The Silver Linings Playbook

The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

I was very disappointed by this book. Midway through it, I thought it was going to end up as the best work of fiction I’d read in the past few years. By the end…nope. There was so much potential, so much depth, so much good. Then it all just fizzles away.

The Silver Linings Playbook is the story of Pat Peoples, a man in his early thirties who is being discharged from a neural health facility after an indeterminate—to him, at least—length of time. Pat’s mother picks him up from the facility in Baltimore and returns him to the home in South Jersey in which he grew up. At home, Pat dedicates himself to restoring his mind and body so that he can reunite with Nikki, his wife, and end what he calls “apart time.”

Pat’s impaired brain sees life as a movie. As he believes that all good movies have happy endings, he believes that “apart time” is just the struggle through which he must fight in order to achieve his movie’s happy ending. Negativity in his life is something he views as a screenwriter tricking the audience into thinking the movie will have a bad ending. The novel follows this type of storytelling—Pat’s narration is like that of a movie, complete with a Rocky-style training montage.

As a first-person narrative told in the present tense, the book gives us Pat’s thoughts and feelings as he thinks and feels them. He is endearing, but witnessing his thought process is heartbreaking. At the same time, being in the family home with Pat’s mother and father lets us know exactly why the man is the way that he is. That Peoples household was a toxic environment, one that gives the reader a sense that Pat, as the elder of the two Peoples children, didn’t have much of a chance to grow up healthy and stable. He grew up fighting an uphill battle that he lost.

He doesn’t realize this, of course, but it is evident to the reader, who feels compelled to want to root for him. Even when he displays racist and sexist tendencies, one can relate it all back to family structure in which he was raised. The Silver Linings Playbook shines in this area. The realism of environment and emotion in the Peoples’ South Jersey die-hard Eagles fan home is very real. I know these people.

The moments shared between Pat and his mother run readers through a gamut of emotions. They were beautifully written and, again, feel very real. They are, in my opinion, the very best parts of the book, which is a bad thing. The plot of this novel is such that Pat’s friendship with Tiffany is the most important relationship of the book. Unfortunately, the most intimate moments of the book are those moments he shares with his mother. Pat’s intimate moments with Tiffany, the moments that build their relationship and actually contribute to his development as a person, all take place during his “montage”. I found that to be a bad choice for storytelling. The “montage” threw off the pace of the story. Instead of seeing and thinking and feeling everything day-by-day with Pat, we jump forward a month or so with tiny glimpses of plot. The Silver Linings Playbook is not a plot-driven tale, yet the author chose to let plot drive the portion of the novel in which the protagonist’s character goes through its most critical developmental period. I don’t understand that choice.

Due to that “montage”, readers miss the bonds formed by Pat and Tiffany, and the end result is that we aren’t given a reason to buy into their relationship. I didn’t care about it. Tiffany was supposed to be a special character (the text tells us so), a real best friend, but she was written as just another person.

The first-person narrative hurts here as well. Pat and Tiffany are both screwed up (their words), and they want to help each other. That makes the story of Pat’s development as much Tiffany’s story as it is his. They must grow and develop together, yet we don’t see any of Tiffany’s growth. She’s just there. She is a plot device, not a character. The failure to flesh Tiffany out was this novel’s greatest downfall (fortunately, this error was fixed for the movie).

Later on, there are several rather long chapters that are just letters. The letters throw off the novel’s pace too. They also, as letters are, told in past tense and make up much of the last fifth of the novel. Again, we have critical details that are given to the reader in an expository manner. Very disappointing.

On another level, I was disappointed by the character of Danny, whom Pat often describes as his “black friend”. It doesn’t bother me so much that Danny’s role throughout the first two-thirds of the novel was to teach Pat things like “mad cheddar” and “drop knowledge” and “Bros B4 Hos”. What bothered me was that the plot demanded Danny be Black so that Pat could have an incident in North Philly. Had I been reading a hard copy, I would have thrown the book against the wall at that point. It was a cheap and insulting plot device.

Overall, The Silver Linings Playbook was a good novel that could have (should have?) been great. I am disappointed, but glad that I read it.

C+