The Good Luck of Right Now

By: Matthew Quick

Narrated by: Oliver Wyman

Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Call it fate...

Call it synchronicity...

Call it an act of God...

Call it…The Good Luck of Right Now.

For 38 years, Bartholomew Neil has lived with his mother. When she gets sick and dies, he has no idea how to be on his own. His redheaded grief counselor, Wendy, says he needs to find his flock and leave the nest. But how does a man whose whole life has been grounded in his mom, Saturday Mass, and the library learn how to fly?

Bartholomew thinks he's found a clue when he discovers a "Free Tibet" letter from Richard Gere hidden in his mother's underwear drawer. In her final days, Mom called him Richard - there must be a cosmic connection. Believing that the actor is meant to help him, Bartholomew awkwardly starts his new life by writing Richard Gere a series of letters. Jung and the Dalai Lama, philosophy and faith, alien abduction and cat telepathy, the Catholic Church and the mystery of women, are all explored in his soul-baring epistles. But mostly the letters reveal one man's heartbreakingly earnest attempt to assemble a family of his own.

A struggling priest; a "Girlbrarian"; her feline-loving, foul-mouthed brother; and the spirit of Richard Gere join the quest to help Bartholomew. In a rented Ford Focus, they travel to Canada to see the Cat Parliament and find Bartholomew's biological father…and discover so much more.

©2014 Matthew Quick (P)2014 HarperCollinsPublishers

Critic reviews

"Thanks to Oliver Wyman's extraordinary performance, this novel should be savored in audio.... One can only pity the poor print reader." ( AudioFile)

"[A]nother offbeat gem populated with eccentric, fallible, intensely human characters." ( Booklist)

"A quirky coming-of-age story…. Quick writes with an engaging intimacy, capturing his narrator’s innocence and off-kilter philosophy, and the damaged souls in orbit around him." ( Publishers Weekly)

Unintelligible.

Matthew Quick wrote The Silver Linings Playbook, which was a wonderful movie. When I listened to the audiobook, I thought that Matthew showed a lot of promise as a writer, and a lot of guts, to put on display an extremely accurate, vivid, unflinching picture of what it is like to have a major mental illness. The movie was hollywood, of course, but the book was written by an author with tremendous skills, I can speculate about whether Matthew has a personal experience of mental illness, particularly the disorder which is called Bipolar Disorder, formerly manic-depressive illness.It doesn't matter whether or not he has that, but if he hasn't, then he is a man of remarkable powers of observation.
He wrote a second book, which I listened to but immediately forgot, not a good sign. The third book is so bad that it is annoying. Neil, the main character, is clearly a seriously deluded man. One of his main goals in life is to have a beer with a friend in a bar. He also hallucinates Richard Gere. He and Richard have daily conversations. This portrait of loneliness is awful enough, but the skill of the writing deteriorated to the point at which it was very hard to listen to, saying nothing about the uncomfortable content. However, in the middle of the book Matthew decompensates to the point at which his words are literally nonsensical gibberish. Matthew introduces a character who has to include the word fuck, or any of its variations, whenever he speaks. I quit at this point. Matthew completely lost me. I just cannot believe that an editor could allow such a manuscript to be published. The words become something like stream-of-consciousness, with the exception that the author is no James Joyce. Still, I root for him. I hope he does better next time, and that for God's sake he finds an editor.

Irritating female voice—I’d like a credit, please

Read it for Bookclub. Pathetic nature of first chapter made it very hard to get interested. The story did get better. But the Richard Gere conceit did not appeal to me.

The Whiniest Most Annoying Characters Ever!!

Would you try another book from Matthew Quick and/or Oliver Wyman?

I enjoyed Silver Linings Playbook but I wouldn't spend money or waste a credit on another Matthew Quick book.

What could Matthew Quick have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

He could have made it less annoying and more enjoyable! This book was nothing but incessant whining, crying, complaining & 'poor me's'! These characters were some of the most pathetic, negative, sad and depressed people I have read about! I tried, I really really tried but when the girl pulled out the pills and started talking 'exit' strategy because her and her brother couldn't pay their bills I was done!

Did Oliver Wyman do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

okay but not great

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Good Luck of Right Now?

So many I can't write it here.

Any additional comments?

I'm so angry that I wasted a credit on this book! I was vacillating between this and the Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly and I wish so bad I would have chosen the latter. Such a waste!!