The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (67 page)

S
elfishness, it seems, has become a positive personality trait these days. Look after your own needs first, the self-help books exhort. Make sure it’s you who gets to the top. Putting yourself first may well bring you lots of money and land you a CEO’s swivel chair, but it’s never going to make you friends—or, at least, not the sort of friends you’d want. Nor will it make you happy.

It’s time to take inspiration from one of our favorite characters in literature: Randle Patrick McMurphy, the bold and brassy Irishman in
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, Ken Kesey’s 1962 exposé of psychiatric institutions, EST, and lobotomies. With his “big wide-open laugh” and absolute refusal to be cowed, McMurphy storms into the lives of the Acutes and the Chronics of the loony bin—damaged men, abandoned by the society that created them—and changes them forever.

McMurphy is not selfless in the tedious way of saints and martyrs, and he’s probably feigning psychosis just to get out of doing chores on the “work farm” where he was previously held. Primarily, McMurphy is after a good time. But McMurphy’s irrepressible spirit soon starts having an effect on the other patients. McMurphy knows that in this place of intimidation and fear, where the tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules, none of the men are going to get better. “Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your
footing
,” he says.

And so, subtly and perhaps only half consciously, McMurphy begins to build his fellow patients up, winking and joking in group therapy meetings, persuading the doctor to let them play basketball in the corridors, listening to the others explain why they feel small. When one day he takes a group of them out on a deep-sea fishing trip with a couple of “aunts” (aka hookers), he rewards them for their courage by teaching them how a bit of bravado can help them keep their heads up, even if they have to pretend. It’s a glorious, laugh-filled, heartbreaking day in which the men are reminded of what they could be.

McMurphy doesn’t have to take any of them out with him on the boat. He doesn’t have to share his spirit. He doesn’t have to bring one of the hookers, Candy, to the party, and he certainly doesn’t have to delay his escape so that the young, stuttering Billy Bibbit could spend his first night with a woman. He pays a terrible price.

But that’s the thing with selflessness. It’s not about you. It’s about
everyone else. So how do you want to be known: as bringing joy and generosity to others, or for just making sure everything’s dandy in your own life? Maybe it’s time to forget about number one and pay more attention to those you care about.

See also:
Empathy, lack of
•
Greed
•
Manners, bad

See:
Arrogance
•
Confidence, too much

Doctor Faustus

THOMAS MANN

T
hose who barter their literary souls tend to do so in return for eternal youth, knowledge, wealth, or power. In real life, this translates as losing your artistic integrity, preferring pots of money to having time to breathe, and turning your back on old friends. But the outcome is the same: you lose yourself. And what’s the point of living if you’re only half there?

Arch-consumer John Self in Martin Amis’s
Money
believes himself to be a big shot in the film world. But he has signed his life away—not to the literal devil, but to debtors. Kurtz in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
is less interested in the trappings of Western civilization than in power and control; he has sold his soul for sovereignty over his fellow men and, in doing so, reduced himself to an animal. But the best template for the glory and catastrophe of selling your soul remains Thomas Mann’s masterpiece
Doctor Faustus
. In this version of the Faustus myth, it’s a composer the devil ensnares. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled artistic achievement, his soul will belong forever to Mephistopheles.

It is not the first time Adrian Leverkühn has resorted to drastic measures. Before meeting the embodiment of devilishness, he deliberately contracts a case of syphilis with the idea that the madness it will bring him will deepen his artistic sensibilities. It’s during a bout of syphilitic derangement that a vision of Mephistopheles appears. The devil warns him that he shouldn’t
assume he is hallucinating.

Unsure and terrified, Leverkühn returns to his work—and immediately starts creating masterpieces. He “invents” the radical twelve-tone system, is hailed a genius, and becomes the most celebrated musician of his generation. But there is something disconcerting about him, something cold that friends and audiences notice, which they can describe only as an absence, as if one’s feeling toward him “dropped soundless and without trace.”

Hold on to your soul. You may get your four and twenty years of fame, or whatever earthly riches you so desire. But what’s the use if it means letting go of the most fundamental part of your being?

The Hearing Trumpet

LEONORA CARRINGTON

A
t the start of this surreal, wonderful novel, ninety-two-year-old Marian, “a drooling sack of decomposing flesh,” is living happily with her son Galahad. She is in perfect bliss, in fact, feeding her cat on the bed, living largely off chocolate and soup, and regularly meeting up with her best friend, Carmella, to discuss plans for their trip to Lapland. But when her relatives can no longer bear her toothless exclamations and cat-fur-covered clothing, she is moved to an “extremely sinister” institution known as the Well of Light Brotherhood. Carmella gave her a hearing trumpet shortly before her move, and this gift transforms Marian from a victim of mild deafness to the heroine of a brilliant, if slightly fantastic, drama. Unfettered by her age to the point that she thinks nothing of scaling the roof of a house if it’s the only way to listen in on what’s going on inside, she clearly hasn’t lost any sense of limitless possibility. The hearing trumpet simply enables her to engage with the world once more—so much so that she masterminds a nine-day-long hunger strike in which the ancient residents of the home subsist on nothing but chocolate biscuits smuggled in by Carmella (who is only too happy to come to the rescue).

With this group of nonagenarians, anything could happen. Indeed, a new and more positive world order seems to be taking over by the end. Read it and you will be skipping into your golden years with ear trumpet in hand.

See also:
Aging, horror of
•
Amnesia, reading associated
•
Memory loss
•
Old age, horror of

A High Wind in Jamaica

RICHARD HUGHES

O
nce upon a time, being sentimental simply meant being in touch with your emotions, and, thus, perhaps more sensitive to the delights of literature, music, and art. But today the cold, hard world distrusts sentimentality for its shallowness and easy vulnerability. We, too, support a deeper, more subtle, more deliberate relationship with our emotions. If you are easy prey to sentimentality, we recommend a self-administered dose of
A High Wind in Jamaica,
Richard Hughes’s searing tale of piracy, kidnap, and death.

This bracing tonic opens with five expat British children leading an idyllic existence in Jamaica. After surviving a minor earthquake and a major hurricane, Emily and John, the neglected offspring of emotionally absent parents, are shipped off to the mother country for a bit of education. On the way, their boat is seized by pirates. The siblings become embroiled in the pirates’ way of life and before long are more attached to the pirates than to their stiff English family. As the story unfolds, they become ever more unfazed by the sometimes shocking events around them.

The children’s total lack of sentimentality is a striking, if at times disconcerting, aspect of the tale. When a fellow child disappears at one point, for instance, the others forget about him almost at once. And eventually, the pirates fear the children more than the reverse—rightly so, the reader feels. Perhaps even too disillusioning in its portrayal of the loss of childhood innocence, the novel will nevertheless be the perfect counterbalance to your gooey nature. Something tells us this will do the trick.