The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (72 page)

See also:
Anxiety
•
Cold turkey, going
•
Grumpiness
•
Hunger
•
Irritability

S
leeping with someone who snores can be a nightly torment. To save your sanity and your relationship—if not your partner’s life—invest in a set of headphones and keep a stack of soothing audiobooks by the bed. Mellifluously read, tranquil in tone, these books are guaranteed to drown out your partner’s snores while not interfering with your sleep. Play all night if need be, drifting in and out.

See also:
Divorce
•
Insomnia
•
Noise, too much

Sense and Sensibility
JANE AUSTEN

A Little Princess
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

Essays in Love
ALAIN DE BOTTON

Our Mutual Friend
CHARLES DICKENS

The French Lieutenant’s Woman
JOHN FOWLES

The World According to Garp
JOHN IRVING

The Wings of the Dove
HENRY JAMES

Ulysses
JAMES JOYCE

English Passengers
MATTHEW KNEALE

Anne of Green Gables
LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY

Vanity Fair

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

•   •   •

Rules of Civility

AMOR TOWLES

T
here are two cures for social climbing. One is to fail so spectacularly or repeatedly that you’re left to abandon your pursuit. The other is to succeed, through your superior social wits and graces. If you pull this off, you may soon find others making use of
you
as they scramble up the greasy pole—a fitting punishment, you devious arriviste.

To cure yourself, or simply acquaint yourself, with the manifestations of this guileful but sometimes beneficial failing, turn first to Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
, whose shamelessly self-promoting antiheroine, Becky Sharp, has come to symbolize the affliction at its most virulent. Just as a stubborn idealist is called a “Quixote,” a stubborn social climber is called a “Becky Sharp.”

Miss Sharp, lacking fortune or title but possessed of verve and an arsenal of wiles, springs from Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies with her talons out and at the ready. She pounces first on her best friend Amelia’s brother, Joseph Sedley, who is oafish, vain, and unconfident, but very rich. Joseph is warned off in time, but her next prey, Rawdon Crawley, the son of a baron, is not so lucky. He’s caught and quickly hitched. From then on Becky’s rise is meteoric. She sucks up to the source of the family’s cash, Rawdon’s spinster aunt, makes a profit out of Joseph when he panics over the looming Napoleonic Wars, considers absconding with Amelia’s husband, then claws her way up in Paris and London until she’s cavorting with a marquis—and then a prince—at the top. And for what? You’ll just have to find out for yourself. But we’ll say this much: it may be fun at the top, but there’s not much room, and
plenty of other contenders are eager to knock you off your spot.

Amor Towles’s champagne revel of a novel
Rules of Civility
, set in New York City in 1938, tells the story of two girls with gumption who manage to make their rise seem purely evolutionary. Katey, the clever, literary-minded daughter of Russian immigrants and the “hottest bookworm you’ll ever meet,” deploys her brainpower to land a prestigious publishing job, and quickly is absorbed into the swell set. Her roommate, Eve, a gorgeous, impetuous heiress from the Midwest, catches the eye of the biggest catches, but also rebuffs whomever she wishes, only heightening her allure. Her eye, at any rate, looks to Hollywood. Both women are intrigued by a handsome young man named Tinker Gray, who projects an old-money air, though his money has in truth evaporated.

Towles sets his bright young things amid the nostalgia of ascendant prewar New York. Not only are Towles’s characters all climbing, so is their city—and so is their country. Some rise, some fall, but the expanding and contracting of the era makes it hard, in the end, to tell who’s who.

See also:
Ambition, too much

Black Swan Green

DAVID MITCHELL

D
avid Mitchell’s
Black Swan Green
offers a truly insightful exploration of the trials and tribulations of having a speech impediment. Thirteen-year-old Jason thinks a lot, and intelligently, about his stammer. The “Hangman,” as he calls it, struck him when he was eight—around the time his parents’ marriage began to fall apart. As tensions rise at home and his stammer worsens, the dreaded bullying begins (see: Bullied, being). It starts off mild but crescendos to excruciating heights, and we share Jason’s pain as we watch him cling to his tattered reputation.

And then something magical happens: Jason discovers poetry. With the help of Mrs. de Roo, his speech therapist, and the eccentric Madame Crommelynck, who makes sure his anonymous submissions to the parish magazine appear in print, he begins a new relationship with words, learning to love them and harness them to tell his truth. As Jason’s narrative becomes increasingly studded with lyricism—an impressive sleight of hand by
Mitchell—he begins his metamorphosis from someone filled with envy and shame to someone for whom words are, at last, a beautiful tool.

Jason’s cure may not be your cure, as all speech impediments are different. But watching him reach the point where he can create an “appalled silence” in class by delivering a shocking riposte with metronome-slick timing will bring a glow to your heart. Anyone whose tongue gets in similar tangles must take two things at least from this novel: You, like Jason, will be the more mature for having had this extra battle to fight. And—again like Jason—blunted in one direction, you’ll probably find you flower in another.

See also:
Different, being
•
Self-esteem, low
•
Shyness
•
Words, lost for

See:
Words, lost for

See:
Coward, being a
•
Selfishness

See
:
Adultery
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Divorce
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DIY
•
Midlife crisis
•
Mr./Mrs. Wrong, ending up with
•
Murderous thoughts
•
Snoring

The Blue Flower

PENELOPE FITZGERALD

L
ike the rest of our bodies, brains require regular exercise in order to stay in tip-top shape. If yours has fallen into a stagnant state from lack of use—or from being too much in the company of other stagnant brains—we suggest you shock it back to life with a mental defibrillator in the form of
The Blue Flower
by Penelope Fitzgerald.

The Blue Flower
tells the story of the incandescently brilliant real-life German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg—later
known as Novalis—and his adoration of Sophie von Kühn, a twelve-year-old girl with an unmistakably mediocre brain. Being in the company of the von Hardenbergs is constantly amusing, with Fritz’s eccentric siblings delivering line after line of crisp, dry wit. But the main reason to read
The Blue Flower
is to experience the author’s own brain writ large. It’s partly what she puts in—making observations with devastating clarity, then moving on as lightly as a fly—and partly what she leaves out. She’ll make geographic or spatial leaps between one sentence and the next that would have most novelists passing out in a panic. She’ll give a character a simple tilt of the chin that contains a lifetime’s dignified concealment of a broken heart. So much that’s important remains unsaid, and our minds are kept mightily busy filling in the gaps. By the end your synapses will be thrumming and your mental acuity restored. Reread whenever you need an intellectual tune-up.