Civility Will Prevail: Matthew Quick’s Novels for Adults

Matthew Quick is best known for The Silver Linings Playbook, his first novel and one that has been turned into a movie, Silver Linings Playbook.  In these works, Pat Peoples is recently released from a mental institution where he was committed after an explosive argument with his estranged wife. He still loves her, she's moved on.  Peoples starts compulsively working out and tries to win his wife back, despite the obvious attention from a neighbor, who wants him to (among other things) help her win a dance competition benefiting a charity for depression. Hilarity ensues as everyone tries to get Pat Peoples back on track.

The most recent novel from Mr. Quick is Love May Fail, the title taken from a piece by Kurt Vonnegut. Portia Kane is the dynamo who powers this book, desperately wanting to believe in good men after catching her awful husband with a woman who looks like Khaleesi from Game of Thrones. Portia looks up her old high school English teacher who retired after being assaulted by a student. She tries to convince him to teach again, since he made such a difference in her life as well as that of other students. Apparently failing at that, she takes up with the brother and son of one of her high school friends and they form an odd little family as Portia writes the novel she's always wanted to since that high school English class.

The Good Luck of Right Now is a quick read told in letters to Richard Gere. Nearly-forty Bartholomew has never left home until the death of his mother sends him on a road trip to find his father. Joining him is a whimsical cavalcade of equally damaged and surprisingly intertwined people. Message: it is not the destination but the journey that is important, along with those you share it with.

As funny and compulsively readable as these books are, they have an awful lot of ideas in them. His characters are never cutouts and they think a great deal. As his books tend to take place in small towns and close-knit suburbs, Matthew Quick's characters are often connected in ways other novelists might eschew under the philosophy that every man really is an island, a view Quick obviously does not share. Hilariously optimistic characters are Quick's stock in trade, and while bad things happen, they refuse to be crushed, and in so doing they are victorious. Tragedies do happen in his books as no one makes it out of this world alive, but there is grace, both for the characters and the reader.