A disappointing second serving

Since the huge com­mer­cial and crit­i­cal suc­cess of “The Cu­ri­ous In­ci­dent of the Dog in the Night­time” by Mark Had­don, there has been a slight trend to­wards nov­els that use a main char­ac­ter with a de­gree of men­tal dis­tinc­tive­ness. Matthew Quick's pre­vi­ous and debut work of adult fic­tion “The Sil­ver Lin­ings Play­book” (also a de­served Oscar award-win­ning film) fo­cused on a cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist with bi-polar dis­or­der and in this new book too the nar­ra­tor is a hyper-ob­server who strug­gles with being in touch with what can be called ob­jec­tive re­al­ity.

Bartholomew Neil is highly in­tu­itive as well. He is ap­proach­ing mid­dle age and now has to live with­out his mother, who had been a con­stant fig­ure of re­as­sur­ance in his do­mes­tic rou­tines. Writ­ing very per­sonal let­ters to Richard Gere (his mother's favourite actor) helps him ex­press his thoughts and for­tu­nately for him there is vital human con­tact at hand in the form of a whiskey priest and Wendy, a young trainee psy­chol­o­gist. When Bartholomew starts (very) small group ther­apy as grief coun­selling he be­friends an­other colour­ful char­ac­ter in the form of Max, who is an al­most con­stant user of the F---- word and ob­sessed by the idea of aliens. Along with Max's sis­ter, they have a few ad­ven­tures and mer­ci­fully, the story ends.

Hav­ing thought that Sil­ver Lin­ings Play­book was one of the best films I've seen for a few years, I was gen­uinely look­ing for­ward to read­ing Quick's lat­est of­fer­ing. I was sorely dis­ap­pointed. It is an easy read mainly be­cause the au­thor is a su­perb com­poser of seem­ingly au­then­tic di­a­logue but that is not enough for me. I sim­ply get noth­ing (ex­cept a re­peated feel­ing of ex­as­per­a­tion) from putting up with the half-baked the­o­ries of in­vented peo­ple. The hom­i­lies and pieces of home­spun “wis­dom” that fill each chap­ter are often painful. “Mom al­ways used to say,” ex­plains Bartholomew “that for every bad thing that hap­pens, a good thing hap­pens too - and this is how the world stayed in har­mony.” Com­bine this kind of For­est Gump-style sim­plis­tic non­sense with the main char­ac­ter's re­liance on the ob­vi­ous com­mon sense quotes of the ap­par­ently rein­car­nated Dalai Lama and sup­posed cases of Jung's syn­chronic­ity in his and other's lives and the ef­fect on this reader was to cre­ate the de­sire to put the book down and not pick it up again.

To be fair though, Quick's por­trayal of mod­ern North Amer­ica is not all flawed. He shows it to be as re­li­gious and su­per­sti­tious as much of it al­most cer­tainly is: a part of the planet where mil­lions of peo­ple pray in­stead of think­ing hard or get­ting hon­est with them­selves. In the first nine pages of the book there are at least half a dozen pointed ref­er­ences to faith, saints, ho­li­ness, di­vin­ity, the bible and mir­a­cles. Quick gives us a glimpse into a pop­u­lace that is one of the most god-both­er­ing in the de­vel­oped world but is, iron­i­cally, so spir­i­tu­ally con­fused. He de­picts hard-drink­ing men, ca­sual po­lice cru­elty and the kind of neigh­bours most of us will for­tu­nately never have. As with his pre­vi­ous work of fic­tion, there is the threat of vi­o­lence often pre­sent in the back­ground - even in the same places where there is also a strong sense of com­mu­nity.

If noth­ing else, this book gives a some­times en­ter­tain­ing ex­am­ple of how the human mind in­stinc­tively looks for pat­terns and is often com­forted by them.