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.
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Your post made me wonder what else Nancy Pearl has to say these days. Found out she has a Book Lust blog:
http://booklust.wetpaint.com/
And, hey! Where are you, dude? Miss your posts.