The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (32 page)

Now, more than twenty years later, we follow Tengo and Aomame as they lead their separate, solitary lives. Neither has developed a grown-up relationship. Tengo now teaches at a math “cram school” and is writing a novel; Aomame lives a disciplined life teaching self-defense while moonlighting as a kind of hit woman. But then they both become embroiled with a religious cult, Sakigake, which soon has them on the run, separately, becoming slowly aware of each other’s continued relevance to their lives.

One of the novel’s preoccupations is the idea of becoming irretrievably lost—whether it’s morally, or between two parallel worlds, or simply lost to love. While Tengo visits his dying father in a home, he reads him a story about the “Town of Cats,” a place where people can find themselves beyond the reaches of love. Tengo thinks about the Town of Cats, this place of ultimate lovelessness, a lot. And when, in contrast, things start happening that reach beyond realism—an inexplicable pregnancy, two people finding each other against all odds, love coming to those who gave up on it long ago—it seems that love has proved itself to be the strongest force. Take this epic journey with Tengo. Fall with him back in love with love.
*

See also:
Disenchantment
•
Hope, loss of
•
Mr./Mrs. Wrong, ending up with

See:
Alcoholism
•
DIY
•
Drugs, doing too many
•
Hospital, being in the

See:
Friend, falling out with your best

A Suitable Boy

VIKRAM SETH

W
hen we are with our families we have the best of times and the worst of times, if we may misquote Dickens. Certainly it’s within the family unit that we seem to have our biggest conflicts—be they out in the open or swept under the carpet. Whoever it is that gets your goat the most—your tyrannical toddler, your squabbling siblings, your pressuring parents, your critical in-laws, your adolescent outlaws, your crepuscular cat, or that one particular member of the family who consistently fails to do his or her share of the dishes—we offer you Vikram Seth’s
A Suitable Boy
, a hefty tome that explores the jockeying for power that goes on in families.

It tells a familiar story: Mrs. Rupa Mehra wants to choose the man that her youngest daughter, Lata, will marry, but Lata has other ideas. “I do know what is best,” Mrs. Mehra tells Lata, and “I am doing it all for you.” We don’t need to be Indian to have heard these words before. For nearly fifteen hundred pages, Lata ricochets between Haresh, the “suitable boy” of her mother’s choosing, “solid as a pair of Goodyear Welted shoes”; Kabir, the fellow amateur actor she falls in love with; and Amit, the friendly dilettante poet pushed forward by his sisters.

Lata is surrounded by people seeking to influence her. But whose life is she living anyway? She knows that ultimately she must make the choice herself—not as an act of rebellion or to win approval, but freely. The length of the novel testifies to the difficulty of her task.

The choice Lata makes shows that although we may fight our families for the freedom to be ourselves, we are also part and parcel of them—steeped in their culture, traditions, and values. We may turn our backs on them, but
they have made us what we are. Battle it out with your family, but know that ultimately you are battling it out with yourself.

See also:
Aging parents
•
Christmas
•
Mother-in-law, having a
•
Sibling rivalry

I Am Legend

RICHARD MATHESON

F
ar away from your family, physically or emotionally, you feel conflicting emotions. On the one hand relieved and freed, on the other lonely and bereft. Whether your distance is self-imposed or involuntary, keep this novel in your backpack to remind you that you can cope on your own—as long as you’re not the last man on Earth.

Matheson’s genre-creating vampire novel begins with an unforgettable scene. Robert Neville sits in his barricaded house, drinking beer and listening to a symphony called
The Year of the Plague
on his record player. This is, partly, to drown out the eerie calls of “Neville! Neville!” coming from outside his house.

We soon realize that his wife and daughter have both been lost to vampirism. Neville goes outside during the daylight hours only, grimly attempting to kill his predators as they sleep in their daytime comas. Not that this is a gore fest—we see little of the vampires and their unpleasant deaths at Neville’s hands. Instead, it’s Neville’s solitude that comes to the fore, his efforts to understand the new world order, and his increasingly desperate attempts to find an ally. His sincere endeavor to befriend a dog apparently unaffected by the virus is one of the most tragic moments in the story. A likable chap to whom driving stakes through hearts has become routine, his metamorphosis into a creature of nightmare goes completely unnoticed by the reader—and therein lies the genius of the novel.

Neville’s resilience is impressive. Staying alive in this vampire-infested world depends on keeping the generator going and foraging for tinned goods from ghostly supermarkets. Keeping his spirits up by listening to Schoenberg and attempting to find a cure for the disease that wants to claim him, he does his best to live in the moment and cling to glimmers of hope for a different future.

If living far from your family leaves you feeling lost and alone, this book will give you solace: at least you’re not forced to go around killing off vampires on a daily basis or strewing garlic necklaces and mirrors around your house to keep them out. Instead you’ll be so gripped by this story that you’ll forget your isolation—or discover that yours isn’t nearly as bad. And if you become
too
comfortable without your family, the final revelation will sort you out.

See also:
Empty-nest syndrome
•
Loneliness

The Road

CORMAC MCCARTHY

•   •   •

I’m the King of the Castle

SUSAN HILL

A
t its best, being a dad is a chance to be a kid all over again—while precipitating you into a new phase of maturity, both as a father and as a partner. It gives you the opportunity to pass on your passions and all that you’ve learned. But it also brings with it enormous responsibilities and can change your relationship with your partner in ways you don’t like. Sometimes, this resentment gets let out on the child. If the mantle of fatherhood does not sit on your shoulders easily, or you wish to strengthen a father-child bond that has perhaps been blemished by this sort of emotional transferal, we offer you the fictional equivalent of a father-son how-to manual: Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing, but astonishing,
The Road
.

Its premise is grimmer than the reality of any of our lives—we hope—will ever be: following a cataclysmic event, the exact nature of which the survivors can only guess at, America—and perhaps the wider world—has been devastated. Ash blocks out the sun. The cities have burned and trees have died. Through this “barren, silent, godless” land, a man and his son—known to us only as “the man” and “the boy,” as befits a world without color and with scant humanity—follow the road south, where they hope to find warmth and increase their chances of survival. Along the way they try to sleep through nights that are long and dark and “cold beyond anything they’d yet encountered,” they scavenge what food they can—from wild mushrooms to occasional cans—and they’re under constant threat from the “bad guys,” filthy, terrifying men who travel in packs wearing masks and
hazard suits, carrying clubs and lengths of pipe, plundering and killing like animals.

It’s as shorn of beauty as a world can get. The boy is frequently so sick with fear that he can’t run when his father commands it. Half starved and yearning for his mother, the possibility of playmates—let alone any of the normal pleasures of childhood—is unknown to him. At one point, the father finds a can of Coca-Cola in a vending machine that’s been opened with a crowbar and tells the boy to drink it all, slowly. “It’s because I won’t ever get to drink another one, isn’t it?” says the boy. And so, through a can of Coca-Cola, we feel the full thud of the loss of a world that will never return.