The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (70 page)

Cain

JOSÉ SARAMAGO

•   •   •

Peace Like a River

LEIF ENGER

•   •   •

Little Women

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

L
iterature heaves with squabbling siblings, young and old. Little siblings in unrequited adoration of big siblings, siblings competing for parental attention, siblings who abuse, siblings who betray, siblings who love too much, siblings who are annoying just because they’re siblings.

A little bit of competition between siblings is par for the course, but beware the example of Cain, who let it go too far. We know this archetypal tale of fratricide from the Bible, but in José Saramago’s
Cain
we are given a fuller picture. The brothers start out the best of friends, but the competitiveness reaches dangerous heights when they are grown men. One day they make offerings to God—Abel the flesh of a lamb, Cain a bunch of vegetables. The Lord doesn’t think much of the vegetables, and shows it. Cain experiences such intense jealousy that he takes the jawbone of a donkey and slays his brother in a cave. He immediately feels terrible remorse—and blames God for not intervening. (Frankly, we think he has a point.) For the rest of the novel, Cain seeks revenge on God by meddling with the Almighty’s plans, sticking a wrench in the works of the Old Testament stories, from Sodom and Gomorrah to the flood. The results are delightfully entertaining.

Literary siblings seem to get along better when they’re united in battle against someone or something—and when it’s not a parent they’re fighting, it’s usually poverty or bullies. The siblings in Leif Enger’s
Peace Like a River
are bonded together by hardship, hunger, and small-town suspicion in Roofing, Minnesota. Abandoned by their mother when their father downgrades from doctor to janitor (unimpressed, she leaves), these siblings show unquestioned love toward one another, perhaps because they feel they must stick together in solidarity. When eight-year-old Swede makes Christmas cookies using ingredients including frozen peas and macaroni, elder brother Davy crunches right through one, managing a “flawless display of gladness and enjoyment.” And Davy goes a bit far in defending his siblings when he shoots the two town bullies, making an outlaw of himself. They might not always get things right, but their hearts are in the right place.

If any siblings had reason to wonder how they could possibly have come from the same gene pool, it’s the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women
. Responsible Meg, tomboy Jo, goody-goody Beth, and spoiled Amy could not be less alike. But rather than despise one another for their differences, these sisters develop a genuine understanding and appreciation of the others’ strengths. If you can stomach the old-fashioned girliness of it all (and you should; it’s part of the novel’s charm), this absorbing story has much to instruct any siblings facing rivalries of their own.

See also:
Christmas
•
Family, coping with
•
Jealousy

The Hunters

JAMES SALTER

W
e used to be in favor of single-mindedness. In fact, you could go as far as saying we were single-minded in our belief in single-mindedness. We believed that single-mindedness was a useful trait because it got things done. We have, in the past, been single-minded in our pursuit of various things, many of which we achieved, which surely had something to do with us having been single-minded about them in the first place.

But then we read
The Hunters
, and found that our approach had been, well, somewhat single-minded.
The Hunters
is about the single-mindedness of fighter pilots, and how the only thing they care about is becoming an ace.
One has to shoot down five enemy planes in order to become an ace, so naturally one runs a great risk of being killed in the single-minded pursuit of becoming an ace. Ergo: sometimes single-mindedness can kill you.

But that’s not the only reason our faith in single-mindedness was shaken. While on leave from his single-minded pursuit of becoming an ace, Cleve Connell—thirty-one years old, a man of few words, honest, intelligent, brave; in other words, someone we wanted to see fall in love and live happily ever after—meets the daughter of a Japanese artist who was an old friend of his father’s. The girl is only nineteen but has extraordinary poise. We could see immediately that she was good enough for Cleve. We also saw that if Cleve were to survive the war, he would come back to find her and then they would live happily ever after.

But in order to survive the war, Cleve would have to swap one single-minded pursuit for another. He’d have to swap the single-minded pursuit of becoming an ace with the single-minded pursuit of
staying alive
. Because one cannot pursue two single-minded objectives in direct conflict with each other. The problem is that to swap one single-minded pursuit for another, one has to be open-minded. And one cannot be open-minded when one is already single-minded. And so the happy-ever-after eludes him . . .

The crux of the issue, then, is that single-mindedness is the opposite of open-mindedness. And we had long ago sworn allegiance to open-mindedness in our lives, as open-mindedness allows us to grow, to learn, to experience new things, to allow for the unexpected. To let in open-mindedness, therefore, we had to give up on single-mindedness. And on this, we were of one mind.

See also:
Anally retentive, being
•
Change, resistance to
•
Obsession

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

RICHARD FLANAGAN

•   •   •

Legend of a Suicide

DAVID VANN

•   •   •

How I Live Now

MEG ROSOFF

•   •   •

The Last Samurai

HELEN DEWITT

•   •   •

Silas Marner

GEORGE ELIOT

•   •   •

To Kill a Mockingbird

HARPER LEE

N
o one said it would be easy. And unless you can afford not to work, or have a live-in nanny or a hands-on granny, trying to be there for your offspring emotionally and physically while simultaneously earning a living, running a house, and having a sniff at a social life is challenging even to the most stoic human being. Literature has a great and disproportionate appetite
for single parents, and there is a lot to be learned from the range of parenting strategies on display.

At one end are the botch jobs, providing you with an excellent list of don’ts: The abandoned, alcoholic Bojan in Richard Flanagan’s
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
belongs on this list, although he does get a chance to redeem himself as a granddad; while the father in David Vann’s
Legend of a Suicide
wins top spot for the worst divorced dad in the business. As for single mothers, literature seems to argue that the more alternative the approach, the better—see, for example, Aunt Penn in Meg Rosoff’s
How I Live Now.
Though not strictly a single mother, she may as well be; and her hands-off parenting techniques may be attractive to single moms attempting to juggle a family with a globally vital peacekeeping career: her fourteen-year-old, Edmond, might smoke and drive the family car, but he displays the sort of maturity and sensitivity that every mother dreams about kindling in her boys.

Our standout favorite single mom, though, is Sibylla in
The Last Samurai
. Mother to the super intelligent Ludo, she doesn’t have enough money to heat the house, so they regularly spend whole days riding the Circle Line in a continuous loop to keep themselves warm. But Sibylla doesn’t let poverty come between her and high achievement. Choosing to home educate, Sibylla teaches Ludo to read by the age of two, and by three he is tackling Homer—in Greek.

No stranger to genius herself, Sibylla is undaunted by Ludo’s lust for languages, and in the next few years Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, and Inuit are added to his repertoire. The one thing she will not do is introduce him to his father, opting to depend on the classic Kurosawa film
Seven Samurai
for role models instead. This doesn’t stop Ludo from embarking on a search for his real dad himself—but will any of the contenders compare with the samurai? It’s a brilliant conceit, and the conclusion will bring a silent cheer to the heart of any single mom struggling to raise children in the absence of a committed dad.