The Novel Cure

Berthoud, Susan Elderkin, Indrajit Hazra

• Publisher: Roli Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9789351940173
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Whether you have a stubbed toe or a stubborn case of the blues, within these pages you'll find a cure in the form of a novel – or a combination of novels – to help ease your pain. You'll also find advice on how to tackle common reading ailments – such as what to do when you feel overwhelmed by the number of books in the world, or if you have a tendency to give up halfway through. When read at the right moment in your life, a novel can – quite literally – change it, and The Novel Cure is a reminder of that power. Written with authority, passion and wit, here is a fresh approach to finding new books to read, and an enchanting way to revisit the books on your shelves.

A–Z OF AILMENTS

‘One sheds one’s sicknesses in books — repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.’

DH Lawrence (The Letters of DH Lawrence)

A

abandonment

Plainsong

KENT HARUF

If inflicted early, the effects of physical or emotional abandonment – whether you were left by too-busy parents to bring yourself up, told to take your tears and tantrums elsewhere, or off-loaded onto another set of parents completely (see: adoption) – can be hard to shrug. If you’re not careful, you might spend the rest of your life expecting to be let down. As a first step to recovery, it is often helpful to realise that those who abandoned you were most likely abandoned themselves. And rather than wishing they’d buck up and give you the support or attention you yearn for, put your energy into finding someone else to lean on, who’s better equipped for the job.

Abandonment is rife in Plainsong, Kent Haruf’s account of small-town life in Holt, Colorado. Local school teacher Guthrie has been abandoned by his depressed wife Ella, who feigns sleep when he tries to talk to her and looks at the door with ‘outsized eyes’ when he leaves. Their two young sons, Ike and Bobby, are left bewildered by her unexplained absence from their lives. Old Mrs Stearns has been abandoned by her relatives, either through death or neglect. And Victoria, seventeen years old and four months pregnant, is abandoned first by her boyfriend and then by her mother who, in a back-handed punishment to the man who’d abandoned them both many years before, tells her ‘You got yourself into this, you can just get out of it,’ and kicks her out of the house.

Gradually, and seemingly organically – though in fact Maggie Jones, a young woman with a gift for communication, orchestrates most of it – other people step into the breach, most astonishingly the McPheron brothers, a pair of ‘crotchety and ignorant’ cattle-farming bachelors who agree to take the pregnant Victoria in: ‘They looked at her, regarding her as if she might be dangerous. Then they peered into the palms of their thick callused hands spread out before them on the kitchen table and lastly they looked out the window toward the leafless and stunted elm trees.’ The next thing we know they are running around shopping for cribs – and the rush of love for the pair felt by both Victoria and the reader transforms them overnight. As we watch the community quicken to its role as extended family – frail Mrs Stearns teaching Ike and Bobby to make cookies, the McPherons watching over Victoria with all the tender, clumsy tenacity which they normally reserve for their cows – we see how support can come from very surprising places.

If you have been abandoned, don’t be afraid to reach out to the wider community around you – however little you know its inhabitants as individuals (and if you need help turning your neighbours into friends, see our cure for: neighbours, having). They’ll thank you for it one day.

accused, being

True History of the
Kelly Gang

PETER CAREY

If you’re accused of something and you know you’re guilty, accept your punishment with good grace. If you’re accused and you didn’t do it, fight to clear your name. And if you’re accused, and you know you did it, but you don’t think what you did was wrong, what then?

Australia’s Robin Hood, Ned Kelly – as portrayed by Peter Carey in True History of the Kelly Gang – commits his first crime at ten years old, when he kills a neighbour’s heifer so his family can eat. The next thing he knows, he’s been apprenticed (by his own mother) to the bushranger, Harry Power. When Harry robs the Buckland Coach, Ned is the ‘nameless person’ reported as having blocked the road with a tree and held the horses so ‘Harry could go about his trade.’ And thus Ned’s fate is sealed: he’s an outlaw for ever. He makes something glorious of it.

In his telling of the story – which he has written down in his own words for his baby daughter to read one day, knowing he won’t be around to tell her himself – Ned seduces us completely with his rough-hewn, punctuation-free prose that bounds and dives over the page. But what really warms us to this Robin Hood of a boy/man is his strong sense of right and wrong – because Ned is guided at all times by a fierce loyalty and a set of principles that happen not to coincide with those of the law. When his ma needs gold, he brings her gold; when both his ma and his sister are deserted by their faithless men, he’ll ‘break the 6th Commandment’ for their sakes. And even though Harry and his own uncles use him ‘poorly’, he never betrays them. How can we not love this murdering bushranger with his big heart? It is the world that’s corrupt, not him; and so we cheer and whoop from the side-lines as pistols flash and his Enfield answers.

And so the novel makes outlaws of its readers. Ned Kelly is a valuable reminder that just because someone has fallen foul of society’s laws it does not necessarily mean that they are bad. It’s up to each one of us to decide for ourselves what’s right and wrong in life. Draw up your personal constitution – then live by it. If you step out of line, be the first to give yourself a reprimand. Then see: guilt.

addiction to alcohol

SEE: alcoholism

addiction to coffee

SEE: coffee, can’t find a decent cup of

addiction to drugs

SEE: drugs, doing too many

addiction to gambling

SEE: gambling

addiction to the internet

SEE: internet addiction

addiction to sex

SEE: sex, too much

addiction to shopping

SEE: shopaholism

addiction to tobacco

SEE: smoking, giving up

adolescence

The Catcher in the
Rye
JD SALINGER

Who Will Run
the Frog Hospital?
LORRIE MOORE

In Youth is Pleasure
DENTON WELCH

Day Scholar
SIDDHARTH
CHOWDHURY

Hormones rage. Hair sprouts where previously all was smooth. Adam’s apples bulge and voices crack. Acne erupts. Bosoms bloom. And heart – and loins – catch fire with the slightest provocation.

First, stop thinking you’re the only one it’s happened to. Whatever you’re going through, Holden Caulfield got there first. If you think that everything’s ‘lousy’; if you can’t be bothered to talk about it; if your parents would have ‘two hemorrhages apiece’ if they knew what you were doing right now; if you’ve ever been expelled from school; if you think all adults are phonies; if you drink/smoke/try to pick up people much older than you; if your so-called friends are always walking out on you; if your teachers tell you you’re letting yourself down; if you protect yourself from the world with your swagger, your bad language, your seeming indifference to what happens to you next; if the only person who understands you is your ten-year-old sister, Phoebe – if one or more of those things is true for you, The Catcher in the Rye will carry you through.

Adolescence can’t be cured, but there are ways to make the most of it. Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is full of the usual horrors – the narrator, Berie, is a late developer who hides her embarrassment by mocking her ‘fried eggs’ and ‘tin cans run over by a car’; and she and her best friend Sils roll about laughing when they remember how Sils once tried to shave off her pimples with a razor. In fact, laughing is something they do a lot of together – and they do it ‘violently, convulsively’, with no sound coming out. They also sing songs together – anything from Christmas carols to TV theme tunes and Dionne Warwick. And we applaud that they do. Because if you don’t sing loudly and badly with your friends when you’re fourteen and fifteen, letting the music prepare your heart for ‘something drenching and big’ to come, when do you get to do it?

A teenage boy who makes no friends at all yet lives with incredible intensity is Orvil Pym in Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure. This beautifully observed novel published in 1945 takes place against the backdrop of an English country hotel over the course of one languid summer where Orvil, caught in a state of pubescent confusion, holidays with his father and brothers. Aloof and apart, he observes the flaws in those around him through a pitiless lens. He explores the countryside, guiltily tasting the communion wine in a deserted church, then falling off his bike and crying in despair for ‘all the tortures and atrocities in the world’. He borrows a boat and rows down a river, glimpsing two boys whose bodies ‘glinted like silk’ in the evening light. New worlds beckon, just beyond his reach, as he hovers on the edge of revelation – and for a while he considers pretending to be mad, to avoid the horrors awaiting him back at school. Gradually, he realises that he cannot leap the next ten years – that he just has to survive this bewildering stage, and behave in ‘the ordinary way’, smiling and protecting his brothers’ pecking order by hiding his wilder impulses.

Siddharth Chowdhury’s Day Scholar, which gives us a ring-side view of Delhi University in the early 1990s, is yet another antidote to adolescence. The landscape in which the young narrator, Hriday Thakur, finds himself is drenched with testosterone and aggression. Its rules are laid down along caste, class and regional lines. Towering, fearful characters such as Zorowar Singh Shokeen control the goings-on, especially amongst a small army of adolescent proto-adults whose notions of adulthood – and sex – are not only exaggerated but warped. Negotiating this terrain, not to mention his own artistic and hormonal urges – Thakur, along with his friend Pranjal Sinha, travels through adolescence between the rock of small-town childhood and the hard place of an approaching adulthood. Apart from capturing a slice of Nineties Delhi as well as the transposition of a bunch from ‘aspirational’ Bihar to the big city of Delhi, Chowdhury’s tale of growing up among characters who method-act their way through adolescence is funny, disturbing, and revealing. Reading Day Scholar won’t make the teenage reader jump straight to his mid-twenties, but it will provide him the tranquilizing comfort that he’s not a total freak among freaks, and that this too shall pass.

Adolescence doesn’t have to be hell. Remember that your peers are struggling to cross the chasm too and, if you can, share the struggles together. Friends or no friends, be sure to do the silly, crazy things that only adolescents do. If you don’t get the chance while you’re at school, then take a gap year while you’re still in your teens (being sure to take the right books when you do). Then, when you’re older, at least you’ll be able to look back at these heady, high, hormonal times, and laugh.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Book
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• The Novel Curve
• Contents
• Introduction
• A–Z of Ailments
• Epilogue
• Index of Reading Ailments
• Index of Lists
• Index of Novels and Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Back Page