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

bickering and joylessness? Do you ignore the irritations of living in a collapsing flat but make no plans to move out? You are not alone. Tolerating less than ideal circumstances has been humanity’s defaultsetting since long before Hamlet pondered the virtue of bearing those ills he had rather than fly to others he knew not of. But as scary as it is to contemplate change, avoiding it bears its own dangers. Chew on this thought as you read Richard Russo’s beautiful and forgiving novel
Empire Falls
, about a man in a washed-up industrial town in Maine who, rather than attempt to improve his lot, lets life get away from him.
    As a boy, Miles Roby was ambitious and resolved to escape his depressing blue-collar village. But when he’s away at college and his mother gets sick, he dutifully drops out and returns home to run the family business, the Empire Grill. Mrs. Whiting, a rich, manipulative old local woman, owns part of the grill; early on, impressed by Miles’s conscientiousness, she promises to bequeath him her share. But under Miles’s stewardship, the diner, which was “never terribly profitable,” goes into a “long, gentle decline almost imperceptible without the benefit of time-lapse photography.” When the diner starts losing money, Miles, now in middle age, faces losing everything. Mrs. Whiting threatens to alter her will, and Miles’s energetic wife has tired of his paralysis and found a way to evolve. Life is changing around Miles, whether he wants it to or not. By staying in place, he risks being left behind.
    If, like Miles, “surviving not thriving” is pretty much your MO, let
Empire Falls
suffuse you with a rueful understanding of the perils of inertia. Don’t let life happen to you. To survive
and
thrive, take a proactive role in what happens next.
    See also:
Control freak, being a • Single-mindedness
CHEATING
    See:
Adultery
CHILDBIRTH
    The Birth of Love
    JOANNA KAVENNA
    I f you’re facing the great unknown of childbirth for the first time, you’re probably keen to prepare yourself mentally. You may have the urge to ask anyone who looks like a mother what it entails and how it feels, and for any tips on how to getthrough it with minimum pain and maximum joy. But anyone who has given birth knows that it is almost impossible to convey the experience, as it is, by its nature, unique every time. For a less didactic approach than the latest pregnancy manual, women on the verge of delivering are encouraged to turn to fiction to find out what it’s all about. Besides, it’s a great time to rest on the sofa with a good novel (see: Pregnancy).
    The Birth of Love
by Joanna Kavenna tackles head-on the varied nature of childbirth through four interweaving stories. In the present, Brigid is going through her second labor. As we accompany her through ever agonizing contractions all the way to an eventual C-section, we watch her dream of a home birth shatter. In the past is real-life scientist Ignaz Semmelweis, struggling to hold on to his sanity in a Viennese asylum after coming to the horrifying realization that the high rate of “childbed fever” fatalities could have been prevented if only the doctors had washed their hands before examining their patients. Michael Stone, a novelist telling Semmelweis’s story, goes through his own version of birthing pangs as he watches his first novel,
The Moon
, go out into the world to stand or fall on its own merits. And in a laboratory of the future, Darwin C, where people are kept and bred in cells, their wombs closed off and their eggs harvested at the age of eighteen, a female escapee successfully manages to bear a child in the natural way.
    Giving birth—or watching a partner give birth—is perhaps the closest any of us will get to witnessing a miracle. Read this novel to prepare yourself for the intensity of the experience, but also so you can appreciate doing it amid the high hygiene standards of today. Kavenna’s graphic and vivid storytelling does