, as with most literary afflictions, psychology has a lot to do with both cause and cure. And if this novel doesn’t do the trick, we suggest you administer a short, sharp literary shock—the best of which are waiting to jump out at you from the pages of the novels below.

Guaranteed to deliver an ice cube down your back, these novels either accumulate shock as they go or pack a punch on a particular page. We’re not telling which.

Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord
LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

The Hunger Games
SUZANNE COLLINS

Gone Girl
GILLIAN FLYNN

Schindler’s Ark
THOMAS KENEALLY

The Painted Bird
JERZY KOSINSKI

In One Person
JOHN IRVING

Rosemary’s Baby
IRA LEVIN

The White Hotel
D. M. THOMAS

Anna Karenina
LEO TOLSTOY

Legend of a Suicide
DAVID VANN

K
nown to reduce anxiety, reading is a great habit to acquire if you’ve got high blood pressure—especially if you do it with a small furry animal curled up on your knee. Be careful what you choose, though—something too racy or nail-biting, and you’ll be pumping the blood even harder than before. To slow you down, reduce anxiety, and encourage you to live in the moment, take your pick from our list of calming reads—novels that do not rush toward their resolutions, but luxuriate in nonevent and the virtues of the placid life. What they lack in pace they more than make up for in beauty and their ability to promote reflection.

See also:
Stress
•
Workaholism

The Mezzanine
NICHOLSON BAKER

A Closed Eye
ANITA BROOKNER

The City of Your Final Destination
PETER CAMERON

Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto
MAILE CHAPMAN

The Hours
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

The Remains of the Day
KAZUO ISHIGURO

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
CARSON MCCULLERS

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
MARY ANN SHAFFER AND ANNIE BARROWS

Crossing to Safety
WALLACE STEGNER

The Waves
VIRGINIA WOOLF

Anywhere But Here

MONA SIMPSON

•   •   •

The House of Paper

CARLOS MARÍA DOMÍNGUEZ

•   •   •

A House for Mr Biswas

V. S. NAIPAUL

I
f you’re a vagabond at heart—or in reality—homelessness may at first have some appeal. Without being tied down to one particular place, you’re free to go where the wind blows you; without rent or bills to pay, you can spend your time in non-laboring ways. But whatever its cause, the state of homelessness becomes exhausting after a while. Whether you are constantly on the road, living in a makeshift tepee exposed to the elements, or endeavoring to adapt to the habits of other people kind enough to take you in, the need for privacy, independence, and rootedness becomes impossible to ignore in the end.

For twelve-year-old Ann in Mona Simpson’s spirited novel
Anywhere But Here
, homelessness brings with it a constant state of anxiety. After three short years of marriage, her mother, Adele, decides it’s time to move on, and drives them both from Wisconsin to California on her abandoned husband’s credit card—ostensibly so that Ann can “be a child star while [she is] still a child,” but actually because being on the move is all Adele knows how to do. While they’re waiting for their car to be fixed in Scottsdale, Arizona, Adele asks a real estate agent to show them a house. For a moment, Ann allows herself to believe her mother is serious, that this might be the place she can, at last, make her home. She starts to “breathe slower.” But before she knows it they’re back on the road again.

Ann understands far better than her mother that to develop and explore in normal adolescent ways, she needs stability and routine. If you spend all
your energy looking for somewhere to sleep every night, how can you have energy for anything else?

Perhaps the answer is to build yourself a house. If you’ve got a big enough book collection, you could steal an idea from Carlos María Domínguez’s novel
The House of Paper
. This delightful book about books begins at the scene of an accident: the narrator’s friend Bluma has been hit by a car while engrossed in a volume of Emily Dickinson poems. While debate rages as to whether Bluma was killed by a car or by a poem, the narrator receives a mysterious parcel. Inside is a book encased in cement. It turns out to be a Joseph Conrad novel from the collection of an obsessive bibliophile named Carlos Brauer, who has lost his mind in the interstices between reality and fiction. (Beware his fate, readers—see: Read instead of live, tendency to.) Obsessed with the preservation of his twenty-thousand-strong collection, he decides to encase them in cement and build a book house.
*
Which all goes well—until he needs to find one of his books.

If you don’t have enough books for such do-it-yourself measures, acquire
A House for Mr Biswas
by V. S. Naipaul instead. Set in the rich cultural melting pot of 1940s Trinidad, the story follows the young Mohun Biswas from cradle to grave as he searches for a place of his own. Biswas comes from a “family of nobodies,” with no reason to hope for anything better than a life as an odd-job man. When, more by accident than design, he finds himself marrying into the vast and successful Hindi Tulsis family, he’s guaranteed a roof over his head for the rest of his life. But in return, he has to contend with an entire extended network of in-laws at Hanuman House. Yet too sensitive to hold his own, he finds himself yearning for privacy and solitude.

The Namesake

JHUMPA LAHIRI

•   •   •

Brick Lane

MONICA ALI

Mr. Biswas gets his house in the end. His checkered journey will give you courage, and faith, that you too can find a roof of your own.

I
t’s hard enough being homesick when you’re away from home only temporarily. But what do you do when homesickness is your permanent state, and your native land lies at an enduring remove across the ocean?

Jhumpa Lahiri, born in England to Indian
parents but raised in the United States, and Monica Ali, born in Bangladesh but raised in England, have written sensitive books dealing with this global longing. In Lahiri’s
The Namesake
, the Ganguli family are the only Bengalis in their university town outside Boston. Being a foreigner, Mrs. Ganguli reflects, is “a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.” Her children will grow up to become unquestioningly American, but Mrs. Ganguli will always retain her hyphen.