Greg's Reviews > The Silver Linings Playbook

The reductive takeaway: The adult Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Sometimes I wonder if I read the same book as other people. That's usually when I hate something that other people love. It's rarer when we both like the same book, but for vastly different reasons and have vastly different interpretations. But of course, the power of literature is interpretation, so it's to be expected.

For some reason, people keep calling this book "fun" and "entertaining." I'm sure someone probably called it a "light-read" at one point.

Huh?

I really liked it, but this is some depressing stuff. It has quirk and black comedic moments, but no one said sad couldn't also be funny. I also don't understand why everyone isn't shouting "adult Perks of Being a Wallflower" over and over again. That was my first thought when I started reading and my first thought when I finished. Yes, the circumstances are different in that Charlie is 16 and Pat is 34 and Charlie is quietly crazy, while Pat is crazy crazy, but I see a lot of similarities. The crazy, the crying, the "secret," the narrative style, the voice. I'm sure there's more, but that's all I can think of at the moment. Both characters have some mental illness. Both cry in public...a lot. Both have a "secret" reason as to why they are the way they are. Both are written in 1st person and take the form of written communications. Charlie exclusively writes letters. Pat writes journal entries and letters, although we also see a few letter's in Nikki's voice (view spoiler)[actually Tiffany's voice (hide spoiler)]. Both Charlie's and Pat's voices are remarkably childlike for their ages. Both are unreliable narrators. However, for all their similarities, they are quite different books. It's like Chbosky and Quick took the same central conceit and ran in complete opposite directions.

Perks is jewel-like in its surreal isolation. It is so all about Charlie and his voice and his experience and his life. Chbosky is an instinctual writer who I can imagine wrote Perks very fast in a fit of apocryphal epiphany. He doesn't spend a lot time pondering the whys of things because teenagers don't care. So why should we. We put too much of a premium on knowing the backstory, knowing the genesis of every action we take. Perks delights in the unknown, even so far as to shove the big reveal to the epilogue, as if that event and the discovery and the hospitalization are not the story.

Silver Linings Playbook has a totally different philosophy. It is set in the adult world, where events are not isolated, where what happens now resonates, where what happened then paralyzes. Pat's story has context. Where Perks ends with Charlie coming out of the hospital, Playlist begins with Pat coming out of the hospital. Playlist is about the consequences, about how we move on. Quick knows that these character's backstory and their relationships matter. He likes the whys of things and doesn't delight in the present, preferring to wallow in the past, like most adults I know.

The narrative conceit of Pat writing down his thoughts of the day works well here. Because of the length of Pat's stay in the neural center and his powerful sedative cocktail, his memory leaks. He has to write everything down to remember everything. To Pat writing is more than putting pencil to paper, it is almost identity itself. It is how he remembers who he is. We see an example of this when he first starts to write to Nikki and he sends her two hundred pages of his journals. Maybe I'm reading too much into a one sentence explanation, but I found it moving.

Pat's voice is a little hard to grasp at first. Much like Charlie's it is very child-like and naive. I think Charlie's voice comes from teenage selfishness, but Pat's voice is willful ignorance. Like his belief in silver linings and the happy ending to his movie, Pat has no room for negativity ("practice being kind, not right"). Pat reminded me of Poppy from Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky. Obviously Pat is far more fucked up, but Poppy also used her optimism to fight the negativity of the day. To Pat and to Poppy it is clear that happiness is a choice. And if you choose to be happy, then one day you will be. I make it sound kind of depressing, but these both are supposed to be comedies!

One note on all the football talk. I come from football crazed Texas. Football talk doesn't bother me . There is a lot of it, but football is how Pat connects to his brother and father, and in some ways, to much of the world around him. It allows him to see himself as not this fucked up individual, but one member of a clan. Where his actions aren't a result of improper dosage or anger issues, but pissed-off fans.

Another note on football. We don't see this level of specificity much in contemporary fiction, especially when the specific time is not the point. We're made to believe the always resetting present is the optimum setting. Quick talks about a specific Eagles season (I remember it, the events are real!). Pat identifies with the up and down Eagles so it was important for Quick to write about that specific season. Although the Eagles are pretty up and down as a whole, so he could have written about a lot of seasons. That specific season does follow the narrative thrust of Pat's story. They start off strong, then taper off and seem out of it, but then burst to life and make the play-offs. I think the specific can be universal, so I liked this. It gives his life context.

God I've written a lot. Let's do the rest quick-like. The plot is good, familiar, but good. It's not as predictable as you think it would; I guess that makes it unpredictable. No, it's familiar, with some twists. The characters feel real in their oddness and quirkiness and craziness, not manufactured. When Pat's dad complains about Pat's mom spending so much money on Pat and then busts their TV and buys an expensive new TV, his character becomes rounder. Like a lot of family, he does a million tiny things wrong, but always gets the important one right, that he loves his family. It takes him a while to get there, but we do. I'm not writing quick-like. Characters good. Story good. "Secret" reveal expected. Ending, expected with one wrinkle.

I liked the ending a lot actually. No happy endings. No swooning strings and ending on a romantic interlude. Pat doesn't get all the answers he wants. He doesn't get all his memory back. He's a little worse for wear, but he survives. That's his silver lining.

ETA: I'm not a very good self-promoter. I should have linked to my previous review. Duh!