Imaginary advice from Richard Gere

THE GOOD LUCK OF RIGHT NOW

By Matthew Quick

282 pages

Available at National Book Store

A 39-year-old recluse, a defrocked priest, a shy librarian, a cursing projectionist who mourns his dead cat and the offstage presence of Richard Gere make Matthew Quick’s latest even quirkier than his ‘Silver Linings Playbook.’

Matthew Quick may not be a household name, but the author’s novel, Silver Linings Playbook, will definitely ring a bell. It spawned an Oscar-nominated movie that catapulted Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper into Hollywood’s A-list.

Part of the movie’s appeal was its quirky characters and language. Terms like “Excelsior” and “If it’s me reading the signs” and many oddball sidekicks made the romance between two young lovers on prescribed meds much easier to swallow.

Quick has a tendency toward quirky language, and his latest, The Good Luck of Right Now, is no exception (starting with the title). The author likes to introduce characters who speak from the heart, even if their vocabulary and mental state isn’t always crystal clear. Thus, because they’re endearing, their mental illness is given the Vaseline-on-the-lens treatment. One of the things people tended to overlook in Silver Linings Playbook is that Pat (Bradley Cooper’s character) has a pretty scary bipolar condition: he freaks out over Stevie Wonder songs, gets violent and obsessive over misplaced wedding videos, etc. Tiffany (Lawrence’s character and his love interest) was relatively sane, mainly dealing with grief over being a widow by sleeping around too much and screaming a lot. Not only that, but Pat’s dad (played by Robert De Niro) has OCD, and apparently needs good luck totems to watch football games. Each one has issues.

Actually, Quick may have tapped into a modern zeitgeist in his fiction: American families with multiple mental conditions for which they are overprescribed meds. You know the old saying: the family that takes meds together, stays together.

In The Good Luck of Right Now, Bartholomew Neil is a mentally simplistic man of 39 who lives with his mother until she dies suddenly of cancer. (It’s unclear what his mental diagnosis really is; perhaps it’s meant to be vague. I prefer to think it’s something similar to that of Chance the Gardener in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There.)

Bartholomew must then learn to get along in the world, telling his first-person tale in a series of letters addressed to Richard Gere, the movie star/Tibetan freedom activist. You see, his mother was a fan of the actor, and Bartholomew suspects she might have crossed over into dementia after receiving a form letter from Gere’s agency requesting prayers for Tibet’s sovereignty and the peaceful return of the Dalai Lama. Before she passes away, Bartholomew’s mom starts blurring the edges between Gere/her son as dementia progresses, and eventually so does Bartholomew. He starts slipping into the role of Gere to placate his mom. As he puts it, he gets caught up in “the you-me Richard Gere of pretending.” Meanwhile, he’s got a crush on a local “Girlbrarian” who takes such a long time to restack books that older librarians routinely yell at her.

To say that phrases like “Girlbrarian” and “the you-me Richard Gere of pretending” do not exactly roll off the tongue is probably beside the point. Quick is content to immerse himself in the minds of characters whose mental state is a little wobbly. As some of us know from personal experience, hanging around mentally ill people can be psychically draining. To his credit, Quick tries to make it all seem fun and cute and warmhearted.

Yet this was a minor criticism of Silver Linings Playbook, the movie. The rom-com tended to trivialize the true scariness of mental illness, presenting two people who were so darn adorable together that we just overlooked that they had a screw or two loose. (I know these are not clinical terms.) I just couldn’t help thinking: would they be nearly as charming if not portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper?

But so what? That’s how fiction earns its designation as “fiction.” In The Good Luck of Right Now, Bartholomew surrounds himself with even more endearing if slightly kooky characters, such as Wendy, a grad student assigned as his case worker; and Father McNamee, who defrocks himself then moves in with Bartholomew, and may be bipolar; and a fellow grief therapy group member named Max, 50 percent of whose vocabulary consists of the word “f**k.” (Perhaps he has Tourettes? After all, everyone else in the book has a diagnosis.)

It doesn’t stop there. This ragtag alternative family heads north to Montreal (road trip!) to find closure for at least two people in the story. With each step of the way, Bartholomew learns a little bit more about real life and independence. He comes to understand the philosophy of his mother, about good and bad luck being relative — that someone’s misfortune means someone somewhere else is having great luck, and that it all balances out in the end like yin and yang.

Does it sound nearly as memorable as Silver Linings? Probably not. But if quirk is what you like, Quick delivers it. In bulk. A comparison could be made to John Irving, who has made a damned good living off of quirky characters, starting with The World According to Garp. The trick with Irving was to inject just enough sadness and real tragedy behind the pretending and delusion, so you knew you weren’t reading a kid’s story.

Speaking of kid’s stories, the cover art of The Good Luck of Right Now is suspiciously close to that of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, which is understandable because Quick also writes young adult novels and therefore has the same target audience. Maybe even the same publisher.

The novelistic device of inserting Richard Gere as an offstage muse actually works, because much of Bartholomew’s mission after his mom dies is to figure out how to successfully “pretend” around other people. Basically, he wants to know how to “act” normal — how to ask a girl out, how to have a beer with a friend at a bar — since he has little experience living a normal life. What better imaginary mentor to have than an actor, a man who has made a living by pretending? Gere is invoked as a wise philosopher, a compassionate man, but his pop cultural image also gets teased and skewered a bit by Bartholomew’s unintentionally ironic prose. It gets so the reader can’t stop imagining Gere somewhere beyond the page, looking over the latest missive from Bartholomew and blinking, shaking his head, or smirking a little in private amusement.