Read Online The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You by Ella Berthoud, Susan Elderkin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ella Berthoud, Susan Elderkin
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sidewalks, throwing rocks, drunkenly colliding with trash cans, leering and lurching to show the newcomers they’re not welcome. You might think that fear for their own safety would keep the Bentwoods at a pitch of alertness that would stave off ennui. Apparently not.
As the novel begins, Otto has fallen out with his longtime law partner, Charlie Russel, whom he considers hypocritically sentimental and has come to hate. Otto dislikes people who display “unseemly emotions,” he dislikes the lurking bums on his Brooklyn block, and he doesn’t like gentrifiers such as himself any better. As he tells his wife as they leave a neighborhoodgathering, “I’m tired of parties. I get so bored.” More interesting to them both is whether the stray cat that bit Sophie is rabid. Sophie delays going to the hospital, and their anxiety about her possible rabies gradually brings them to a greater appreciation of their previous comfort. As they flee the city for a restorative visit to their country place, Sophie is on the verge of needling Otto when she catches herself and thinks, “Why interrupt the pleasant boredom of the drive?”
Desperate Characters
is a useful reminder that boredom can be a good thing; it may mean that nothing is terribly wrong with your life, which ought to give you a boost and encourage you to stoke your enthusiasm. “The sky was all clear now, a bland, washed blue, and the occasional house that could be glimpsed from the road looked freshly painted and prosperous and eternal,” Sophie thinks, her mood lifting. If you find yourself experiencing the malaise of feeling fitfully bored, it’s probably an occasion to celebrate. Follow the example set by Chloe in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and “tink ob yer marcies.”
See also:
Apathy • Dissatisfaction • Lethargy • Mundanity, oppressed by • Stagnation, mental
BORING, BEING
See:
Anally retentive, being • Humorlessness • Organized, being too • Risks, not taking enough • Sci-fi, stuck on • Teetotaler, being a
BOSSINESS
See:
Bully, being a • Control freak, being a • Dictator, being a
BRAINY, BEING EXCEPTIONALLY
Franny and Zooey
J. D. SALINGER
I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy.” So says Mrs. Glass in J. D. Salinger’s novella
Franny and Zooey
—and she should know. Mother of seven precocious prodigies who haveall featured as panelists on the popular radio show
It’s a Wise Child
, she has since lost her eldest (Seymour) to suicide, and is now watching her youngest (Franny) have a suspected nervous breakdown on the living room couch.
Being brainier than everyone else should, in theory, be a positive thing. But there’s nothing mediocre people hate more than having their mediocrity exposed. Unfortunately, this sentences the exceptionally brainy child to a lifetime of alienation. The Glass children find themselves branded either “a bunch of insufferably ‘superior’ little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth” or the kinder but distrustful “bona fide underage wits and savants.” And if the exceptionally brainy are not pushed away by others, they often end up pushing others away. Clever people are easily bored and disappointed by their peers. Franny’s apparent breakdown is triggered by a weekend date with her college beau Lane, during which she finds herself criticizing him relentlessly. “I simply could
not
keep a single opinion to myself,” she laments to her brother Zooey. “It was just horrible. Almost from the very second he met me at the station, I started picking and picking and picking at all his opinions and values and—just
ev
erything.” It makes her hate herself.
In life, it’s usually the Lanes of this world who get the sympathy—those “normal” people on the receiving end of “abnormal” behavior. But literature likes to side with the freaks, and the exceptionally brainy will find
As the novel begins, Otto has fallen out with his longtime law partner, Charlie Russel, whom he considers hypocritically sentimental and has come to hate. Otto dislikes people who display “unseemly emotions,” he dislikes the lurking bums on his Brooklyn block, and he doesn’t like gentrifiers such as himself any better. As he tells his wife as they leave a neighborhoodgathering, “I’m tired of parties. I get so bored.” More interesting to them both is whether the stray cat that bit Sophie is rabid. Sophie delays going to the hospital, and their anxiety about her possible rabies gradually brings them to a greater appreciation of their previous comfort. As they flee the city for a restorative visit to their country place, Sophie is on the verge of needling Otto when she catches herself and thinks, “Why interrupt the pleasant boredom of the drive?”
Desperate Characters
is a useful reminder that boredom can be a good thing; it may mean that nothing is terribly wrong with your life, which ought to give you a boost and encourage you to stoke your enthusiasm. “The sky was all clear now, a bland, washed blue, and the occasional house that could be glimpsed from the road looked freshly painted and prosperous and eternal,” Sophie thinks, her mood lifting. If you find yourself experiencing the malaise of feeling fitfully bored, it’s probably an occasion to celebrate. Follow the example set by Chloe in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and “tink ob yer marcies.”
See also:
Apathy • Dissatisfaction • Lethargy • Mundanity, oppressed by • Stagnation, mental
BORING, BEING
See:
Anally retentive, being • Humorlessness • Organized, being too • Risks, not taking enough • Sci-fi, stuck on • Teetotaler, being a
BOSSINESS
See:
Bully, being a • Control freak, being a • Dictator, being a
BRAINY, BEING EXCEPTIONALLY
Franny and Zooey
J. D. SALINGER
I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy.” So says Mrs. Glass in J. D. Salinger’s novella
Franny and Zooey
—and she should know. Mother of seven precocious prodigies who haveall featured as panelists on the popular radio show
It’s a Wise Child
, she has since lost her eldest (Seymour) to suicide, and is now watching her youngest (Franny) have a suspected nervous breakdown on the living room couch.
Being brainier than everyone else should, in theory, be a positive thing. But there’s nothing mediocre people hate more than having their mediocrity exposed. Unfortunately, this sentences the exceptionally brainy child to a lifetime of alienation. The Glass children find themselves branded either “a bunch of insufferably ‘superior’ little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth” or the kinder but distrustful “bona fide underage wits and savants.” And if the exceptionally brainy are not pushed away by others, they often end up pushing others away. Clever people are easily bored and disappointed by their peers. Franny’s apparent breakdown is triggered by a weekend date with her college beau Lane, during which she finds herself criticizing him relentlessly. “I simply could
not
keep a single opinion to myself,” she laments to her brother Zooey. “It was just horrible. Almost from the very second he met me at the station, I started picking and picking and picking at all his opinions and values and—just
ev
erything.” It makes her hate herself.
In life, it’s usually the Lanes of this world who get the sympathy—those “normal” people on the receiving end of “abnormal” behavior. But literature likes to side with the freaks, and the exceptionally brainy will find
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