The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (51 page)

Because of its great length,
Les Misérables
may on the surface seem like a punishment. In fact, it will help the victim to find the patience and stoicism to endure his enforced inactivity—the most pernicious cases of man flu have been known to incapacitate for up to a week. Those responsible for nursing the victim, a round-the-clock job, will find him to be less talkative while taking the cure, thus giving everybody a chance to recover and delve more deeply within themselves to find unending supplies of love and sympathy. In the most effective cases, the cure might even enable the sufferer to forget about his symptoms completely and bring about a return to good humor, vivacity, and pleasure in life—even interest in others—which will seem quite miraculous when it occurs.

If the patient does not finish his medication before recovering, do not panic. Those prone to man flu are likely to experience recurrences of the illness at regular intervals throughout their lives, and an unfinished dose of the medicine is useful to have at hand. Being familiar with the medicine will mean the patient is more likely to be receptive to it and will agree to taking it the instant symptoms appear.

See also:
Cold, common
•
Dying
•
Hypochondria

Prep

CURTIS SITTENFELD

•   •   •

Carry On, Jeeves

P. G. WODEHOUSE

W
hat do good manners mean anymore, in an age in which thank-you notes are sent by e-mail (if at all) and even the most august occasions are interrupted by the flashes of smartphone cameras and the rat-a-tat-tatting of texting guests? Every day it gets harder to figure out which social conventions still matter. But that does not mean we cannot make serious faux pas, or that we do not agonize about the possibility of making them.

In the meticulously well-observed novel
Prep
, by Curtis Sittenfeld, a precocious girl from the Midwest named Lee Fiora gets a scholarship to a
prestigious East Coast boarding school. She arrives on the playing fields of Ault with no clue as to how to behave in her upscale new setting if she wants to avoid looking stupid or giving offense. “There was so much I didn’t know,” Lee reflects. “Most of it had to do with money (what a debutante was, how you pronounced Greenwich, Connecticut) or with sex (that a pearl necklace wasn’t always a piece of jewelry), but sometimes it had to do with more general information about clothing, or food, or geography.” Quickly, she learns to downplay her lack of knowledge and keep a low profile until she has a better sense of the contours of her new social landscape. Lee adopts a strategy that may help you, too, whenever you find yourself in situations in which you’re not quite sure how to act. As she learns, manners don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re determined by where you are, what you’re doing, and what sort of people you find yourself among. When it comes to manners, context is all.

Decoding this context, of course, is the tricky part. If only we all had a Jeeves, the brainy butler of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster tales. Jeeves protects his employer, the rather blithering Bertie Wooster, from one blunder after another. In
Carry On, Jeeves
, Bertie is saved from his own boorish impulses on many an occasion (especially sartorial ones), and reading this book may offer you some advice to combat your own tendency to social clumsiness. More than just antiquated social formalities, good manners save you from your own worst impulses by prompting you to consider the sensitivities of others.

See also:
Selfishness

The Enchanted April

ELIZABETH VON ARNIM

B
eing married? An ailment? If that was your first thought when you happened upon this entry, you probably don’t need to read it. You’ve won life’s biggest lottery and found yourself a mate you can live with effortlessly, peaceably, and productively. Congratulations.

If, on the other hand, you find that marriage sometimes involves a struggle to maintain your sense of self in the face of constant compromise, if your marriage is stuck in a rut, or if the passing of the years has somehow pushed you and your spouse
apart rather than bring you closer, take a burst of luminous inspiration from
The Enchanted April
by Elizabeth von Arnim.

A neglected period piece from the 1920s, the novel tells the story of Mrs. Wilkins and Mrs. Arbuthnot, two married women who have become jaded and faded by their broken relationships. Both happen to spot the same advertisement in
The Times
: “To Those Who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine,” it reads. “Small medieval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain.” It calls to them both, and in a desperate bid for a gasp of happiness, the two women, though strangers, decide to take the castle together. They invite along a couple of feistier examples of their sex, who have relationship issues of their own—the impossibly proper Mrs. Fisher and the ethereally beautiful Lady Caroline, who is so sick of drooling attention from both men and women that she has become liberal with the icy put-downs.

Amid the purity of San Salvatore’s bare white walls and stone floors, the women recover, and slowly begin to rediscover their sensuality and capacity for joy. With the help of juicy oranges, meadows of spring flowers, and the ever helpful gardener, Domenico, alchemical transformations occur. Faces puckered by fear and worry smooth out; hearts and minds that have been closed for years break open like buds in full sun. Love floods back in. “I was a stingy beast at home,” declares Mrs. Wilkins, “and used to measure and count . . . I wouldn’t love Mellersh unless he loved me back, exactly as much, absolute fairness. Did you ever. And as he didn’t, neither did I, and the
aridity
of that house!”

We expect the women to find only themselves in their splendid isolation. But as it turns out, the husbands aren’t forgotten. Marriages are saved and great loves reignited. If your marriage isn’t what you’d hoped for, buy
The Enchanted April
. Then book a villa in Italy and read it on the journey out.

See also:
Children, under pressure to have
•
Jump ship, desire to
•
Orgasms, not enough
•
Querulousness
•
Sex, too little
•
Sex, too much
•
Snoring

See:
Pointlessness

See:
Sadness

Remainder

TOM MCCARTHY

I
n comic television shows and films, amnesia is a condition that can be caused and cured . . . and caused again and cured again . . . by a bump on the head from a coconut. Should you have come by this traumatic condition in a less mirthful manner, you will doubtless be eager to restore your memory loss without recourse to a wind-whipped palm tree. Certainly, the services of a physician or psychiatrist ought to be engaged as a first step in the curative process, but you might also consider the recovery strategy pursued by the unnamed narrator of
Remainder
, Tom McCarthy’s brainteaser of a novel.

McCarthy’s hapless narrator has been wandering around, minding his own business, when he gets—you’ve guessed it—clonked on the head. But not by a coconut. “Technology. Parts, bits. That’s it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know,” he says. The company responsible for the whirling piece of something falling from the sky gives him a huge cash settlement, on the condition that he never discuss or in any way record the incident. Easy enough. As he tells his lawyer, “I never had any memory of it in the first place.” The man’s memory is entirely gone; his own past feels to him like fiction, and the word “you” sounds to him like somebody else. Simple acts like eating and walking seem unnatural. A physical therapist starts his recovery by making him “visualize things”—like raising a carrot to his mouth—to prompt his brain to create new neural pathways. The hope is that, once the brain can picture the activity, it will eventually remember how to make the limbs hop to it and execute it in real life.