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

won’t let a stranger demoralize him and he won’t give up. When work comes his way, he tells his sister Ruthie, “I got a chance at a job, an’ I’m a-goin’ for it.” Even as calamity after calamity continues to befall the luckless Joads, Tom’s resolve is unshaken. He determines to bring the workers together to defend their rights. However rough a road you may be on, you can take heart in recognizing that the Joad family’s was surely worse, and find inspiration in Tom Joad’s convictions and courage.
    But what if your broken spirit is not a product of evil times but of your own outsize ambition, which has led you to aim for greater glory than you were likely to attain, resulting in dashed dreams and frustrated hopes? Rather than stew, mope, and give up on yourself, recalibrate your desires and reconceive your achievable potential by reading Edith Wharton’s wickedly perceptive social novel
The House of Mirth
. Wharton’s beautiful, haughty, and calculating antiheroine, Lily Bart, wrecks her own happiness by setting the bar too high. Lily was born to wealth, but after her father’s bankruptcy and death, she loses both her money and her status. Nearing thirty, she determines to regain both through marriage. She stubbornly refuses to accept reality, turning down eligible men because they’re not rich enough or sophisticated enough, until there’s hardly anyone left for her to reject. Even as her romantic career circles the drain, she continues showing callousness to the few men who still come knocking. One of those, a former suitor named George Dorset, who has a philandering wife, asks Lily to save his reputation and mend hers by marrying him. She refuses him. “I’m sorry; there’s nothing in the world that I can do,” she says. That is because she, unlike you, is not capable of being flexible and adjusting her views to match her possibilities. Don’t be like Lily. Shore up your spirits by inventing for yourself a realizable future. Then fight your way there, like Tom Joad.
    See also:
Hope, loss of • Identity crisis
BULIMIA
    See:
Eating disorder
BULLIED, BEING
    Cat’s Eye
    MARGARET ATWOOD
    •   •   •
    Tom Brown’s School Days
    THOMAS HUGHES
    B ullying comes in many forms. Among boys, it tends to be aggressive and physical. Among girls, spiteful and verbal. And although we tend to think of it as a childhood phenomenon, it happens just as much among adults—in the workplace and at home. Both our cures are about bullying among young people, but they capture an ingredient common to all: the shame or bewilderment of the victims, which, at least initially, prevents them from seeing the situation for what it is. If you suspect you are being bullied, these novels will give you some perspective. Perhaps you’ll recognize the techniques the bullies use to assert their authority. And depending on whether you’re the sort to crumble or fight back, you may recognize one or the other response. If you do, speak out.
    When middle-aged Elaine returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her paintings in Margaret Atwood’s chilling
Cat’s Eye
,
she wonders whether she’ll bump into her old friend Cordelia, and, if so, what she will say. Cordelia was the most powerful and alluring of a trio of girls at school (the others being Carol and Grace) to whom she became joined at the hip—the one Elaine most wanted to please. Whenever Cordelia had a “friend day,” putting her arm through Elaine’s and singing and laughing together, Elaine would feel gratitude—and anxiety. Sooner or later she knew Cordelia would turn from friend to foe and, as the ringleader of the group, encourage Carol and Grace to do the same. In Toronto, when Elaine finds a marble like a cat’s eye, given to her years earlier by her brother Stephen, it brings to the surface a traumatic memory she’s long blanked out.
    Anyone who has been bullied will recognize Elaine’s emotional numbness and won’t be surprised by her failure to remove