The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (74 page)

I
t was probably Hemingway who invented the romance of the battered news hack, trapped in an endless cycle of deadlines, living from paycheck to paycheck, and squandering his meager earnings on drink as he valiantly avoids such moss as a family, a house, or a dental plan. But the experience isn’t so romantic when you’re the hack in the trap.

If you’re stuck in a rut, professionally or personally, snap yourself out of it by reading Tom Rachman’s bleakly funny and original novel
The Imperfectionists
, a collection of linked portraits of a dozen sad-eyed newshounds across the globe, all of them working, or sort of working, at the foreign offices of an international newspaper. Rachman’s hacks should have jumped ship long ago and carved out independent careers, but, naturally, being stuck in a rut, they didn’t.

Lloyd Burko, the paper’s Paris correspondent, complains to his grown son, “I must have done, what, an article a day since I was twenty-two. And now I can’t rustle up a single new idea. Not a one.” Arthur Gopal, an obituary writer based in Rome, leads a life (if you can call it that) of lusterless tedium. When he interviews a curmudgeonly Austrian feminist scientist to get a jump start on her obit, she exclaims, “You’re a bit of a dud,” and he readily agrees. Gopal is going nowhere, and doesn’t mind. He actually prefers to stay
late at work, however little he accomplishes, cherishing his nearness to the supply closet and his even greater proximity to the watercooler—a “consolation” for his marooned state. Long before you’ve reached the travails of Winston Cheung, the paper’s barely competent, barely employed Cairo stringer, you will find yourself resolving to avoid their fate, unstick yourself, and get a move on.

What you’ll need, then, is to pull out the beguilingly daft
The Towers of Trebizond
by Rose Macaulay, which is spirited and loopy enough to wake the most paralyzed hack from a torpor. “Take my camel, dear,” it begins—an invitation from the eccentric, aristocratic Aunt Dot to her niece Laurie, whom her aunt has brought to show her that “travel is the chief end of life.” When Aunt Dot disappears into Russia with an opinionated old reverend halfway through their trip, bequeathing the camel to Laurie, the novel turns from semifarcical travelogue to soul-searching soliloquy. For Laurie, a proper young woman, has been having an affair with a married man, a relationship she cannot reconcile with her Anglican faith. She opens her heart to us and, with the camel as a catalyst, soon becomes as eccentric as her aunt, indulging her passion for fly-fishing at every opportunity and acquiring an ape that she teaches to play her at chess.

Let Laurie and Aunt Dot and their infectious whimsy inspire you to live life as a true eccentric. You will never find yourself anywhere near a rut again.

See also:
Career, being in the wrong
•
Change, resistance to
•
Jam, being in a
•
Mr./Mrs. Wrong, ending up with

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

MICHAEL CHABON

•   •   •

This Book Will Save Your Life

A. M. HOMES

W
ait—don’t tell us. You imagine the red and blue Lycra. You wonder which superpower you’d choose. Just a bit of you still believes in Superman’s gravity-defying flying prowess, the Hulk’s incredible strength, and Wonder Woman’s powers of telepathy. You don’t completely write off the possibility that you might one day own something similar, if not identical, to Batman’s Batmobile. And occasionally, as you go about your daily life, you imagine, in little bubbles over your head, the words
Woosh!
Bam!
Kaboom!
Pzzow!

Well, that’s okay. Some children grow out of it; you didn’t.

You’ll have already read and adored
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
, Michael Chabon’s epic tale of comic book makers Josef Kavalier and Sammy Clay. Riding the wave of the golden age of comic books, the duo create a series of superheroes, beginning, just before World War II, with the Escapist, who “comes to the rescue of those who toil in the chains of tyranny and injustice.” While fighting the war against Hitler with pen and ink, Joe and Sammy do not, however, become superheroes themselves. If you are looking for a how-to literary mentor, we know someone who does.

Richard Novak, in A. M. Homes’s
This Book Will Save Your Life
, is left emotionally numb after a divorce causes him to leave his young son, Ben, behind in New York. His new life, in Los Angeles, is filled with modern-day artificiality and alienation: he lives in a glass box house on a canyon wall, splendidly sealed from the world with a noise-canceling headset, and he interacts only with his housekeeper, his nutritionist, his masseur, and his personal trainer. One day, he starts to
feel
again—beginning with an overwhelming and undiagnosable physical pain—and gradually new people start coming into his life. The next thing he knows, he’s breaking his rules—drinking coffee (“Real coffee?” asks his nutritionist, aghast. “With regular milk?”), snacking on doughnuts, bursting into tears, taking naps. And he wants to “be more, do more . . . to be heroic, larger than life—rescue people from burning buildings, leap over rooftops.” Be a superhero, in other words.

Richard’s various heroic acts—including our favorite highway car chase in literature—will have you aglow with superhero awe. It takes his quack doctor, Lusardi, to point out that maybe all this saving of other people is
really about saving himself. When Ben, now seventeen, finally pitches up on his doorstep, Richard is ready to try to rescue the most important relationship of all.

You can’t become a superhero if you haven’t suffered first. If, like Richard, you are motivated by correcting past wrongs and improving the lives of others, you can be a superhero too.

The Snow Child

EOWYN IVEY

S
weating can be an indication of many pleasurable activities. But there are limits. When dark circles appear beneath your armpits and you begin to exude an odor that even you can detect, you’ve crossed that fatal threshold from healthy glow to full glandular meltdown. Pick up this snowflake of a novel and let it caress you with cold like a winter sprite.

Mabel is so lonely and full of despair at her childless state that she deliberately walks out onto the unreliable surface of the freshly frozen Wolverine River (see: Children, not having). The ice makes a “deep, resonant crack like a massive champagne bottle being uncorked,” but—unexpectedly—it holds and she crosses safely, returning to her cabin with a renewed sense of hope. Soon afterward, in the first flurry of new snow, she and Jack make a snow child together, its face whittled by Jack’s penknife. But by the next morning it has disappeared—along with the hat and gloves they gave it. Footprints run from, but not to, the site of the sculpted snow child. As this magical child weaves in and out of their lives—leaving them when it’s warm, and returning in a flurry of ice crystals when it’s cold—Mabel worries about her “Faina” disappearing.

When your body heat rockets, return to a mental image of this wild and icy spirit, in whose hand snowflakes do not melt. Let her pervasive cold inhabit your body. Lose yourself in the enchantment of the Alaskan forest. Chase moose, catch snowflakes with Jack and Faina, and sketch with Mabel. By the end, you’ll be so chilly that sweating will be a distant memory.

The Line of Beauty

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

L
iterature suggests it’s never too late to learn good taste. Many a philistine within white borders has learned to dress in the fashions of the day, and to affect good taste even if they don’t possess it. Yet it’s interesting to note that an aesthetic sensibility doesn’t align with worldly success very often in literature.

Alan Hollinghurst’s
The Line of Beauty
is no exception. Nick Guest is a bachelor aesthete who has a taste for high living, but lacks the means to achieve it. He becomes a lodger in the home of the MP, Gerald Fedden, the father of his best friend from university. Their Victorian mansion is full of beautiful and desirable objets d’art, but, as Hollinghurst delights in making clear, they consume art as a symbol of their wealth and power rather than possessing innate good taste. While looking for ways to survive in this world of people richer than he can ever hope to be, Nick gravitates toward the status—and physical beauty—of Wani Ouradi, a young millionaire he meets at one of the Feddens’ parties.

Soon he and Wani, the son of a Lebanese supermarket mogul, have a plan to start an arty magazine. It will be named
Ogee
, after the S-shaped curve found to be present in many artistic standards of beauty, such as Islamic and Gothic architecture and Germanic clocks. (William Hogarth called it “the line of beauty”—hence the novel’s title.) For Nick, this line is most sensually
expressed in the curve of a young man’s back, at the point where it cleaves to his buttocks.

Things start going wrong when various of the characters’ sexual proclivities are exposed, with cataclysmic repercussions for Gerald Fedden. And though Nick plays a part in Fedden’s fall, his genuine aesthetic sensibility ultimately redeems him.

As you read this novel, listening attentively to Nick as he waxes lyrical on music and art, your own sensibilities will open like a daisy in the sun. You might find yourself noticing that sinuous curve of beauty—in art, music, and perhaps the small of your lover’s back.

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry

B. S. JOHNSON

T
he April deadline is looming. Once again, you’ve left it to the last minute. You stare at your filing cabinet in horror, then back away from it as if from a rabid dog.

Sufferers from fear of doing taxes must forge an entirely new relationship with their finances—one that is nonthreatening and even friendly. This can be achieved by reading the shocking, toxic accounts kept by the simple, disaffected young man in
Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry
, by avant-garde author B. S. Johnson. Besieged by a sense that life is unfair, Christie Malry hits on the “Great Idea” of keeping track of the ways in which he has been slighted by others. According to the rules of double-entry bookkeeping as codified by the Tuscan monk Luca Pacioli in the fifteenth century—thus laying the foundations for modern capitalism—every debit must be balanced with a corresponding credit. And so Christie balances his accounts by taking revenge on the world—acts that start small (scratching an unsightly line down the side of an office block, for example) but quickly spiral out of control.

Christie takes pleasure in keeping his accounts in tidy order, and you should extract all you can out of this brief, bitter novel. By the time he enacts his most far-reaching act of vengeance, you’ll see that the keeping of emotional accounts is the only real beast in the filing cabinet. Your own finances
pale in comparison—they’re just a harmless set of figures that won’t bite when you open the drawer.

See also:
Procrastination

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

DOUGLAS ADAMS

W
e all know—or, to be more precise, those of us who are British know—the need for a good cup of tea. It traditionally hits at four o’clock, when our energy slumps. Luckily, it’s usually fairly easy to make a cup. But what do we do when there’s no kettle, boiling water, tea bags, or milk at hand?

Pick up a copy of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. Because your need cannot be greater than Arthur Dent’s after one particularly trying Thursday. The day begins with Arthur prostrating himself before a bulldozer that’s intent on demolishing his house. His protest is interrupted by his friend Ford Prefect—an alien from a planet somewhere near Betelgeuse—who insists he come to the pub to down three pints to anesthetize him against the imminent destruction of planet Earth. Duly anesthetized, they “hitchhike” onto a passing Vogon spaceship, in which they’re tortured with poetry, before escaping to another ship. As Arthur, still in his robe, is blearily watching a binary sunrise over the legendary planet Magrathea and wondering what on earth—except there isn’t one—is going on, that need for a good cup of tea hits.

The only source of hot drinks on the ship is a Nutri-Matic drinks synthesizer, a machine so sophisticated it claims to be able to produce a drink tailored precisely to your tastes and metabolic needs. But when Arthur requests a cup of tea, it produces a plastic cup filled with liquid that is “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.” Arthur throws away six cups of the stuff before finally, desperately, telling the machine everything he knows about tea—from the history of the East India Company to silver teapots and the importance of putting the milk in first. Only after the ship is all but destroyed do they find a small tray on the delivery plate of the Nutri-Matic,
with three bone china cups and saucers, a silver teapot, and a jug of milk. It’s the best cup of tea that Arthur has ever tasted.

All of which will help you bide the time between when the urge for tea hits and the moment you’re reunited with kettle and teapot. Even if you’ve had to wait, at least you can sip your tea in the luxurious knowledge that the Earth, along with the contents of your kitchen and (come to think of it) you, haven’t been demolished. Yet.

See also:
Adolescence

Farewell, My Lovely

RAYMOND CHANDLER

See:
Cry, in need of a good
•
PMS
•
Tired and emotional, being