The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (59 page)

C
an one ever have enough? One might well ask. It used to be thought that having too many orgasms drained one’s chi and shortened one’s life span, but now experts seem to think that the more you come, the more you’ll keep on coming—in every sense. For some, though, an inability to reach orgasm with ease—or at all—can mar an otherwise happy intimate relationship. Known as anorgasmia, the condition is more common among women than men, and though science is unsure of the cause, repression stemming from a lingering belief that female sexual expression is somehow “wrong”—a holdover from Victorian days—is often mooted. We suggest, therefore, that those afflicted should moderate their literary diet accordingly: no more euphemistic or avoidant Victorians (we name no
names
*
). Instead, loosen yourself up with novelists who tend toward the explicit.

For many of today’s adolescents, it’s vampire novels with their dark, unrealized yearnings that bring newly sexual beings to their first literary climax. Virginia Andrews’s incestuous captives in the
Flowers in the Attic
saga still continue to fascinate, with more explicit sexual encounters offered by the likes of Ellen Hopkins. Adults get their rocks off in literature in so many different ways that we can barely moisten the tip of our finger before feeling the need to insert a long and varied list, both of novels that suggest ways of achieving orgasm and of novels that are so erotically compelling that you may need no more than the text itself, mulled over at your own pleasure. But we’ll limit ourselves to a choice few.

John Cleland’s 1748 novel
Fanny Hill
—generally considered to be the first pornographic novel in English—will surprise you with its young female prostitutes indulging in mutual masturbation, discussion of penis size, and sexual romps that last several days at a time. In the twentieth century,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
led the way—for those who could get their hands on a copy—with a brazen, earthy sensuality and overt references to male and female genitalia that had not laced the pages of literature for a hundred years. Once it became widely available, in the 1960s, the floodgates opened and everybody joined in.
Gravity’s Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon sports an actual orgy on board the
Anubis
—outlandishly erotic, with its nautical setting adding to the hilarity; a public spanking culminates with all those on board climaxing simultaneously. Bloom’s masturbatory fantasies in
Ulysses
may do it for the boys, while for the girls we have Molly’s reminiscences
about how her afternoon of sex with Boylan made her “feel all fire inside.” In
Doing It
by Melvin Burgess, we get the chance to relive the complicated and fraught sexual fumblings of teenagers, while Alina Reyes’s
The Butcher
describes one summer an adolescent girl spends working in a butcher shop and is drawn into an exploration of flesh that is not just about offal. (What is it with butchers and sex scenes? Kate Grenville also could not resist their siren call in
The Idea of Perfection
, which has more sweaty couplings in butcher’s overalls.) The heroine of
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
by Rebecca Miller precociously achieves orgasm in her teens by doing the breaststroke (of the swimming variety), and Nikki Gemmell’s anonymously published
The Bride Stripped Bare
has its heroine taking time out from her recent marriage to explore her inner whore and dominatrix. Pauline Réage’s
The Story of O
unleashes a sadomasochistic fantasy about a sex slave that harks back to the inaugural work of this genre, the late nineteenth-century
Venus in Furs
(for more on which, see: Jealousy)—have whips at the ready for these two. Meanwhile, lesbian and gay literature has been making up for years of repression with fulsome abandon: Alan Hollinghurst’s
The Swimming Pool Library
is a rich source of gay male erotica—happily brandished hard-ons are the order of the day here. Emerging homosexuality is explored in Edmund White’s
A Boy’s Own Story
, a paean to young gay male love, while a more agonized male-on-male take explodes with floral metaphors in
Our Lady of the Flowers
by Jean Genet. Girls can add costume drama to their repertoire with
Fingersmith
by Sarah Waters, queen of lesbian erotica. Sufferers of situational or complete anorgasmia should keep these novels by their bedsides, applying their suggestions alone, or with a friend.

See also:
Dissatisfaction
•
Married, being
•
Seduction skills, lack of
•
Sex, too little

See
:
Sex, too much

Oscar and Lucinda

PETER CAREY

T
he outsider is one who doesn’t belong. He or she is not left out (see: Left out, feeling), because he or she was never in in the first place. And though certainly different (see: Different, being), he or she is also transplanted. Because the outsider has left the world of others behind, roaming the world as the perennial observer, looking in, but always staying just outside. If this describes you, you will cheer at the eventual meeting of outsiders extraordinaire Oscar and Lucinda in Peter Carey’s 1988 Booker Prize winner.

Oscar Hopkins is such an outsider that he doesn’t even know there is an inside. He’s brought up in the tiny Devon village of Hennacombe with his botanist father, who, though loving, is a member of an evangelical sect called the Plymouth Brethren, who interpret the Bible literally, “as if it were a report compiled by a conscientious naturalist.” He begins to sense that they are different when the servant Fanny Drabble makes him a Christmas pudding and his father, being against Christian feasting, calls it “fruit of Satan” and makes him drink salt water until he brings it back up. But he does not question his father’s beliefs or realize how much of an oddity his upbringing has made him until he’s at Oxford and his “ignorance” becomes a talking point.

When fellow student Wardley-Fish—a member of the “fast set”—bangs on Oscar’s door looking for somebody else, he invites Oscar to the races even though Oscar is known as “the Odd Bod.” Oscar joins him and, winning his first bet nine to one, develops a pathological relationship to gambling that threatens constantly to uncollar him later on, once he’s become the Reverend Hopkins. But when, on board a boat to New South Wales, he meets Lucinda Leplastrier, an heiress and owner of a glass factory, it becomes a cause for celebration—for Lucinda is just as much an outsider as Oscar, and happens to share his addiction. Coming to him for confession, she tells him in a voice so tiny “you could fit it in a thimble” of her seemingly unquenchable thirst for a game of dice or poker—or even a cockfight. Oscar can hardly believe his ears. Holy thoughts soon shoved aside, he knows he has met his match.

What Lucinda and Oscar do with their bond is for those of us who’ve read it to know and those of you who haven’t to find out. The healing is there in the scene on board the ship when Lucinda looks into Oscar’s eyes
and sees herself “mirrored” in them. The outsiders have found each other, but as long as they are together, outsiders they are no more.

See also:
Foreign, being
•
Loneliness
•
Shyness

See:
Busy, being too
•
Busy to read, being too
•
Career, being in the wrong
•
Cope, inability to
•
Exhaustion
•
Insomnia
•
Nightmares
•
Stress
•
Tired and emotional, being
•
Workaholism

See:
Adolescence
•
Antisocial, being
•
Cynicism
•
Daddy’s girl, being a Grumpiness
•
Humorlessness
•
Hypochondria
•
Killjoy, being a
•
Lovesickness
•
Man flu
•
Misanthropy
•
Neediness
•
Querulousness
•
Teens, being in your
•
Teetotaler, being a
•
Vegetarianism

The Death of a Beekeeper

LARS GUSTAFSSON

N
o life is free of it. And though modern medicine offers various ways to numb it, and literature can help you to escape it (see our list of Ten Best Escapist Novels, below), it is harder to find suggestions on how to bear it and live with it.

The Death of a Beekeeper
does. Through the experience of Lars Westin, a divorced ex-schoolteacher who lives in the beautiful, remote countryside of Västmanland in Sweden with his dog and his bees, we explore the world of physical pain—its various pitches, frequencies, and decibel counts—and what it is like to endure pain without drugs. Lars’s pain is from cancer. As winter begins to thaw, he discovers that he will likely not live to see the fall, and decides not to go to the hospital in the city but to stay where he is—because this is his life and he wants to live it. And so, taking his dog, he goes on long walks through the gray February landscape with its bare trees and boarded-up summer houses, and learns to live with pain.

At first, he is aware of the pain mostly at night, dreaming of it before it wakes him, and in his dreams he finds he is trying, literally, to turn his head away from it. The pain makes him more aware of his body—that he
is
a body. But he also projects the pain outward. On his walks, the landscape sometimes assumes his pain for him—a tree becomes the tree where his back really hurt; at a fence post where he strikes his hand when passing, he tries to somehow leave it “hanging on the fence” and walk on without it.

But as the pain gets worse, conjuring memories from his marriage and childhood, he enters a stage where the pain is so “absolutely foreign, white hot and totally overpowering,” that he struggles to cope. And this is when he realizes that the art of bearing pain is just that: an art, like music or poetry or eroticism or architecture, except that its “level of difficulty is so high that no one exists who can practice it.” Somehow, though, he does—as others do, every day.

If you are unlucky enough to experience pain at this level, think of yourself as an artist practicing something so demanding, so challenging that you are elevated to a master by the act of your endurance. And let the beekeeper accompany you there. For as he discovers, blaming others for your pain, or even grumbling about it to others, doesn’t help. With the beekeeper, you will discover a terrible but wonderful truth: that pain makes you feel more alive.

W
hen you need to forget the pain in your head, heart, or body, when you’re waiting for a bus that never comes, when you want to press “eject” on the daily grind, decamp with one of these.

Corelli’s Mandolin
LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

Jamrach’s Menagerie
CAROL BIRCH

The Savage Detectives
ROBERTO BOLAÑO

A Passage to India
E. M. FORSTER

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
TOM ROBBINS

Mating
NORMAN RUSH

A Town Like Alice
NEVIL SHUTE

The Map of Love
AHDAF SOUEIF

Dreams of Leaving
RUPERT THOMSON

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
DAVID WROBLEWSKI

Shane

JACK SCHAEFER

T
here is only one thing more frightening than thinking you might be about to have a panic attack, and that is having the panic attack. Knowing this makes the possibility of having the panic attack even more likely. Those caught up in this chicken-and-egg situation need to keep a flask of literary tranquillity at hand and take a long, slow draft—either by reading or quietly reciting passages committed to memory—whenever you feel a panic attack coming on. Practice it often, and in time just the title alone will have your heart rate abating. The novel for the job is
Shane
.

Shane rides into the valley dressed in black. When he politely asks for water for himself and his horse, all three members of the Starrett family are drawn to him—he exudes something powerful and mysterious. They persuade him to stay with them, offering him work as a temporary farmhand, even though it is clear that farming is not his trade. It becomes rapidly apparent that Shane is the essence of calm. A man of few words, he has a strong sense of justice, and although his strength and power could easily overwhelm another man, he clearly holds no truck with aggression. He keeps his gun under his pillow rather than, as other men do, on his belt.

The first thing Shane does when he goes to live with the Starrett family is to take an ax to the ironwood stump in the yard that has been niggling at Joe Starrett ever since he first cleared the land. The stump is big—big enough to feed dinner on to a family twice their size—but, as Shane cuts it, the clear ringing sound of steel on wood strikes young Bob as no sound ever has before, filling him with warmth. At that moment Shane becomes the hero that Bob needs in order to grow up “straight inside, as a boy should.” For Bob needs an example from outside his family unit—someone he can emulate. Determined, graceful, just, with sorrows we know nothing of, and a man will always do the right thing, Shane is that mentor—and not just for Bob, but also for his father, Joe.

Install this fierce, hard gem of a man in your heart. Your blood will pump as steadily and calmly as that clear ringing ax on the obstinate stump. Let panic be the tree stump you know you can conquer.

See also:
Anxiety

The Crying of Lot 49

THOMAS PYNCHON

T
his novel is all about you. You’ll find your name in it. Try page forty-nine.
*

See:
Children requiring attention, too many
•
Fatherhood
•
Motherhood
•
Mother-in-law, being a
•
Single parent, being a
•
Trapped by children

See:
Aging parents

See:
Anally retentive, being
•
Control freak, being a
•
Organized, being too
•
Reverence of books, excessive
•
Risks, not taking enough

Robinson Crusoe

DANIEL DEFOE