The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You Read Online Free

which smooth-skinned young people indulge in no-strings-attached sensual romps in between bouts of cosmetic surgery. Work, such as it is, amounts to little more than hobbies, and there are no frowning oldies to scold the slackers to behave themselves and grow up. All this may sound like delicious, escapist wish fulfillment, until it dawns upon you that, even in the fanciful world of sci-fi, avoiding old age means dying young. (You knewthere had to be a catch, right?) Yep. Youth’s stuff will not endure, and the frivolous denizens of Nolan and Johnson’s futurama are put to sleep—
permanently
—on their twenty-second birthdays. A fleet of enforcers called “Sandmen” hunt and trap the “runners” who perversely decide, as the deadline looms, that they wouldn’t mind a few crow’s-feet after all. Logan, the title character, is one of the most dedicated of these Sandman vigilantes—until his own twenty-second birthday looms. Which prompts, of course, his “run.” But where can you run to in a world without old folks’ homes? Whenever you get depressed about being physically past your peak, medicate with a dose of
Logan’s Run
and be grateful for your comparative longevity.
    King Alobar, the hero of
Jitterbug Perfume
, Tom Robbins’s exploration of a similar scenario (set not in the future but a fictional eighth century of the past), has very good reason to dread the approach of senescence. It is customary for his tribe to commit regicide with a poisoned egg at the king’s first sign of middle age. Here we distill the essence of
Jitterbug Perfume
in order to give you Alobar’s recipe for eternal youth. For a fuller exposition, read the novel in its entirety.
    INGREDIENTS
    1eighth-century king on the brink of middle age
    1immortal, goaty god giving off a strong stench
    1vial of perfume that has the power to seduce whole cities when released
    1measure of Jamaican jasmine, procured by the beekeeper Bingo Pajama
    1most vital part of beetroot
    METHOD
    Fold ingredients earnestly inside a French perfumery until combined, adding at the last moment your beetroot’s vital part. Breathe in a never-ending loop while you fold. Now ensure that the Bandaloop doctors preside over your potion while you take a hot bath. Then achieve orgasm with your sexual partner, drawing all the energy from this act up into your brain stem. Repeat daily for a thousand years.
    If you have not by then achieved your aim, take Alobar’s best advice of all: lighten up.
    See also:
Baldness • Birthday blues • Old age, horror of
AGING PARENTS
    The Corrections
    JONATHAN FRANZEN
    •   •   •
    Family Matters
    ROHINTON MISTRY
    W e wish this ailment on all of you. To have aged parents is something to celebrate, the alternative being to have faced their deaths before their time (see: Death of a loved one). However, one can’t deny that people sometimes get annoying when they get old. They become crankier, more opinionated, less tolerant, more set in their ways. And on top of it all, they become physically incapacitated and need looking after, forcing a quite disconcerting reversal of the parent-child relationship. To that end, we address aging parents as a condition requiring a salve as well as a celebration. We recommend two excellent novels with this theme at their heart, revealing the practical and psychological effects of aging parents on the caring—or uncaring—children.
    All three children veer heavily toward the latter in Jonathan Franzen’s painfully funny
The Corrections
—though maybe Alfred and Enid Lambert had it coming. We first meet the Lambert parents in the final, most troubled stage of their lives. Alfred has Alzheimer’s and dementia, and Enid joins the children in worrying about how to look after him (he has taken, among other things, to peeing in bottles in his den, because it’s too far to get to the toilet). The driving force behind the narrative is Enid’s desperation that all her children and grandchildren should