The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (71 page)
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Authors: Ella Berthoud,Susan Elderkin
Usually it’s women left holding the baby, but sometimes men find themselves in this character-building predicament too, as we can see in George Eliot’s
Silas Marner
. Embittered and lonely, shunned by the other inhabitants of Raveloe, Silas Marner has nothing to live for except his accumulating gold, which he hoards beneath the floorboards. One day he finds a mysterious child asleep at his hearth side. Gradually, Eppie melts his heart, teaching him how to love and bridging the gap between Silas and the locals. If single parenthood wasn’t something you planned and you’re struggling to adjust,
this novel will give you great heart.
Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
gets our vote for the best single father in the business. For how to treat your children with respect, for how to give them freedom to play and discover the world for themselves, for how to show them the importance of standing up for what you believe is right and having the courage to take action against wrong, look no further. Build a house with a porch and put a rocking chair on it. Sit there with this gem between your hands. Read it once a year, first to yourself, and then out loud to your kids. Take heart. Be there for your children. The rest will come.
See also:
Busy, being too
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Busy to read, being too
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Cope, inability to
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Fatherhood
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Motherhood
THE TEN BEST NOVELS FOR SIXTYSOMETHINGS
Things Fall Apart
CHINUA ACHEBE
The Sense of an Ending
JULIAN BARNES
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
RACHEL JOYCE
The Diviners
MARGARET LAURENCE
Out Stealing Horses
PER PETTERSON
American Pastoral
PHILIP ROTH
Nobody’s Fool
RICHARD RUSSO
Last Orders
GRAHAM SWIFT
Fathers and Sons
IVAN TURGENEV
A Curious Earth
GERARD WOODWARD
READING AILMENT
Skim, tendency to
CURE
Read one page at a time
I
f your eyes are apt to skip ahead, scanning for dialogue or drama, sex or scandal, leaping rudely over passages of description, it may be that you are reading a bad novel. In which case, use this book to guide you to a better one. But it may be that your capacity to delay gratification has been eroded and you need to retrain your brain to slow down and digest.
Your therapy is to read a novel one page at a time—no more, no less. A page before you go to sleep, a page when you wake in the morning, a page as you eat your lunch. The best novel for the purpose is one in which every page glistens with intelligent insight; Robert Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities
is ideal, but you can take your pick. The point is to allow whatever you read to trigger your thoughts, and then to spend time with these thoughts, penetrating to deeper and deeper seams within yourself. We agree that finding out what happens next is important. (And so are sex and scandal.) But do you want to live your life on the surface, just picking the icing off the cake? Sometimes chewing on a piece of really good bread is the most satisfying part of the meal. It’s certainly the part that will fuel you through the rest of your day.
See:
Busy, being too
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Depression, general
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Exhaustion
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Insomnia
•
Nightmares
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Pregnancy
•
Sex, too much
•
Snoring
•
Stress
•
Tired and emotional, being
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Workaholism
See:
Adolescence
•
Ambition, too little
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Apathy
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Bed, inability to get out of
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Depression, general
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Lethargy
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Seize the day, failure to
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Unemployment
The Sleepwalkers
HERMANN BROCH
W
hen we dream, the brain imagines all sorts of vivid wanderings. For most of us, the wires transmitting the intention to move from brain to body are blocked by sleep—we lie still, with no outward manifestations of our inner journey other than, perhaps, a twitch, a sob, or a squeak. In children and the elderly, plus a few odd bods in between, the wires malfunction every now and then, letting the intentions of the brain loose on the body and transforming a dreamer into a meandering somnambulist who will scare the living daylights out of any other members of the household who happen to be passing on the landing. Eyes glassy, somnambulists are completely unaware they are padding around barefoot—and if you wake them to tell them, you’re likely to scare the living daylights out of them too.
We advise you to reconsider your use of the term “sleepwalker.” From now on, begin to see it metaphorically, as does Hermann Broch in
The Sleepwalkers
. In this great experimental modernist epic—in fact three distinct novels, each written in a different style—Broch uses the term to represent those caught between two sets of ethical values, old and new, as the nineteenth century turns to the twentieth.
In the first of the trilogy we have Joachim von Pasenow (the romantic), a highly codified Prussian aristocrat who ardently espouses traditional values—so much so that he enters into a suitable but loveless marriage with the emotionally distant Elisabeth. But Pasenow is also passionately involved with the sensual Ruzena, a bohemian prostitute with whom he’s ashamed to be seen in public. In the second, there is August Esch (the anarchist), a steady, responsible accountant who gives it all up to go work as a manager of a circus—only to find that that doesn’t suit him either. And finally, in the third novel, in which Pasenow and Esch return, we have Huguenau (the opportunist), a man who cheats, murders, and rapes to get what he wants, without receiving any comeuppance.
No matter what era we live in, we are trapped, philosophically speaking, between different ways of living—like somnambulists, who are neither quite asleep nor quite awake. Are we living our lives deliberately, guided by a set of principles, or are we chasing after whatever false god we happen to favor in any given moment, with an eye only for the object and no consideration of the consequences? In other words, how should we live?
So, somnambulists, while you wrestle with the philosophical, psychological, existential, grammatical, transcendental, translational (we could go on) questions evoked by the metaphorical condition of sleepwalking, one of
three things will have happened. Either you will have discovered an inner conflict of your own, the resolution of which will curb your nighttime wanderings forever. Or you will have so exhausted your brain by reading this dense trilogy that you will slumber in the deepest part of the sleep cycle with no possibility for sleepwalking. Or you will have fallen asleep midsentence, this doorstopper of a tome still weighing on your chest, where it will have you pinned to your bed till morning.
Still Life with Woodpecker
TOM ROBBINS
• • •
Asylum
PATRICK MCGRATH
S
horn at last of its final glimmer of glamour, smoking is now bad for you in every conceivable way. But that doesn’t make it any easier to give up. A good novel can be as effective as a nicotine patch for injecting a buzz—see our list of Ten Best Novels for Going Cold Turkey. But don’t attempt to quit the ciggies without the help of the following two novels. The first allows you to revel in the accessories of smoking without actually inhaling. The second delivers a short, sharp punch to the thorax that will put you off destroying your lungs forever.
In
Still Life with Woodpecker
, the redheaded Princess Leigh-Cheri meditates on the iconic pyramids and palm trees of her pack of Camels for countless hours while her outlaw boyfriend Bernard Mickey “The Woodpecker” Wrangle is in prison, his only company also being a pack of Camels, identical to hers. As she feels the psychic connection, facilitated by their shared icon, she decides she can’t actually smoke them, because to open the pack would be to destroy her imaginary world. “A successful external reality depends upon an internal vision that is left intact,” she muses. Through her meditation, the reader gleans fascinating insights about pyramids, redheads, the purpose of the moon—you get the picture. When our two heroes find themselves trapped inside a genuine, newly built pyramid, believing they are entombed forever with nothing to eat but wedding cake and champagne, they make creative use of their practical and hallucinatory talents, plunging them into yet another pack of Camel cigarettes. In short, this novel is tons more fun than actually smoking a cigarette.
Asylum
is a novel that will catch your breath, compress your lungs, and constrict your throat at a moment of unbearable horror. If you haven’t quite managed to quit the habit yet, this will convince you that it’s time. It’s 1959 and Stella Raphael is isolated and depressed. With her forensic psychiatrist husband spending long days at a maximum security asylum, Stella becomes intrigued by one of the inmates. Once embarked on a misbegotten affair with the charming but erratic artist Edgar Stark, Stella is drawn deeper and deeper into his dark interior world. To cope, she smokes almost constantly, punctuating her days with long, deep pulls on her cigarettes.
When on a school trip with her son, Charlie, something appalling and preventable happens, but Stella looks away deliberately, her attention focused entirely on her cigarette. “With one hand she clutched her elbow as her arm rose straight and rigid to her mouth. She turned her head to the side and again brought the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, each movement tight, separate and controlled.”
It is this moment, with its terrible chill, that will have you extinguishing your last cigarette by vigorously crushing it into the ground.
