*I received this book as an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review
'Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.' - Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut
This is the first chance I’ve had
to write this, even though I finished Matthew Quick’s ‘Love May Fail’ in a few days almost as soon as I received it
through Netgalley.
I enjoy reading Quick’s work
because he uses a unique blend of themes that really speak to me; whether it’s
mental health, the role of parents and teachers, of love and relationships and
pain and betrayal – he does it all in a very particular, quirky (Quick-y) style which blends the humorous
and ironic (without belittling anything) with heartbreaking situations and
broken, eccentric/flawed characters.
Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her cheating husband
and their posh Florida life, she finds herself transported back home and back
to square one. In need of saving herself, she sets out to find and resurrect a
beloved high-school English teacher who has retired after a violent incident in
the classroom.
But she quickly learns that it's not a one-woman job. Luckily she meets
a few people on her journey. Can Chuck, the handsome brother of Portia's old
school friend, together with a sassy nun and a metal-head little boy, help
Portia's chances in her bid for renewed hope in the human race? (from http://www.panmacmillan.com/book/matthewquick/lovemayfail)
Oddly I read the blurb of the
book and it sounded like everything I’d normally avoid (cliché romantic comedy), even the title would
usually turn me off, but I know better with Matthew Quick – I know that I’ll
always find something of what I’m looking for in his books.
Love May Fail has Camus, Bon Jovi (‘Ah, bullshit. Eighties hair metal was fun. It’s still fun. God, I miss
guitar solos. Where did those go? They were like the orgasm of the song. Why
would you ever cut those out? What do teens even do in mirrors now if they
can’t play air guitar?’) Dead Poet's Society and Ernest Hemingway
references, which are enough to win me over any day and Quick has cited all these as influences in many interviews. The plot is contrived at points and heavily dependent
on suspension of disbelief and coincidence but Quick’s writing is intelligent
and inter-textual and taps into sides of humanity that don’t get explored
enough.
My favourite of his books remains Forgive
Me, Leonard Peacock but Love May Fail
is another, sometimes trying, but ultimately thought-provoking adult novel. There
are times when Portia felt like a bit of a parody of herself, but switching
between different character perspectives ultimately balanced out the different
characters’ eccentricities and gave just enough of their inner-workings. As
someone who grew up in the Gossip Girl
generation, however, the name Chuck Bass always made me double take.
My favourite part was the story
of Mr Vernon (and his dog, Albert Camus) and the impact he had on Portia. I was
less interested in the love story, though Chuck, as a recovering addict and
father-figure to his nephew, was a compelling character on his own.
Mr Vernon: ‘You gotta believe once in a while, kids. That’s what I’m trying to
tell you here. The world will try to crush that belief out of you. It will try
its damnedest. ‘If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to
kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one
and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not
break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave
impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but
there will be no special hurry.’ Does anyone know who wrote that?’
Portia: ‘Ernest
Hemingway. It’s from A Farewell To Arms. We read it Sophomore year.’
Mr Vernon attempts to make his students understand the cost
of being strong, and tells them that one day they will all understand. He certainly experiences such a cost (this could be
seen as paralleling the fate of Mr Keating in Dead Poet’s Society – perhaps this is one interpretation of what
could have become of a man like Keating after), in a senseless, unprovoked
attack by a student which leaves him broken and damaged for the rest of his
life. It is this Mr Vernon that Portia has to try and restore. A depressed and
suicidal alcoholic, who names his dog Albert Camus. In a darkly comic scene,
the dog jumps to its death from his apartment window – what Mr Vernon
interprets as an act of suicide. There is something of the Camus-ian anti-hero
in Mr Vernon at this point, a quality of the Meursault – as he wonders ‘if it’s wrong to miss my dog much more than
I miss my mother’ (he finds out his mother, who’s letters he has never opened,
has died). Mr Vernon’s thinking is consumed by a grim strand of the Absurd (see in relation to Camus) – a dark
embrace of the futility and irrationality of his existence and a step away from
society’s emotional standards and claims on him.
It is this that Portia must contend with, as if somehow
saving Mr Vernon will save a whole group of students who have also made mistakes or had accidents and suffered.
Portia: ‘FUCK YOU, you
have a responsibility to your students! FUCK YOU, you have a responsibility to
yourself!’
Mr Vernon: ‘Why?’ I
yell. ‘Why? If you can tell me, I’d be most grateful. I was just a high school
English teacher. No one cared! No one at all! The world does not give a flying
hoot about high school English teachers! Why do I have a responsibility to
anyone? What responsibility do I have?’
Portia: ‘To be a good
man! Because you changed the lives of many kids. Because we believed in you!’
Both are guilty of extremes of thinking – Portia is full of
a romantic idealism – a belief that a kind of adoration or love between teacher
and students will prevail, while Mr Vernon has fallen into apathy and
Absurdism, believing only in love's failure.
I particularly like that Quick (a former teacher himself) acknowledges
the role of a teacher who positively impacts their students – so many of his
books make the case that such teachers can save lives, without even being aware
– they change worlds and mould minds. They matter and often they can go their
whole lives without realising just how much. Portia’s quest is an admirable
one, to give this gift to the teacher who helped her. Too often in society, the
voices of appreciation and the simple acts of gratitude are lost in the focus
on the negative and the extreme or people simply forget to express positive feelings that seem small in the moment. The pivotal roles that teachers can play are
expressed also in the personal lives of Leonard (in Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock) and Portia here. Both need the
surrogate paternal figures, and what other source is it to come from – with varying
degrees of absent parents and the majority of their formative years spent in
school?
In a great interview with Mountain X (I will reference this
a few times, all Quick quotes will be from here: https://mountainx.com/arts/matthew-quick-delights-and-devastates-in-latest-novel-love-may-fail/–) Quick spoke about how he tried to
channel his ‘inner Mr. Keating’, ‘with no
real life experiences to back my claims’ and then left teaching ‘completely burned out and dangerously
depressed’. He also speaks about the parts of the ‘teacher/student relationship’ that he finds fascinating:
‘It gets frozen in
time. I eternally think of my former students as teenagers, even though some of
them are in their thirties now. They have careers, houses and children of their
own. And they think of me as a teacher even though I haven’t written a lesson
plan or graded a test in more than a decade. I’ve given talks at the high
school I attended as a teenager and I still can’t call my former teachers by
their first names. I don’t think I ever will be able to do that.’
In the same interview, Quick alludes to a comment once made that his ‘characters take turns in rescuing each
other.’ This certainly plays out in Love May Fail, as there seems to be a
cycle of rescue attempts and fails and people trying to do their best in
difficult situations – it is all emphasized by each switch in perspective.
In her attempted rescue of Mr Vernon, Portia wants to fulfil
some of her childhood fantasies:
‘When I was in your
class I used to pretend you were my father, because I never had one—and if I
got to pick, I would have wanted a father exactly like you. I used to fantasize
about you taking me places like the Mark Twain House and teaching me about
great writers, the way other fathers might teach their sons about baseball
players at the ballpark. And now we’ve been to the home of a famous writer
together. It’s kind of like a childhood dream come true for me’
Even Chuck recognises the power of such a figure as a
constant:
‘He’s been my one
constant since I quit heroin, and a constant is a powerful thing’
It is ‘Romantic’,
in a ‘wonderfully platonic way’, as
Mr Vernon muses, ‘the former student
returning after all these years to save the grizzled teacher who has suffered
calamity and given up hope –it’s poetic, but it’s simply not real life’.
Instead, Portia and Chuck must find something of that
inspirational time with the old Mr Vernon in each other, and their bond grows
from the shared memory of those formative years and the teacher who inspired
them. Their grand gestures for Mr Vernon fail to have the desired effect, and when
he runs away in fear – both must face the question:
‘What do you do when
the person you admire most literally turns his back on you?’
The answer is, muddle through, put your heart and soul into
something worthwhile and hope it pays off in the end. For Portia, it is to
write the novel she’s been meaning to, and to make it a tribute to the teacher
who kept her going. This is where the title has such resonance – Quick has
talked before about the influence of this quote (taken from the beginning of
Vonnegut’s Jailbird: ‘Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail’),
and Vonnegut in general, on him. For Quick, this quote embodies the notion that ‘small, simple things save us in the end’
(see Mountain X interview) – perhaps not the grand, memorable gestures but the
quiet acts of gratitude and care – the smallest courtesies done with sincerity.
‘Some students beat
the hell out of you with a baseball bat, and some students save you by writing
novels. And we’ve got to thank our saviour no matter how many times we feel
attacked and broken, because we damn well need them. So that’s what today is
about. Thank you, Portia, for Love May Fail’
Love May Fail is
heart-warming, moving, funny, dark and full of small, simple feats of impact and it resonates on an individual and human scale.
