I loathed the first fourth of this book. We’re told repeatedly that Portia is a feminist despite the fact she married a pornographer, and not women-friendly porn, but the kind where he lures young college women into signing dubious contracts and then denigrates them on film. Portia has been married to this guy for a decade and has had no problem whatsoever spending his ill-begotten wealth. She’s known for a long time that he’s a sex addict who likes teenagers, but it’s in the opening scene where she is drunk and invoking Gloria Steinem’s name while holding a gun to catch her husband and his latest teenage conquest where she finally decides to leave him.
Let me assure you, at no point in the book does Portia do a single thing that could be called feminist. Repeatedly using the words “feminist,” “sexist,” “misogynistic,” and “Gloria Steinem” does not a feminist make. Also, the term is often used as in, “I know it’s not feminist of me to like going to see heavy metal bands where women are objectified, but . . .” Also, Portia goes out of her way to continue to spend as much of her husband’s money as she can well after she’s left him when she returns home to New Jersey to her mentally unbalanced, OCD, hoarder mother.
The hoarder mother is interesting and makes Portia a slightly less nausea-inducing character.
Portia is obsessed with finding her high school English teacher that made a difference in her life—although she’s forty years old and only now decides she needs to get around to writing the novel he inspired so many years ago. Mr. Vernon was brutally beaten by a student and left teaching to become a hermit, so she goes off to find him and inspire him to return to teaching.
The second section of the book is told from Mr. Vernon’s point of view. He’s suicidal and his only reason for living is his dog, Albert Camus.
The one redeeming character in the book is Chuck Bass, who also had Mr. Vernon as an English teacher and also remembers Mr. Vernon as having a big impact on his life, except for the part of his life where he was shooting heroin in alleys and stealing to obtain the money to enable him to shoot heroin in alleys. He’s been clean for years and takes care of his sister and her five-year-old son.
I will gladly accept a few coincidences for a novel to work, but this entire book is predicated on one coincidence after another. We have to accept fate for this to work, but there are so many coincidences as to be seriously aggravating. There are some touching scenes, but getting through this book was a struggle.
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From the Publisher
Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project, interviews Matthew Quick
GS: My experience is that in the US, if your story doesn’t fit into a genre, the market and marketers will try to force it into one. How would you classify your books?
MQ: All of my favorite stories defy genre. Harold and Maude. Anything by Haruki Murakami. Slaughterhouse-Five. Safety Not Guaranteed. Soul Mountain. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The Zoo Story. Just to name a few.
I attempt to tell stories that feel authentic to me and then let my publishers figure out the rest.
GS: You’re writing about relationships: the word love is a giveaway in the title of your new book. Traditionally, such stories attract a largely female audience, yet you’re male and so are your protagonists. Are men (besides me) reading your books?
MQ: I’m told the majority of people who buy books are indeed women, but I hear from both sexes. It’s an equal mix. Honestly, I don’t think I’d care all that much if only one group of people read my books as long as enough of them continued to do so. I’m extremely grateful for whatever audience shows up.
(My novels Love May Fail, Sorta Like A Rock Star, and Every Exquisite Thing feature women protagonists.)
GS: Love May Fail—but I’m betting it doesn’t. Your books seem to reflect an underlying belief in the essential goodness of people, and their ability to make it through. It’s been said that if you want literary cred, you can’t have a happy ending. Why are you driven to sabotage your Pulitzer prospects?
MQ: If your primary goal is winning a prize, I’d say you’ve failed before you’ve even begun. I’ll admit that Hamlet is my favorite Shakespeare play, but there’s a reason The Bard wrote both tragedies and comedies—we need both.
The title Love May Fail is the first half of a quote found in Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird. 'Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail'. Vonnegut said his entire body of work was summed up by that sentence. (I don’t believe it ever won him a Pulitzer Prize.)
My father says his 'real life' is too stressful to watch depressing films. By the time he walks out of a movie theater, he wants to believe in a greater good. When I was little, I noticed he seemed happier in movie theaters than he was outside of them. That left an impression.
GS: Silver Linings Playbook the movie seemed to me quite different from the book. Are there movie plans or aspirations for any of your other books, and if so, what have you learned from the Silver Linings experience?
MQ: One of the first things David O. Russell said to me when I visited the movie set was this: "The book is yours. The movie is mine." And I’d say that’s true. I enjoyed David’s adaptation, changes and all.
I recently told another writer that the whole novelist-in-Hollywood experience sometimes feels like selling a kidney and then getting credit and/or blame for what the person using your old kidney is doing. When I see my literary kidney up there on the screen, I’m grateful because I know it will bring people back to my novels. So far, it has.
I have six other novel-to-screen adaptations in various stages of development. Mike White has written excellent screenplay adaptations of both Love May Fail and The Good Luck of Right Now. Fingers crossed.
(I’m also working on an original screenplay.)
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