When people say “The Silver Linings Playbook,” they automatically think of the David O. Russell-directed 2012 motion picture that was nominated for five Academy Awards. (It won one, Best Actress, for Jennifer Lawrence.) But that film was actually based on a 2008 debut novel of the same title by Matthew Quick.
“The Good Luck of Right Now: A Novel” (HarperCollins, New York, 2014, 281 pages) is already Quick’s fifth novel, but he has skewed toward the more popular elements of his previous work, featuring an unusual protagonist having to connect with people and simply carry on living a relatively normal existence.
The book-obsessed Bartholomew Neil has spent almost all his 39 years living with and caring for his mother. To cope with the loneliness, he begins to write letters to the actor Richard Gere.
When Bartholomew’s mother passes away, he must now face a seismic shift in his life. It’s compounded by the fact that Bartholomew isn’t like other people. “And you’re just a little off,” his mother would say. “Off in the best of ways. Perfect the way you are.”
Blindsided by his mother’s passing, Bartholomew struggles to find meaning and direction in his everyday life. Soon he is joined by an unusual gaggle of people: self-defrocked priest Father McNamee, troubled grief counselor Wendy, the profanity-spouting Max and the person Bartholomew knows only as the Girlbrarian.
“Good Luck” is also unusual because the entire novel is presented as letters Bartholomew writes to the actor Richard Gere—but never sent. At the end of her life, Bartholomew’s mother began referring to Bartholomew as Richard and so he began to do it on his own, carrying on imaginary conversations with the actor-activist, even seeing his apparition at times. That reads as weirdly as it sounds.
Bad, good
Even as he has to overcome his shyness among other obstacles, Bartholomew tries to adhere to the kind philosophy his mother believed in: “Whenever something bad happens to us, something good happens—often to someone else. And that’s The Good Luck of Right Now. We must believe it.”
Meanwhile, all kinds of strange and ordinary things happen to him, and as the narrator, he reflects in his own quirky way on everything. “I’m finding it hard to believe it her philosophy these days,” he thinks.
Bartholomew is charming in that stilted, hesitant way Quick likes in narrators, but also initially somewhat distant and grating. His occasionally meandering inner monologue (through the letters) is something else altogether, each ending with “Your admiring fan Bartholomew Neil.”
What you get is a bucket of seemingly random reflections on Catholicism, alien abductions, the most awkward road trip ever and everything that has to do with Richard Gere.
Ostensibly, “Good Luck” is supposed to inspire readers, and it’s a really quick, breezy read that would probably take most readers three days at the most to finish, if not sooner. It’s also deliberately bonkers and therefore diverting in its own way. The Richard Gere angle—him appearing to Bartholomew, Bartholomew’s uncanny familiarity with Gere’s background and causes—is eerie and effective at the same time, at times almost becoming a narrative crutch for Quick.
Those who enjoyed Quick’s style in “The Silver Linings Playbook” will find much of the same elements here, though perhaps in differing amounts. But in Matthew Quick’s earnest efforts to explore the hidden meaning in everyday events, “The Good Luck of Right Now” winds up somewhere between the silly and the truly profound.
Available in paperback from National Book Store.
