The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (79 page)

The Transit of Venus

SHIRLEY HAZZARD

I
t is deeply painful to watch someone you love throw his or her life away on someone unworthy. We grieve for the loss of potential, for the self-inflicted pain, for the inevitable suffering. And yet it’s an error that’s all too human, and many of us make it ourselves.

Victims of this sorry predicament—and you’ll know who you are—need to fall in love with the grave, raven-haired beauty of Shirley Hazzard’s
The Transit of Venus
. Caroline Bell suffers in the inferior embrace of Paul Ivory. Caro, as we come to know her, is one of two orphaned Australian sisters who have emigrated to London in the 1950s to take up new lives—Grace into a conservative marriage and kids, Caro into a government job and independence. Caro is loved—devotedly, hopelessly—by Ted Tice, an academic of modest means. But it is the tall, graceful, upper-class Paul to whom she succumbs. Paul is a dashing young playwright tipped for great things, whose easy manner and pleasure in his own good health and good looks makes him bound to outshine his red-haired rival.

When they meet, Paul is engaged, and soon marries Tertia, heiress to a castle. But he is drawn to Caro’s “somber glow,” and their mutual attraction is overpowering. We know from the start that he is not good enough for her—he’s dazzled by his own success, and his shallowness evidenced by his marriage to the empty-eyed Tertia. Paul and Caro both know she can see through him, and that her love is mixed with contempt. Clearly, nothing can come of their affair. But Caro cannot seem to resist.

Hazzard’s dense, extraordinary prose drives home the anguish we feel for
Caro’s wasted years. You will find yourself forced to submit, as the author masterfully dissects emotions with surgical precision, elevating you to new levels of understanding about your own self-deception. Ache for Caro as you read, but as soon as you’ve turned the last page, ache for yourself. Then cut your losses and get out before it’s too late.

See also:
Love, doomed
•
Mr./Mrs. Right, holding out for
•
Mr./Mrs. Wrong, ending up with

See:
Broke, being
•
Children, under pressure to have
•
Jealousy
•
Shelf, fear of being left on the
•
Wardrobe crisis

The Same Sea

AMOS OZ

•   •   •

The Widow’s Tale

MICK JACKSON

•   •   •

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

HELEN SIMONSON

D
o not underestimate the enormity of what you are going through. Losing one’s life partner will set in motion a series of seismic shifts in every sphere of your life. Before, you had a companion; now you live alone. Before, you were, perhaps, one half of a set of parents; now you are
parenting alone. Your relationship to your child or children will undergo changes. As will the relationships with your friends. And you will also have to build a new relationship to yourself. Because without that other person to prop you up, fill you out, add whatever it was they added to your sense of self, you will sometimes wonder who you are.

To help you navigate these sad and difficult times, we offer you Israeli author Amos Oz’s transcendentally beautiful prose poem
The Same Sea
. Written in short, gentle vignettes, it tells the story of Albert Danon, a “mild” accountant whose wife, Nadia, has died of cancer. Their only son, Rico, has gone off to Tibet, thinking the world needs some sorting out, leaving his girlfriend, Dita, to look in on his dad. Albert does not have an entirely platonic reaction to pretty, bold Dita in her short orange skirt, and when she suddenly finds herself homeless he invites her to move into his spare room. Meanwhile, Albert’s friend Bettine—herself widowed for twenty years—keeps a watchful eye on the pair, not without a vested interest for herself.

In times of grief and loneliness, we must take life moment by moment. And this is how Oz proceeds, capturing with wondrous clarity the time-suspended moment between Albert’s turning off the computer and his going to bed; or the moment when Nadia, woken in the night by a blackbird, wonders who she will be when she dies; or the moment when Bettine lays her cards on the table. Oz gives equal attention to the banal and the beautiful, the touching and the lustful, side by side. For sensitive, understanding company that allows you access to the vast and complicated terrains of emotion inside your heart,
The Same Sea
can’t be beat.

The Widow’s Tale
by Mick Jackson offers an opportunity to reflect on this remaking of the self by examining the past, this time from a widow’s point of view. The widow herself remains unnamed, but through diaries and interior monologue we know her every thought. Wry, humorous, and mildly aggrieved, she is angry at the way her husband died and directs her anger, uselessly, at him. Her way of dealing with it is to flee to the Norfolk coast, where she rents a cottage and, under the pretense of being a bird-watcher, begins spying obsessively on the house of a former love, fantasizing about the life she could have had with this other man.

Her behavior may seem bizarre, but her stint as a stalker turns out to be cathartic. In her attempt to reawaken a largely fictitious affair, it makes her realize the good things she had in her marriage and purges her of the negative emotions that were threatening to swamp her memories. Let this novel encourage you to examine both the good and the bad in your years of marriage, accepting and forgiving the past and leaving you with an honest, open heart.

New beginnings are always possible, however jaded we might feel. In Helen Simonson’s
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
, Major Pettigrew—a retired military man in the stiff-upper-lip mold—is about as rigid in his habits as a man can get. But when, after losing his wife, he also loses his brother, the sixty-eight-year-old major is so tripped up by grief that he begins to see the familiar in a different light—including the kindly Mrs. Ali, the woman who runs the village shop. On the surface the two could not be more different, but they’re drawn together by their mutual widowhood, clashes with their similarly small-minded families, and a shared love of books, particularly Kipling. Anyone reading the book that you’re holding in your hands will appreciate this as a basis for a new relationship—and it may encourage you to leave the door open, just a crack.

See also:
Death of a loved one
•
Loneliness
•
Sadness
•
Yearning, general

Lolita

VLADIMIR NABOKOV