The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (50 page)

L
ies come in many colors. Apart from the white ones, which we use to protect others from unnecessary hurt, lies are generally spawned by baser motives. Do not underestimate the damage they can do.

Look at what happens to thirteen-year-old Briony in Ian McEwan’s
Atonement
. Still blinded by her childhood crush on Robbie, the son of the family’s housekeeper, who has been brought up and educated as one of them, she is shocked to catch him and her cousin Cecilia in flagrante delicto in the library. Later, when she stumbles on her distressed cousin Lola in the dark, having been knocked down and violated by a shadowy retreating figure, she considers only one culprit: the socially inferior Robbie, who now metamorphoses in her febrile imagination into a brute who must be punished.

Trapped in her own delusion, Briony spins a story from her own misreadings and imaginings that causes her to drown out the voice inside her that knows the truth. Instead, she chooses to shore up her position and expunge her doubt, all for the sake of sticking to her story. And so, when she is asked by the inspector whether she saw Robbie clearly, with her own eyes, she lies.

Her lie ruins not just Robbie and Cecilia’s lives, but her own as well. As she seeks atonement for her crime, she goes over the details of it in an eternal loop, like “a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.” This novel should be read as a vaccination against the temptation to tell an untruth. Read it and let it hover in your mind as a constant reminder.

See also:
Trust, loss of

The Comforters

MURIEL SPARK

L
iterature is fond of its lunatics—from Mr. Rochester’s insane wife in
Jane Eyre
, who scurries around on all fours growling like a wild animal, to the eerie presence that haunts Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman in White
. But while these two crazies are harmless, many evocations of mental derangement can be dangerous to the reader who feels that he or she is becoming unhinged. If you feel yourself to be touched in this way, steer clear of Margaret Atwood’s
Surfacing
, which tracks the gradual descent into psychosis of its unnamed narrator. Together with her lover Joe and a couple of friends, this narrator travels north to a remote island in Quebec in an attempt to find out what happened to her father, who has gone missing. Perhaps it is grief for her father that undoes her; perhaps it’s the emotional void between herself and Joe. Or perhaps it’s whatever horrible thing it is that she sees at the bottom of the seabed. But whatever its cause, her increasingly fragmented and ungrammatical narrative does such a good job of conveying her unbalanced mental state that it may well make a few more screws in your head come loose. And despite its title, you will find no comfort in the pages of
The Comforts of Madness
, Paul Sayer’s novel about a boy so traumatized by abuse that he makes a conscious decision, when his father dies in the bed they share, never to move again. As the
boy grows into a man—still lying in bed—his interior monologue is mesmerizing, heartrending, and somehow dangerously seductive.

The best novel for those seeking to avoid the loony bin is Muriel Spark’s
The Comforters
. Almost all the characters in this novel are mad—that is to say, way up there on the scale, although still functioning in society quite happily. You might feel right at home—and rather normal—in comparison.

Caroline Rose is renting a flat in Kensington and experiencing midcentury angst around issues of feminism and aesthetics when she becomes aware of the tapping of typewriter keys. The
tap-tap-tap
is accompanied by the dispassionate narration of her own thoughts and actions, as if a Greek chorus were intoning the banal drama of her life, offstage, while someone else was writing it down. At first the Typing Ghost, as she calls it, simply provides a third-person narrative of her day as she lives it. But then it begins to predict her future. Caroline attempts to cheat it: when the Typing Ghost predicts she will “fritter away the day” and be forced to travel to Sussex by car instead of train, Caroline makes a desperate attempt to take the train after all. But, farcically, she can’t outwit it.

If Caroline’s particular brand of madness doesn’t resonate, you might identify more with the diamond-smuggling granny, the Belgian Congolese Baron, the zealous Catholic convert, or, of course, the Typing Ghost itself. All the characters are equally delightful—and equally mad. “We’re all a little mad, Willi,” Caroline confirms to the Baron. “That’s what makes us so nice, dear.” With its gentle and original humor, this novel certifies that there’s nothing wrong with being a tad bit off your rocker—it happens to the best of us. Leave literature’s serious crackpots for your friends and family to read, and stick to the deviationist fringe.

See also:
Paranoia
•
Turmoil

The Little Girl and the Cigarette

BENOÎT DUTEURTRE

•   •   •

Super Sad True Love Story

GARY SHTEYNGART

T
he sense of discomfort one feels that is unique to this century comes from a discrepancy between one’s desires for a contented, fulfilled, even adventurous life and the absurdity of society as we see it unfurling around us: bureaucracy, political correctness, safety legislation, the dysfunctionality of humans caused by an excessive use of technology . . . The list goes on.

No novel captures this modern malaise more deftly than Benoît Duteurtre’s
The Little Girl and the Cigarette
. Désiré Johnson, on the verge of being executed for the murder of a policeman, requests that he have a last smoke. His plea throws the authorities into confusion. Désiré’s invocation of Article 47 is entirely within his rights, but tobacco consumption is banned within the limits of the prison. The absurdity of his outmoded request, and the obstinacy with which he insists on it, is all too much for the functionaries’ legal capabilities. They decide that only the Supreme Court can make the decision. Meanwhile, another man, a technical adviser for the General Services Department of “Administration City,” is having a different cigarette-related crisis. One day, as he enjoys a quiet puff out the window of the bathroom, a five-year-old girl walks in on him with his trousers down. She tells everyone and soon the man is facing charges of child molestation. A nightmarish satire, Duteurtre’s inverted vision puts justice in the hands of children. As you share your frustration at a world gone mad, you’ll see you’re not the only one crying out for reason.

In Gary Shteyngart’s
Super Sad True Love Story
, Lenny and Eunice live in a world not too distant from our own, in which a data stream constantly updates individuals on their credit scores and social network ranking, while offering up-to-the-minute shopping ideas and the very latest of their friends’ gossip. Lenny is thirty-nine, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, who anachronistically still loves—and reads—books (particularly Tolstoy). The object of his desire, Eunice, is a young Korean student. Their story is told through alternating diary entries, Lenny’s told the old-fashioned way, Eunice’s through her Global-Teens account—a kind of all-encompassing Facebook—so that we have the fun of Eunice’s “teening” to listen to. Eunices’s entries reveal her
own angst about the future, and the contentment she keeps finding, to her surprise, with the “darling little dork” Lenny. Meanwhile, New York is beginning to disintegrate around them, America is at war with Venezuela, and everyone is so in debt to China that the plug may be pulled on resources at any minute. Lenny fears for their future, as individuals and as a nation.

After Duteurtre’s satire and this romp through a media-mad, postliterate world of immortality seekers who have to consult “EmotePads” held to their hearts to learn their true feelings, you will find yourself reaching for a “bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact”—even if it will bring down your “
PERSONALITY
rankings.” Lenny Abramov, last reader on Earth, turns out to be right about a lot of things.

See also:
City fatigue
•
Disenchantment
•
Dissatisfaction

Les Misérables

VICTOR HUGO

I
nfinitely worse than regular flu, and not to be confused with the common cold (which is hard, as the symptoms are identical), man flu is a miserable illness not just for the victim but for all concerned. Bed rest is essential, and the patient—indeed, “victim” is probably more apt—will require a great deal of sympathy. The victim should be propped up on soft pillows and provided with mugs of tea, heating pads, meals on trays, the remote control, and messages of support and commiseration from family and friends brought to him
*
regularly. Visitors to his bedside must take great care when making conversation to stick to the subject of the victim and his suffering. Do not venture into matters pertaining to the outside world or indeed the domestic (household chores and responsibilities), as this will agitate the victim and prevent him from focusing on his suffering and so begin the long journey back to full health.

Our “cure” (term used loosely) is Victor Hugo’s classic novel of human torment and suffering,
Les Misérables.
Your patient might consider himself too ill for the application of a novel cure—he may even urge you to turn to the entry in this book on dying. However, it is important to have a firm
hand in administering it, despite his resistance. Within a few pages he will have lost himself completely in the woes of Jean Valjean and Fantine, Cosette and Monsieur Marius, Eponine and police inspector Javert, recognizing his own sufferings in theirs, and taking great comfort as a result.