The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (2 page)

Adolescence doesn’t have to be hell. Remember that your peers are struggling to cross the chasm too. If you can, share the struggles together. Friends or no friends, be sure to do the silly, crazy things that only adolescents do. Then, when you’re older, at least you’ll be able to look back at these heady, high, hormonal times and laugh.

See also:
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Internet addiction
•
Irritability
•
Rails, going off the
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Risks, taking too many
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Teens, being in your

Run

ANN PATCHETT

•   •   •

The Graveyard Book

NEIL GAIMAN

C
hildren’s literature is strewn with adoptees. Mary Lennox in
The Secret Garden
is a spoiled adoptee who learns to love in her new cold climate; Mowgli in
The Jungle Book
is brought up by wolves; Tarzan in the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs is reared by apes. A romance seems to surround these lost and found—and indeed who, as a child, hasn’t had a run-in with their parents and
fantasized that they too were a foundling? Adoptees find their way into adult literature too: there’s James in Grant Gillespie’s
The Cuckoo Boy
, a novel with some disturbing views on adoption but a riveting read nonetheless; Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights
, who upsets the delicate balance of his adoptive family; “Wart” in T. H. White’s
The Once and Future King
, who is one of the rare success stories in this list—an adoptee who turns out to be Arthur, King of Camelot.

In reality, adoption is less romantic and can be hard for all concerned—for the natural parents who decide to give their child away; for the child who finds out in a nonideal way (see: Abandonment); for children who blame their adoptive parents for their confusion and who may seek out their natural parents, only to be disappointed; and for the adoptive parents who have to decide when to tell their children that they are “special” and not blood related. The whole matter is fraught with pitfalls, but also with love, and it can bring an end to childless grief (see: Children, not having). Anyone involved would do well to explore its complexity via those who have been there before.

One of the loveliest novels featuring adoptees is Ann Patchett’s
Run
. Bernard Doyle, the white ex-mayor of Boston, has three sons: Sullivan, Teddy, and Tip. One is a white redhead, and two are black, athletic, and extremely tall. Bernard’s fiery-haired wife, Bernadette, Sullivan’s mother, is dead. Teddy and Tip’s real mother is “the spy who came in from the cold”—she has watched her sons grow up from a distance, aware of their successes and failures, their friendships and rivalries, and presiding over them like a guardian angel.

When eleven-year-old Kenya—the runner of the title—unexpectedly comes to live in the Doyle household, the complex family dynamics begin to move in new directions. Teddy and Tip seem to be successful, as a scientist and a would-be priest, but Doyle wishes they had followed him into politics. Sullivan has been in Africa for some time trying to help in the battle against AIDS, running away from a terrible incident in his past. With the new issues raised by Kenya’s presence, the stories of the brothers’ different origins gradually emerge, and it is Kenya’s simple but overwhelming need to run—beautifully portrayed by Patchett: “She was a superhuman force that sat outside the fundamental law of nature. Gravity did not apply to her”—that brings them all together. The overall message of the novel is clear, and delivered without sentimentality: blood matters, but love matters more.

Confirmation that even the most unconventional parents can make a good job of adopting a child is found within the pages of
The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman. When a toddler goes exploring one night, he manages to evade death at the hands of “the man Jack,” who murders the rest of his family. Ending up in a nearby graveyard, he’s adopted by a pair of ghosts. The dead Mr. and Mrs. Owens never had children of their own in life and relish this unexpected chance to become parents. They name him “Nobody” but refer to him as Bod. During his eccentric childhood, Bod picks up unusual skills such as “Fading, Haunting, and Dream Walking,” which turn out to be very useful later on.

Bod’s ghostly parents do an excellent job. “You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change.” Their wisdom from the grave gives Bod the impetus to live his life to the fullest, despite the tragedy of his early years. And he certainly does.

Adoption is never a simple thing. Honesty on all sides is essential to allow those involved to come to terms with who they are and what relationship they have to whom. Whatever part you play, these novels will show you you’re not alone. Read them and then pass them around your family—however that family is defined.

See also:
Abandonment
•
Outsider, being an

Madame Bovary

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

•   •   •

Anna Karenina

LEO TOLSTOY

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Patience

JOHN COATES

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The Summer Without Men

SIRI HUSTVEDT

T
he temptation to have an affair generally starts when those who are one half of a pair feel dissatisfied with who they are—or who they feel themselves perceived to be—within their current relationship. If only they could be with someone new, they think, they would be a sparklier, wittier, sexier version of themselves. Perhaps they justify their betrayal by telling themselves that they married too young, when they were not fully grown into themselves, and now their real self wants its moment on the stage. And maybe they
will
be that sexier, shinier person—for a while. But affairs that break up long-term relationships usually go the same way in the end, as
the old self and habits catch up, albeit within a slightly different dynamic. Often insecurities creep in too. Because if the relationship began as a clandestine affair for at least one of you, it’s easy to become paranoid that infidelity will strike again.

For Emma Bovary, the temptation to stray comes almost immediately after tying the knot with doctor Charles, stuck as she is in her adolescent preconceptions of what a marriage should be. While expecting love to be “a great bird with rose-colored wings” hanging in the sky, instead she finds her marriage to her adoring husband stifling and oppressive. Such absurdly sentimental notions of marriage, we are slightly embarrassed to admit, were picked up from literature—Sir Walter Scott is named and shamed—for at the age of fifteen Emma swallowed down a great number of romantic novels, riddled with tormented young ladies “fainting in lonely pavilions” and gentlemen “weeping like fountains.”
*
When she meets the lustful, false Rodolphe, full of clichéd flattery and the desire to serenade her with daisies, she is putty in his hands. If you suspect you are harboring similarly unrealistic ideas of romantic love and marriage, you need to dose yourself up with some contemporary realists: the works of Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith are a good place to start.

Anna Karenina is not actively looking for a way out of her marriage to the conservative Karenin, but she certainly finds the full expression of her vivacious self with Vronsky. When, on the way back to St. Petersburg after having met the young officer on her visit to Moscow, she sees him on the platform, she is unable to stop the animation bubbling forth. And when she next sets eyes on her husband, she can’t bear the customary “ironical” smile with which he greets her (or, now she comes to think of it, his “gristly” ears). More strongly than ever, she feels that she is pretending, that the emotion between them is false—and she feels dissatisfied with herself as a result. Now that she has seen herself around Vronsky, how can she go back to being the Anna she is with cold Karenin?

What Anna also finds, of course, is that loving Vronsky involves guilt. In fact (and this time we take pleasure in pointing it out), it is while she is reading a novel about a guilty baron that she first becomes aware that the emotion has hatched within herself. Guilt and self-hatred ultimately bring the stricken heroine crashing down, for she can never shake the principles and
values that formed her—particularly with regard to the love she owes her son. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, be aware that guilt is hard to live with. See: Guilt, for how to survive a stricken conscience and still come out standing.

A more devious way of dealing with guilt is to ride in the slipstream of a partner who has been unfaithful first. In 1950s London, the eponymous heroine of
Patience
is a contentedly married woman whose stuffy husband, Edward, expects little more from her than keeping house, cooking regular meals, and performing her duties in the bedroom, which she does while planning what vegetables to buy for tomorrow’s lunch. The revelation that Edward is having an affair with the not so Catholic Molly leaves her feeling oddly relieved. Her sense of imminent liberation rapidly finds a focus in the form of Philip, a handsome, intriguing bachelor who awakens her to what sex can be. Patience brings about the end of her marriage and embarks on a new life with Philip, somehow in an almost painless way. Even her three young children remain unscathed. Her suggestion that Philip keep his bachelor flat—where he works and where they sometimes have an assignation—seems to be particularly full of foresight. Perhaps a second home is the secret to an enduring second love.

Sadly, Edward doesn’t come off so lightly: he is deeply thrown, his whole tidy world turned upside down, and is landed, somewhat unfairly, we feel, with the blame for it all. There is a chance that adultery may free you from a loveless marriage and catapult you into a fine romance. But there’s a chance it won’t. You may simply take your problems with you, be capsized by religious or personal guilt, and leave at least one wreckage behind, apart from yourself. The fact is, unless you married late or were very lucky—or are one of the fortunate few whose parents raised you to be fully in your skin by age twenty—you probably will hit a time when you feel there is more to you than your marriage, at present, allows (see also: Midlife crisis).