The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (30 page)

You may have to look quite hard. Of the five Bundren siblings watching their mother, Addie, die in William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
, Darl is the most articulate, Jewel the most demonstrative, and Cash—though the eldest—is the one who struggles most to express his love for his mother. He does it by building her a coffin, right under her window. His brother Jewel watches his meticulous, careful sawing of “the long hot sad yellow days” into planks and puts his act of intense and complex devotion into words for him: “See. See what a good one I am making for you.”

And the coffin
is
good. Cash makes it into the shape of a grandfather clock, “with every joint and seam beveled and scrubbed with the plane, tight as a drum and neat as a sewing basket,” so that they can lay her in it without crushing her dress. The young man funnels all his grief and desire to please into the making of this coffin, and his inarticulacy is deeply touching—especially in the chapter that consists of a list of reasons for making the coffin “on the bevel.”

Embrace your—or your loved one’s—inability to express in conventional ways. Employ—and allow—a wider repertoire.

See also:
Stiff upper lip, having a

The Stranger

ALBERT CAMUS

•   •   •

The Heart of the Matter

GRAHAM GREENE

W
hat is it that makes so many of us want to read about heartless bastards? Is it because, frustrated by our own sensitivity, we long to be tougher, more selfish, and more Teflon-coated ourselves? Do we take perverse pleasure in reading about people (men nearly always, let’s admit) who give a damn about nothing but their own moods and desires because we wish we could be similarly self-indulgent? It’s not a question that can be answered easily, but it’s a question that can be weighed in the company of countless novels, for it clearly preys on the minds of authors too.

Who can forget Meursault, the young, unemotional narrator of Camus’s
The Stranger
? The day after his mother’s funeral, the nonchalant and detached Meursault goes swimming, hooks up with a pretty young woman, has a lot of sex, and goes to see a comic film. Over the next few days, he gets into a fight with a man who provokes him, and shoots him dead. In the aftermath, he’s put on trial for murder. The jury, aware of the pleasure spree Meursault embarked upon after his mother’s death, wants to convict him. He’s definitely guilty of callousness. But does that mean he’s guilty of murder? Judge your own empathy levels by how much you empathize with Meursault—and his victim.

In Graham Greene’s
The Heart of the Matter
, a self-pitying white man in Africa named Scobie believes he teems with tortured Christian pity for Louise, his wife, but Greene makes sure that Scobie’s hollow solace never tricks the reader. When Louise, her hair matted and stringy with sweat, looking vacant and as “out” as a “dog or cat,” rises from her pillow under the mosquito netting to greet Scobie, “he had the impression of a joint under a meat-cover. But pity trod on the heels of the cruel image and hustled it away.” Right . . . hustled it away onto the page, for all of us to savor, drawn by the coldness of the author’s eye.

For those in your life who are plagued by a lack of empathy, we recommend you give them one of these novels to read. If they get the hint that you think they can relate to these cold customers, well, perhaps they’ll show a tad more empathy with
you
. If you’re the one suffering from a lack of empathy, then ask yourself if you felt anything for Meursault’s victim or Scobie’s wife. Are you shocked at the cold veil in which their emotions are wrapped? If
not, you need to read every novel we recommend in this book, for scientific studies have shown that reading fiction is the number one best cure for lack of empathy.

See also:
Emotions, inability to express
•
Selfishness

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year

SUE TOWNSEND

I
t can be embarrassing to admit to, but many parents feel lost when their children leave home. What on earth are they to do with themselves without all those packed lunches to make, dirty rugby shirts to load into the washing machine, and teenagers to chauffeur on Friday nights? Get a life, of course. Except it’s not so easy when you’re out of the habit. Now, thankfully, it’s a “syndrome,” and you can diagnose yourself with it, as Eva Beaver does in Sue Townsend’s novel,
The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year
. And with this typically Townsendian cure, you can have a laugh at the funny side, for there’s no better way to take the air out of a syndrome than to affectionately mock it.

To anyone familiar with the seemingly endless chores that go along with being a mother and housewife (see: Cope, inability to; Housewife, being a; and Motherhood), going to bed for a year seems a completely sensible—and enviable—thing to do. But Eva is not only tired; she doesn’t know who she is anymore. After twenty-five years of seeing to the needs of others and making, as she now sees it, a “pig’s ear” out of bringing her children up, she retreats from the world in order to relearn how to be in it. Kicking her husband, Brian, out of the bedroom, she looks back over her marriage and reflects on the things she gave up (reading, among them) when her twins, Brian Junior and Brianne, were born. She suddenly feels a crushing sense of disappointment. When Brian moves into the shed with his long-term mistress, Titania, and Brian Junior and Brianne learn how to live away from home, Eva starts to make friends with various passersby—including the handyman—while she gets to the bottom of her grief.

As a strategy for recovering and recharging—and opening the doors to new friends, new careers, and new domestic arrangements—we recommend
it heartily, though we think a year is a tad too long. If you start to test the patience of your loved ones, see: Bed, inability to get out of, for a countercure.

See also:
Children, not having
•
Loneliness
•
Yearning, general

See:
Stiff upper lip, having a

See:
Jealousy

Zorba the Greek

NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

P
hysical exhaustion can be a fantastic feeling, if brought on by arduous exercise—swimming in a lake, scaling a peak, galloping on a horse along a beach. But when brought on by standing on your feet for ten hours, plucking chickens, or digging a ditch in the rain, there’s little pleasure in the pain. Mental exhaustion can be even more depleting still, causing stress (see: Stress) and an ill-functioning brain (see: Memory loss). Exhaustion through lack of sleep is particularly miserable, and can be remedied only by an uninterrupted eight hours in bed (at least). Truth be told, sleep is a pretty good cure for exhaustion all around, but if you’re exhausted and want to find a way to keep going, read on.

Meet Zorba, a man of many soups and stories, with bright, piercing eyes, a weather-beaten face, and a gift for expressing himself through dance. Zorba uses dance to tell stories, to define who he is, to explain the world, and to revitalize his spirits when they flag. Our narrator is a young Greek intellectual, interested in Buddhism and books. But when he meets Zorba, with his irrepressible lust for life, he knows he’s met a man with a spiritual secret. When the nimble-footed wanderer accepts his offer to become foreman of the lignite mine he has recently acquired on the island of Crete, he’s delighted. The two take to drinking wine late into the night, discussing philosophy, with frequent musical accompaniment by Zorba’s
santuri
.
During these sessions Zorba often laments that if only he could express his friend’s philosophical conundrums in dance, they could take the conversations even further.

And one day Zorba really does teach his young friend to dance—impetuously, defiantly, ecstatically. Soon they are both telling tales with their gravity-defying bodies. Zorba, we realize, is a man of great wisdom through natural understanding who can reach in “one bound” spiritual heights that would take others years to attain. What we love most about this archetype of energy is his apparently limitless ability to throw himself wholeheartedly into the next project, frequently picking himself up off the floor (when by all rights he should sleep for a week) and dancing himself back to life.