The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (58 page)

He and his wife, Betty, indeed tried Hong Kong, and were spectacularly successful there. And everyone assumed they would stay. But assumptions made about Old Filth tend to be wide of the mark, for secrets lurk in his life, and underneath them, fueled by the traumas of his past, is an entirely different man. Beneath the surface, we discover a diorama of projected journeys, a host of people he plans to visit, dreams of redemptive rendezvous—and he’s more than capable of making them happen.

The elderly Mrs. Monro in
The Skeleton in the Cupboard
also casts old age in a refreshing light. This sharp, witty narrator is merciless in her observations of her nearest and dearest. All she desires is to see her son Syl settled and married before she dies, and indeed the wedding day is imminent. Her reflections on her mean but loving son, her dead and faithless husband, and her inappropriately young and self-denying prospective daughter-in-law make for a wonderfully unsentimental drama. What’s more, the wicked Mrs. Monro actively looks forward to death, experiencing a burst of “unimaginable joy” when she glimpses the point at which the temporal meets the eternal, where “eagles might clash with angels and the ice-bright light, shattered like gems, would scatter and dissipate.” As a vision of the afterlife it’s certainly more interesting than most.

As these old cranks will teach you, don’t be horrified by old age—it is just a different take on the same story.

See also:
Aging, horror of
•
Amnesia, reading associated
•
Baldness
•
Memory loss
•
Senile, going

A Little of What You Fancy
H. E. BATES

The Hearing Trumpet
LEONORA CARRINGTON

The Riddle of the Sands
ERSKINE CHILDERS

The Confessions of Max Tivoli
ANDREW SEAN GREER

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
ALLAN GURGANUS

The Glass Bead Game
HERMANN HESSE

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
JONAS JONASSON

Immortality
MILAN KUNDERA

Dracula
BRAM STOKER

Gulliver’s Travels
JONATHAN SWIFT

Candide

VOLTAIRE

•   •   •

Never Let Me Go

KAZUO ISHIGURO

I
ncurable optimists sometimes need to bite the maggot in their apple in order to temper their expectant orifice with a taste of reality. While we embrace optimists in our hearts, we also feel the need to warn them of being
too
blithely cheery in the face of the inevitable injustice and pain in the world; one cannot always assume the best motives. Between optimism and naïveté, sometimes, lies a lot of unnecessary strife.

Candide is a case in point. Brought up in an idyllic Eden with Pangloss as his teacher, Candide has been taught that “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” So when he has his first taste of the world beyond his childhood walls, he is in for a bit of a shock. The illegitimate nephew of a baron, he falls heavily in love with the baron’s daughter Cunégonde. But the baron has other plans for Cunégonde, and when he catches them kissing, he expels Candide from his castle.

Even worse, Candide finds himself forcibly conscripted into the Bulgar army, and he witnesses a horrific battle. Then, after wandering off from camp for a walk, he is brutally flogged as a deserter. The trials and tribulations continue, but through them all the young man resolutely maintains his optimistic outlook. Only toward the end does his optimism begin to waver—and by then, he’s been robbed of his fortune and lives with a much altered Cunégonde, and his beloved Pangloss has been hanged, dissected, and beaten to a pulp (and that is not even the end of his
story). You, too, will surely see the folly of grinning glibly as the catastrophes rain down.

If not, then
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro is guaranteed to blast your optimism out of its foundations. Growing up in the mysterious Hailsham House, Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth are encouraged to express their imaginations, create art, and develop relationships. But at the same time they are curiously repressed and separate from the world. We won’t give any more away. Suffice it to say, we’re so sure this cure will work we’ll give our right arms if you still believe in the best of all possible worlds by the end.

On the Road

JACK KEROUAC

A
n unfortunate side effect of a busy life is that we can become so adept at organizing our time, dividing up our days into half-hour segments allocated to a particular use—work, sleep, exercise, mealtimes, errands, shopping, social—that we forget to allot any portions to those aspects of living that won’t fit neatly under a heading. Just sitting around? Taking off in a random direction without a plan? Bumping into someone on the street? If you want to avoid the realization, on your deathbed, that you ticked off everything on your list but never actually just stepped out your door and let life come to
you
, spend some time in the company of Sal Paradise and the “great amorous soul” of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s hymn to the generation that knew how to hang,
On the Road
.

Nobody in
On the Road
does anything more than make a very vague plan. And when they go, they go fast, jumping on a bus or onto the back of a flatbed truck, hearing a “new call,” an “ode from the Plains” in the general direction of the West. They don’t take much with them—just a few things in a canvas bag, plus a sheer, Benzedrine-fueled exuberance and a love of life’s infinite possibilities. Because Sal and Dean and Dean’s new “beautiful little sharp chick” Marylou are on a wave, a “wild yea-saying overburst of American joy” that sweeps them across the country in a spirit of reckless excitement, improvising to the beat of bebop, yelling and talking all the time. They are people that “like everything,” who want to get caught up in “the whole mad swirl” of whatever it is they find, and when they get to
Denver, or Chicago, or New Orleans, or wherever it is they’re going, they’ll do whatever it is that people do in those places. Why? “Hell, we don’t know. Who cares?” They’ll find out soon enough.

Take it from these boys. Being organized, planning ahead, deciding things in advance—these are not the holy grail of existence. If you want some carefree exuberance to balance out your sensible, predictable life, give yourself a shot of
On the Road
at the start of each day, and let the beat play out.

See also:
Anally retentive, being
•
Control freak, being a
•
Goody-goody, being a
•
Read instead of live, tendency to
•
Risks, not taking enough
•
Seize the day, failure to

See:
Carelessness
•
Cope, inability to
•
Find one of your books, inability to
•
Overwhelmed by the number of books in your house
•
Risks, taking too many

Flowers in the Attic

VIRGINIA ANDREWS

•   •   •

Fanny Hill

JOHN CLELAND

•   •   •

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

D. H. LAWRENCE

•   •   •

Gravity’s Rainbow

THOMAS PYNCHON

•   •   •

Ulysses

JAMES JOYCE

•   •   •

Doing It

MELVIN BURGESS

•   •   •

The Butcher

ALINA REYES

•   •   •

The Idea of Perfection

KATE GRENVILLE

•   •   •

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

REBECCA MILLER

•   •   •

The Bride Stripped Bare

NIKKI GEMMELL

•   •   •

The Story of O

PAULINE RÉAGE

•   •   •

Venus in Furs

LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH

•   •   •

The Swimming Pool Library

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

•   •   •

A Boy’s Own Story

EDMUND WHITE

•   •   •

Our Lady of the Flowers

JEAN GENET

•   •   •

Fingersmith

SARAH WATERS