The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You by Ella Berthoud, Susan Elderkin

sense in staying put. But if you’ve broken your leg and are wondering how you will stay sane lying in one place or hobbling around on crutches for the next few weeks, turn to
Cleave
by Australian novelist Nikki Gemmell. The title of Gemmell’s debut—written in crisp, inventive prose ever aware of its sounds and contours—is an antagonym, a word that, by a freakish accident of linguistic evolution, also means its own opposite. Muse as you read on the relationship of
cleave
(“to split”) to
cleave
(“to stick fast to”). It will help you visualize the cleft nature of your bone and therefore speed up its new cleaving.
    Snip—“thin and bitten from too much life on the run”—had her first taste of being on the move when her father took her from her mother twenty-five years earlier. He cut her hair (hence, Snip) to make her look like a boy so no one would find her. Now thirty, Snip has made sure that the men in her life have always had the feeling she’ll be out the door any minute, so that while they’re with her they’re hooked. Then, when she decides it’s over, out the door she goes. “No number. No forwarding address. A new town, another rupture.”
    That is, until she meets Dave, a city boy who answers her ad for a companion to drive her and her Holden Ute from Sydney to Alice. Snip is quick to dismiss him as not her type. His face is “too open,” too untroubled. He “blares” good health. He shows all the signs of having been loved very much in his life, like a rock that’s been sitting in the sun. She runs away again, of course, but headlong into an experience that forces her to reevaluate her habit.
    Don’t be a Snip. Be a Dave. Lie in that hospital bed with the expanse of the Australian desert unfolding in your mind (you’ll particularly appreciate,no doubt, the image of “the great stretch of blue arching above . . . [with] the shin-bone beauty of a lone ghost gum against a reddened hill”) and be like a rock emanating heat to those who come to your bedside. Not only will you get lots of attention, but you’ll end up with new friends to go see once you’re up and about again. The reader invests a lot in Dave and ardently hopes for Snip to find a way to cleave to him—a desire that will manifest itself in the reknitting of your bones.
    See also:
Hospital, being in the • Pain, being in
BROKEN PROMISE
    See:
Trust, loss of
BROKEN SPIRIT
    The Grapes of Wrath
    JOHN STEINBECK
    •   •   •
    The House of Mirth
    EDITH WHARTON
    T here’s a reason they called the global economic crisis of the 1930s the Great Depression, beyond depressed stock prices and failed banks. The Great Depression was also a time of misery, sadness, and despair as the afflicted populace saw its prosperity and prospects come crashing down. These days, in the new millennium’s Great Recession, that bleak mood is felt by many who agonize that the present, and future, are chancy. If you’re feeling frightened, pessimistic, and whipped by fate, mend your broken spirit by reading John Steinbeck’s novel
The Grapes of Wrath
. It’s about the desolate Joads, a family of tenant farmers from Depression-era Oklahoma who travel to California looking for crop-picking work.
    After serving four years in prison for manslaughter, Tom Joad emerges to discover that the Dust Bowl has ruined his family’s fortunes. Bad as things are, he struggles to get work to help his family. A young migrant worker he meets on the road tells Tom that men like them have to put up with whatever employers dish out because work is so scarce, and it’s best not to get a reputation as a complainer. Tom retorts, “So we take what we can get, huh, or we starve; an’ if we yelp we starve.” That is not how Tom rolls;he may be an ex-con living in a tent city and warming himself by a trash fire, but he has his pride. “I ain’t gonna take it,” he says. “Goddamn it, I an’ my folks ain’t no sheep. I’ll kick the hell outa somebody.” Tom