The Silver Linings Playbook
Thanks to Action-Figure Librarian Nancy Pearl’s summer reading recommendations, I recently enjoyed the hell out of Matthew Quick’s debut novel, The Silver Linings Playbook.
The narrator is guileless, emotionally damaged, relentlessly optimistic Pat Peoples, who finds a weird but genuine opportunity to restart his life from the absolute depths of a mental health disaster and the literal depths of his parents’ basement. His unique voice is likely to stay with readers for quite a while.
Pat is a thirtysomething former history teacher, freshly released from a “neural health facility” and determined to reinvent himself and reunite with the wife who has inexplicably left him. Pat’s jumbled memory of the last few weeks/months/years complicates his efforts, as does the uncomfortable family situation he moves back into at mom and dad’s house in the Philadelphia suburbs.
The narrator is able to awkwardly reconnect with his parents and brother, but he also hooks up with a new set of unlikely friends, mostly thanks to an obsessive shared love for the Philadelphia Eagles that may verge on its own special form of mental illness. This brand of fandom is skillfully shown by Quick to cross generational, ethnic, and socioeconomic boundaries, but certainly not gender ones.
The novel is in part a really moving and often hilarious look at the somewhat stunted emotional lives of sports fans and the women who tolerate them. The novel’s female characters share varying degrees of dismay and disgust at the relentless chants of “E-A-G-L-E-S! Eagles!!!” that punctuate any gathering of two or more local gentlemen, not unlike the familiar strains of “Boomer Sooner” heard hereabouts.
Pat’s quest for self-improvement begins on the terms established by his estranged English teacher wife, whom he remembers criticizing both his lack of physical fitness and his failure to appreciate the literature she loves and teaches. Some of the novel’s best and funniest scenes involve his attempts to engage with novels like The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye in order to understand their importance to his wife.
Pat eventually tries to piece together the meanings of messages he may or may not really be receiving from his wife, from American literature, from God, from his unusual set of new friends, and especially from the demonic smooth-jazz sax blower Kenny G, whose infernal music is possibly the most challenging obstacle to the narrator’s mental health.
The author’s website features interesting biographical information and news, including an update that acclaimed director David O. Russell will soon make the film adaptation of The Silver Linings Playbook. The site also features a video of the author reading an exerpt from his novel, along with links to reviews and some of his other publications.
Summer Beach Reading . . . in Oklahoma
While the idea of ”Summer Beach Reading” in Oklahoma may conjure images of heatstroke, fifth-degree sunburn, and the unmistakable orange tint of lake water permanently dyeing every substance with which it comes into contact, there is no shortage of recommended summer reading lists available on the web. Most of these selections seem just as enjoyable to read indoors with a tall glass of iced tea and the air conditioning cranked down to 64 degrees.
One of the most interesting and diverse lists belongs to Super Librarian Nancy Pearl, whose recommendations are posted at NPR.org. Her selection of “Summer’s Best Books” includes Matthew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook, the tale of a released mental patient who quirkily critiques classic fiction like The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms in an effort to impress his estranged English teacher wife. An unlikely and important subplot involves the obsessive love for the Philadelphia Eagles shared by the main character and his psychiatrist.
NPR.org has a whole section devoted to summer books, with critics’ and readers’ selections in categories like “Books to Keep You Sane on a Family Road Trip” and interesting series like ”My Guilty Pleasure.” There’s also a list of the summer’s “10 Best Cookbooks” and a reader-generated list of “The Best Beach Books Ever.”
Salon.com’s book section features summer reading recommendations from authors like Neil Gaiman and Michael Connelly, and special sections include listings of highlighted memoirs and thrillers.
Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog has a “Summer Reading List” with tons of reader-contributed suggestions, and USA Today’s “Summer Books Calendar” has dates and blurbs about some hot upcoming titles.
All of these previews and recommendations have driven me to fill up my library reserve list with 30 titles, each seemingly more interesting than the last. It’s gotten to the point where books arrive on reserve for me and I can’t even remember what compelled me to order them in the first place. I’m sure I saw some glowing notice about Chandler Burr’s new novel, You or Someone Like You, in one of these previews, but I can’t for the life of me retrace the steps that led me to order this tale of pseudo-academic book clubs and, as the dust jacket describes, “literature’s power to change our lives.”
(It seems a little heavy for beach or lakeside reading, but I’m kind of captivated by the cover.)
The Bookshelf of Constant Reproach
NPR.org has a blog series based on the idea of “The Bookshelf of Constant Reproach,” where contributors confess a list of books they’ve always meant to read but have never gotten around to. The subheading, “Best Books You Never Read” is another way of getting at the theme with slightly less guilt, but the results are interesting nonetheless.
Moby Dick and anything by William Faulkner seem to pop up quite often here, along with another one of my own (perhaps) shameful reading omissions, Charles Dickens. The great Russian novels are well represented as well, especially an imposing Big Three I’ve started and never finished myself: War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment.
Surprisingly, many commenters cop to never having read Lolita while on the other hand greatly enjoying Reading Lolita in Teheran. Hemingway and Steinbeck are quite well represented on the list as well, and they also appear along with Ayn Rand in more than a few comments in regard to “Books I’ve Actually Read But Wish I Hadn’t.”
Before I end up feeling too guilty on this topic, though, I like to remember the immortal thoughts of Mark Twain: “A classic is a book that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read.”
Commenters also note a few interesting websites where readers can trade unwanted titles with other readers, like bookins.com, paperbackswap.com, and the very nicely designed bookmooch.com.
To Do-Over, or Not to Do-Over
In the wake of Christopher Noxon’s Rejuveniles, which explores the world of adults who indulge (or never grow beyond) their inner child, comes Do-Over!, the product of Guggenheim Fellowship-winning author and writing professor Robin Hemley’s quest to literally re-live huge chunks of his mildly troubled childhood.
The book’s subtitle aptly describes the project: In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarassments.
Hemley is determined not just to try to change the past in his experiment but to re-think, re-evaluate, and put in perspective childhood failures and regrets. Rather than indulging in lengthy and costly psychotherapy sessions, Hemley attempted to actually “do-over” a series of events like blowing a line in his elementary school play, settling some scores at summer camp, and overcoming 6th grade bullying.
Through his experiences Hemley becomes a self-described “connoisseur of childhood,” hoping to become a better parent in addition to appreciating the forces that shaped him. Certain personality types (mine, absolutely) might find this whole idea to be a rabbit-hole that the conscious mind is better off not leaping into. It might be worth questioning, for instance, whether Hemley’s re-living of certain events somehow cancels the original events out, or to what extent he is actually “living” in the present at all in the midst of his done-over adventures.
Hemley’s book has some really interesting “adult” observations on teaching and learning, dating (he dares to attempt a “Prom Do-Over”), and the disillusionments of college fraternity life. The extent to which his project is accepted and indulged by the kids and teachers he encounters is fascinating in itself, and the book is also worth reading for anyone who may have forgotten the simple awesomeness of recess.
An Odyssey
I just got back from a trip to Italy and Greece, where I observed a few interesting international reading habits.
In between touring ancient ruins and dodging the hordes of tiny Smart Cars that are as ubiquitous in Rome as SUVs are here, I noticed immediately that the Twilight series and Angels and Demons are at least as popular in Italy and Greece as they are in the U.S.
The Angels and Demons movie was prominently advertised on billboards all around town, even within thurible-swinging distance from the Vatican. Perhaps the official ban on the filmmakers using Roman churches and the threat of a boycott merely acted as effective marketing tools, or else Romans are particularly rabid Dan Brown fans. Some members of our group especially enjoyed reading the book while we toured sites in the Eternal City mentioned in it, particularly the looming Castel Sant’Angelo.
Equally ubiquitous, especially in Greece, were copies of the Twilight series in all manner of unfamiliar languages. From convenience stores in highway rest areas to flea market stalls to a kiosk in the Athens airport, the books were everywhere.
I was a little surprised, on the other hand, that hardly anybody could be seen reading on trains and buses or in parks or cafes. In a book I’ve been reading called The Dark Heart of Italy, by Tobias Jones, a British transplant to Italy, an interesting idea about this is suggested:
I don’t know whether it’s because of the Reformation, which was iconoclastic and “written,” or because Britain has had, on the whole, the better writers and Italy much superior artists, but Italy is a visual country, Britain a literary one. . . . (V)ery few people read newspapers, even fewer buy or borrow books. A massive percentage of Italian adults don’t read one book a year. To survive, the edicole–the little pavilions on street corners which sell newspapers–have to double as fetish-shops, selling gadgets and videos and soft- to hard-porn magazines alongside the newsprint.
It’s definitely true that there are more beautiful things to look at in Italy than the eye can seem to take in at once, and I was way too distracted to very often pick up the copy of Homer’s Odyssey I’d brought along for some seemingly geographically appropriate reading. Once we got to Greece it was awesome to read a few of the poem’s descriptions of the sea and islands and then look up and see them right there, but more often I was just staring out the window of a train or bus and trying to take in all the incredible sights.
Catcher in the Rye II?
Fresh from receiving the hallowed accolade of induction into the Bookmarking Book Covers Hall of Fame, J.D. Salinger’s immortal Catcher in the Rye is in the headlines again. In slightly more momentous news, Salinger has sued an anonymous first-time novelist whose book 60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye allegedly features a 76-year-old Holden Caulfield who escapes from a nursing home and again wanders through Manhattan, presumably in search of a better book title.
The Smoking Gun has obtained parts of Salinger’s 11-page legal action vs. “John Doe, writing under the name John David California,” and it makes for some fascinating reading. The copyright infringement complaint versus the “unauthorized sequel” even features several pages of plot summary and analysis of Salinger’s novel in addition to a description of its “extraordinary critical praise.”
In describing its “extraordinary commercial success,” the legal brief notes that, “As of May 29, 2009 — 58 years after its publication — The Catcher in the Rye currently sells more copies on Amazon.com than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The DaVinci Code, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Of Mice and Men.” It also notes Holden Caulfield’s status as a “cultural icon” to whom other literary and pop-culture figures have been compared for almost 60 years.
In another interesting nugget, the brief describes the efforts of “numerous filmmakers — including Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg” to purchase film rights to Salinger’s novel. The author has always refused to authorize any work derivative of The Catcher in the Rye, and he is quoted as saying, “There’s no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It’s all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.”
The brief concludes, “Salinger’s copyright in The Catcher in the Rye is worth an enormous amount of money and his right of first publication of a sequel is likewise of great monetary value. His right not to publish a sequel is unquantifiable.”
The Guardian UK’s Oliver Marre helpfully speculates here on a number of other sequels to classics that would be best left alone, and this excellent piece from the same paper’s Stuart Evers describes the project’s ridiculousness thusly: “Its gum-tighteningly awful title can only hint at the disaster lurking within.”
