Ratings9
Average rating4.2
When his mother dies, 38-year-old Bartholomew Neil, who doesn't know how to be on his own, discovers a letter in his mother's underwear drawer that causes him to write a series of highly intimate letters to actor Richard Gere, while embarking on a quest to find out where he belongs.
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Easily among the top 3 epistolary novels addressed to Richard Gere I've ever read - no qualification.
The thing I like about Matthew Quick (having read this and The Silver Linings Playbook) is the realism he brings to characters and situations. I don't think a single one of the people who populate his works could be classified easily via archetype or caricature. Each of them is a living, breathing (FLAWED) human.
It's the kind of writing that can be difficult to read, if only because it seems awkward to be intruding on someone else's life in so personal a way. But it's definitely worth making your way through.
Sooo... the thing is, I am still not sure how I feel about this book. I kept Reading it expecting to like it more, and by the last chapters it had happened: I was used to Bartholomew's quirkiness (he's 39, bound to have Asperger's, lost his mom, nobody knows how his bills are being paid, including him, takes everyone to his home because he's very kind, never had a job, has a crush on a girl he calls The Girlbrarian and literally hear voices. Ah, before I forget: the whole book is told through his letters to Richard Gere, whom he believes was some sort of vessel to his mom.)Still, it was not absolutely lovable like Flowers for Algernon or The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1050.Mark_Haddon) or even my favorite of the genre (or what comes to my mind when I think of the genre, which is loosely bizarrely depicted mentally characters), Unexpectedly MIlo, by Matthew Dicks. Then, at some point I thought, why did I look for it in the first place?
(drum rolls): because he's the author of The silver linings playbook, which I hadn't read but saw the movie and really enjoyed. And now it just occurs to me that this exact book would probably be amazing turned into a screenplay, maybe it's just the guy's talent.
Or maybe I'm rambling. Sorry about that.