The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (27 page)

At first the appalled hosts try to ignore what has happened. Then they begrudgingly slide flat packs of wafer-thin ham under Miles’s door. Nine-year-old Brooke, however, the precocious daughter of some neighbors and chief observer in the local community, is the one to demonstrate what Miles should have done when struggling with the social event that started this off: learn to be curious and ask your fellow guests questions about themselves. And if all else fails, fall asleep at the table.

Emulate Brooke. You’ll have a much better time at the party and get home sooner, too.

See also:
Antisocial, being
•
Misanthropy
•
Shyness

Le Grand Meaulnes

ALAIN-FOURNIER

T
he malady of disenchantment comes with being a grown-up. It’s not surprising, really. We spend our childhoods dreaming of great adventures, our teens whipping them into intense, romantic fantasies, and our twenties (if we’re lucky) making bold steps toward these new horizons. And then responsibility hits: work, mortgage, a routine. And suddenly we find that the world has gone from an enchanted place where anything could happen to a place of predictable, humdrum mundanity (see: Mundanity, oppressed by). Where, we can’t help wondering, have all the dreams gone?

To answer this question, reacquaint yourself with the character in whom the romance and hopes of adolescence find their most intense expression: Le Grand Meaulnes. The mysterious seventeen-year-old arrives one Sunday in November at the schoolhouse home of narrator François in Sainte-Agathe.
François has heard his footsteps in advance in the attic—a step “very sure of itself.” A moment later, Meaulnes impresses François by setting off fireworks on his doorstep. Two “great bouquets” of red and white stars shoot up with a hiss and, for a wondrous moment, François’s mother opens the door to see her son and the tall stranger hand in hand, captured in the glow of this fantastical light.

To François and the other schoolboys at Sainte-Agathe, Meaulnes is everything they find compelling: fearless, a dreamer of impossible dreams, an adventurer who always has one eye on a distant horizon. He is bold in the way that only the young are bold, before doubt and cynicism and the possibility of failure set in (see: Cynicism; Failure, feeling like a). They christen him, with canny accuracy, Le Grand Meaulnes. Translators the world over have struggled to do justice to that seemingly simple word—
grand
—capturing as it does the physical meaning (big, tall) but expanding as the story progresses into something loftier, something great.

Le Grand Meaulnes
will take you back to a world of heightened senses in which everything is more enigmatic, more lovely, and more intoxicating. Meaulnes’s tragedy is that when he finds happiness he can’t embrace it. His sense of identity is too firmly bound up with yearning, and he needs the dream to remain a dream. But we can live differently. Let Meaulnes remind you how to live a life of enchantment, then bring this enchantment into your every day.

See also:
Innocence, loss of
•
Zestlessness

See:
Lying

Cannery Row

JOHN STEINBECK

M
any of us live to the accompaniment of a perpetual sense of dissatisfaction, a gnawing feeling that we have not quite achieved enough, don’t quite have enough to show for our time of life. For some, it’s not enough material things. For
others, it’s not enough time—an endless sense of scurrying through to-do lists before we finally achieve the space to think and breathe. And for still others, it’s a sense of being emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually incomplete—we yearn for a better relationship or better job or better lifestyle that would make us feel we could, at last, begin our lives for real.

We hate to break it to you, but if you keep looking for the answers outside yourself, the dissatisfaction will stay. Clichéd it may be, but the answer lies within. And often the only way to see this is to stop chasing those butterflies and stand still for a while and take stock.

Mack and the boys know how to do this. In
Cannery Row
, John Steinbeck’s ode to the ambition-free life of the bum, we meet them sitting on the discarded rusty pipes from the sardine canneries in a vacant lot. Mack, Eddie, Hazel, Hughie, and Jones are men with three things in common: no families, no money, and no ambitions. Yet this isn’t entirely true. They themselves form a sort of family—along with the lovable Doc, who plays a fatherly role—and they realize ambition in making a home together.

To many they’re a band of no-good thieves and bums. But to Doc they are life’s success stories—healthy, “clean” men who are able to spend their days doing what they want. They live a hand-to-mouth existence, living on the cash earnings of whatever jobs they can get, but they are happy this way. While others race through life striving to achieve and accumulate and keep up in their endless search for more—forever falling short of their targets—Mack and the boys approach contentment “casually, quietly,” and absorb it gently. “What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals?” Steinbeck asks.

You might think this side of America doesn’t exist anymore. But it does if you know where to look. Take a day out of your life to steep yourself in this tender, loving, idle world of men who are happy with little and whose hearts are in the right place—a place of nonstriving and acceptance. Then apply this casual, quiet approach to your own life, and watch the dissatisfaction flow softly away.

See also:
Boredom
•
Grumpiness
•
Happiness, searching for
•
Mundanity, oppressed by
•
Querulousness

Intimacy

HANIF KUREISHI

•   •   •

The Sportswriter

RICHARD FORD

•   •   •

Their Eyes Were Watching God

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

D
ivorce may be common these days, but it’s still one of the most traumatic experiences a person can go through—particularly if there are children involved—and if there’s any chance of avoiding it, we urge you to take it. All marriages go through peaks and troughs, and even if you’ve been in a trough for a number of years, your problems may very well be more easily surmountable than you realize. If your marriage is on the rocks because either you or your partner is suffering from one of the many predicaments described in this book, first treat the problem at its root. Once cured, the strain in your relationship may disappear. If not, read on. Our remedy begins with two novels for those on the brink of divorce—be sure to read them before any knots are severed. And for those who have already gone through divorce, or who need encouragement to see it through, we offer a one-in-a-million novel of hope and inspiration about a woman who gets it right the third time around.

Intimacy
is the raw, and at times uncomfortably honest, first-person account of Jay, a man who has decided to leave his partner of six years, Susan. As he puts his two little boys to bed and sits down to a supper
à deux
, he is aware that this is the last night they will all spend as “an innocent, complete, ideal family.” Inevitably, there’s a tumult of conflicting emotions in his head—guilt, confusion, and terror at the damage he’s about to inflict on the children, but also a desperate need to “live” again, to close the door on unhappiness and move on. When Susan, a successful publisher, comes home from work, we get a glimpse of what has gone wrong. As she casts him an infuriated gaze, he feels his body “shrink and contract.” Clearly there has been a communication breakdown. And in the dialogue that ensues, we get a sense that their problems have never really been discussed. Read this as your wake-up call. If, like Jay, you haven’t been open about your feelings with your partner, you may be giving up too easily. Take some responsibility for the failure. Initiate the conversation. Don’t give up until you both understand—and agree—where you went wrong. Chances are, the return of honest communication will bring you closer again.