The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (31 page)

Become a student of Zorba yourself. When exhaustion hits, don’t flop. Take to your feet, play some music, and find a dance within you. In years to come, wouldn’t you rather say, with Zorba: “I’ve done heaps and heaps of things in my life, but I still did not do enough. Men like me ought to live for a thousand years!”?

See also:
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Busy, being too
•
Busy to read, being too
•
Libido, loss of
•
Tired and emotional, being

See:
Angst, existential

Kingfishers Catch Fire

RUMER GODDEN

•   •   •

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

TRUMAN CAPOTE

E
xtravagance—as in spending money on things you can’t afford and don’t really need—is a habit borne in times of abundance and profligacy. In times of austerity (see: Depression, economic), it needs to be stemmed. If not, you’ll find yourself broke (see: Broke, being; and Tax return, fear of doing), working round the clock to pay off your credit card debts (see: Workaholism), and tempted to live your life in unprincipled and
character-defiling ways (see: Rails, going off the). “He that is extravagant will soon become poor, and poverty will enforce dependence, and invite corruption,” Samuel Johnson has already beaten us to saying.

Extravagant people tend to be dreamers and romantics. One way to curb an extravagant nature is to decide to romanticize frugality. This is very much what single mother of two Sophie does in Rumer Godden’s
Kingfishers Catch Fire
. An expat wife estranged from her husband, Denzil, Sophie has until now been someone who spent money “extravagantly, carelessly . . . selfishly.” Yet the deeply flawed Sophie falls in love with the beauty and simplicity she sees around her in rural Kashmir, where the women fetch water, pound grain, and spin their own flax and wool. For the peasants themselves, who have no choice, it’s a tough existence. But to Sophie, it’s picturesque and charming. She, too, wants to pick her “toothbrushes off a tree.” Much to the anguish of her daughter Teresa, who longs to put down roots and live in a “proper” house back in England, she moves them into Dilkhush, a semi-ruin with no electricity. “We shall be poor and frugal,” she tells her children. “We shall toil.” And toil she does. She also gives up cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee, and works so hard that she almost dies from pneumonia. But she doesn’t give up.

It helps, of course, that by opting to be poor among people who are even poorer than she is, Sophie makes herself, by comparison, rich. But whether or not she embarks on her frugal life with realistic eyes, Sophie does discover the pleasures of it, and so do her children. Teresa and little Moo spend their days climbing trees, sailing walnut shell boats in a stream, and tending to their animals. Sophie, meanwhile, with only a few books to entertain her in the long, lonely evenings, soon finds she is reading in a new way. “Every word impressed her, and what she read in the evening she pondered over the next day. She felt her mind stretch and deepen, grow rich; sometimes an evening had passed before she had noticed.”

If the austerity fantasy doesn’t do it for you, take a cue from Holly Golightly, the slender will-o’-the-wisp at the heart of Truman Capote’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. Holly hails from the dirt-poor Texas sticks, where she’s the child bride of an old widowed turkey farmer with a brood of children, but she escapes this dead-end life and sets herself up in Manhattan as if she were an heiress for whom money is no object. At eighteen, she becomes the toast of New York’s café society, letting rich men pay for her meals, clothes, and jewels, and gaily conducting a whirligig existence. If she can’t buy herself a diamond solitaire at Tiffany’s, she can still go there and inhale its heady aura of luxury. “It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look
of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets,” she rhapsodizes. Holly never expects the fantasy to last: “It’s better to look at the sky than live there,” she explains to one of the men who adore her. She can’t perch at the pinnacle forever, and before long a drug scandal she swans into shakes her flagpole. But she’ll stay up there, aloft and glittering, as long as she can keep a dainty foothold.

An extravagance habit is hard to kick completely. Even Rumer Godden’s Sophie doesn’t manage to lose it. She buys too many flowers from the flower boats, keeps animals for pets rather than food, and cannot resist buying a Persian rug with money she does not have, so entranced is she by its exquisite rose design. Sophie believes that sometimes, particularly when one is afraid, one should do something rash in order to reinforce one’s sense of self—in her case, as a lover of fine things. Clearly, extravagance on a daily basis is a disaster. Spend what you have wisely to make it go far, and paint alluring visions of monkish austerity if it helps. But if the joy begins to go out of life, indulge once in a while. Like Sophie, buy the rug with the roses on it, and when you are hungry, the extravagance of color will feed your soul. Or like Holly, live the dream while cleverly eluding the bills.

See also:
Book buyer, being a compulsive
•
Common sense, lack of
•
Greed
•
Shopaholism

The History of Mr. Polly

H. G. WELLS

Y
our past is littered with abandoned enterprises. Everything you touch turns to lead. Your very anticipation of failure is self-fulfilling—although your fear of failure means that sometimes you don’t even begin. You walk with your head hung low, your shoulders slumping. You’re the embodiment of nonsuccess.

If we’ve just painted a picture of you, it’s time to meet H. G. Wells’s most charming creation, the unsuccessful Mr. Polly.

When we first meet Mr. Polly, he’s sitting on a stile near his home in fictional Fishbourne, Kent, complaining that he is stuck in an “’Ole!”—a “Beastly Silly Wheeze of a Hole.” Prone to mixing up his words (“See? I’m going to absquatulate, see? Hey Presto right away”), which is part of his charm, Mr. Polly lives in a permanent state of indigestion caused as much by his negative self-image as by his dubious diet. Having succumbed to the “zealacious commerciality” of keeping a drapery shop for the past fifteen years, he’s now forty and has grown fat and balding. Realizing he has spent his life so far “in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope”—and that company includes his wife—he is disconsolate enough to set up a life insurance policy that will ensure his wife is comfortably catered for. Then he plans to kill himself (see: Midlife crisis).

As luck would have it, his suicide attempt goes so splendidly wrong that he finds himself feeling—no, not a failure—more alive than ever before. Realizing that Fishbourne is not, after all, “the world,” he sets off onto the open road, heading vaguely toward the sea. Walking for eight or nine hours a day, sleeping in countryside inns and the occasional moonlit field, Mr. Polly comes at last to Potwell Inn. Nestling under the trees at a bend in the river surrounded by hollyhocks, a picnic table out front and a buttercup meadow behind, the inn appears as a vision of perfection. All the more so because it’s inhabited by the “plump lady,” so wondrously “firm and pink and wholesome” that she seems filled with infinite confidence and kindliness. The two realize almost at once that they are “each other’s sort.” And so Mr. Polly finds his kingdom—or would have, if it weren’t for one obstacle in his way.

Read the novel to find out if Mr. Polly completes his transformation from failure to success story. Our guess is that, by the end, your sense of the inevitability of failure, for yourself and for Mr. Polly, will have absquatulated into thin air. Align yourself to Mr. Polly. Turn your supposed failures on their head. Stand tall. Then stride off in search of your own Potwell Inn.
*

See also:
Give up halfway through, tendency to
•
Self-esteem, low

See:
Seize the day, failure to

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

PAUL TORDAY

•   •   •

The Exorcist

WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

•   •   •

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

RACHEL JOYCE

F
or some people, having faith means believing in God; for others, it means believing there’s a point to life (see: Pointlessness), and for others still it means having faith that there’s goodness in the world. Whatever faith means for you, to lose it can mean that the light goes out of your life. At such times, we need novels that return us to the tenets we need to uphold if we are to go forward with joy and confidence. Our cures cover three different approaches to faith; take the one best suited to you.

If you see faith as the triumph of personal conviction over science, then make
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
your bible. When Fred Jones, a civil servant in charge of the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence, receives a letter asking for his help in introducing salmon, and salmon fishing, into the Yemen, he does what any self-respecting scientist would do: he says no. It is “nonsensical,” “risible” to attempt to defy the laws of nature for the whim of a sheikh with too much money and no education. But that is before he has met Sheikh Muhammad and discovered the power of one man’s determination. Because Sheikh Muhammad is a visionary, and, as Dr. Jones soon realizes, this is not so much about fly-fishing as about faith. This feel-good novel will restore your belief in the power of faith to move mountains.

If your belief in God has been shaken,
The Exorcist
will send a powerful shiver up your spine that might just have you reconsidering. In this chilling novel—perhaps the most terrifying we know—we witness a mother’s dawning realization that her daughter, Regan, is possessed. In desperation, she calls in Father Karras. Karras is himself currently questioning his belief in God, but the palpably hellish horror that he witnesses in Regan so clearly testifies to the existence of the devil that it brings his belief in the ultimate presence of good and evil in the world rushing back. It may have the same effect on you.

If you’ve lost a sense of the point of it all—and whether it matters if you’re good or bad—we have a much gentler cure. Harold Fry is a dispirited gray retiree who barely exchanges formalities with his wife and has lost
touch with his grown-up son. When he receives a letter from his old friend Queenie telling him she’s dying of cancer, he writes her a postcard and sets off immediately to post it. On the way, a chance conversation with a gas station attendant (the “garage-girl”) lodges in his mind, and when he gets to the mailbox, instead of sending his letter, he keeps on walking—all the way from Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed, in fact, where Queenie lives—beset with an increasing conviction that, while he walks there, she will stay alive.

Harold’s conviction is tested many times on his journey. But he places his trust in providence, never taking more than he needs, sleeping in the open air rather than in people’s homes, and becoming more and more like a pilgrim from another age. Eventually the press hears of him and he is soon being referred to as “that pilgrim,” someone who everyone wants to touch and be touched by. The spread of faith, it seems, is infectious. His wife, Maureen, begins to fall back in love with him from afar, and Queenie . . . well, you’ll just have to read it to find out.

At times of bleakness, when you’ve lost faith in life, God, love, someone else, or yourself, use these novels to bring yourself back to some fundamental truths. Because the garage-girl is right: “If you have faith, you can do anything.”

See also:
Hope, loss of

See:
Appetite, loss of
•
Concentrate, inability to
•
Dizziness
•
Infatuation
•
Insomnia
•
Lovesickness
•
Lust
•
Obsession
•
Optimism
•
Romantic, hopeless

1Q84

HARUKI MURAKAMI

T
rue love. Moonlight. Roses. Eternal devotion.
The one
.

Get real, we hear you say.

Some of us reach the end of the road with love. We feel that our capacity to love has been
used up, that our ability to inspire love has faded. That the time for romance in our lives is over.

We have no time for such jaded attitudes. We hereby pledge to pluck you from skepticism and reawaken you to the never-ending ability of love to return, again and again. The novel with which we’ll do it is Haruki Murakami’s epic
1Q84
.

To say that
1Q84
is a complex novel is an understatement. It is remarkably long, and takes place in two different worlds. But it is deeply, fundamentally romantic. The kernel of the romance rests in the pasts of the two main characters. When they were both eleven years old, they held hands for one very long moment in their classroom at school. The moment—silent, charged with meaning, quite unexpected for Tengo, planned but inexplicable at the time to Aomame—has continued to haunt them both ever since. Aomame knew that she was leaving, and Tengo had always been kind to her. She imprinted her essence on the palm of his hand, and his soul was altered forever.