Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Love May Fail by Matthew Quick

A trophy wife who shrugs off the dead weight of her marriage; a teacher of exceptional dedication; two mothers with overactive defence mechanisms; a loving brother and uncle who strives to bring contentment to the women in his life. Matthew Quick’s Love May Fail bears many of the hallmarks of his debut novel, the celebrated The Silver Linings Playbook, and might best be read as a series of four interconnecting stories, each of them focused on a life that, at one point or another, exists in the busy suburban haze of southern New Jersey.

In her late 30s, after 10 years with her husband, Ken, Portia Kane theatrically abandons her marriage and returns to her childhood home, the residence of her agoraphobic hoarder mother. Both Ken and Mrs Kane are examples of Quick’s gift for crafting character with a handful of revealing scenes; for instance, Ken and Portia met when he spied her in a Miami restaurant and offered Portia’s dinner companion $500 for her seat. Wealthy, charming Ken makes pornography, “the misogynistic kind,” disillusioned Portia tells her former teacher, Nate Vernon. “Made for misogynistic men.”

Nate is soulless Ken’s antithesis, an educator so earnest and devoted that he painstakingly makes individual ‘Official Member of the Human Race’ cards for each student in the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut, whom Nate reveres and whose work he teaches alongside that of Camus, Shakespeare, Turgenev and other masters. The trouble with great literature, Love May Fail reminds us, is that it encompasses beauty and damnation in equal measure, and when Nate’s life takes an ugly turn, it is David Foster Wallace’s writing on suicide rather than Vonnegut’s resolute optimism upon which he obsesses.

Infidelity, suicidal ideation, drug addiction, emotional abandonment – Quick feasts upon it all, but as in The Silver Linings Playbook, he finds a way to marry authenticity and hopefulness. These are real lives, full of the lies we tell ourselves (if Portia writes a successful novel she will save Nate) and with just enough fancy to keep the plot rolling along (she churns out a manuscript and lands a book agent and a lucrative publishing deal just like that). Her boyfriend Chuck Bass, a high school acquaintance and would-be teacher recovering from years lost to heroin, stands in for the reader as he privately manifests disbelief at such effortless triumph.

Quick has a mind for irony, however, and a disinclination to allow his characters any easefulness. The novel-within-a-novel, Love May Fail, is, in the view of one critic, summed up by the title’s final word. The same cannot be said of Quick’s work, which is alive with humanity, empathy and wit. It is rare for a writer to fuse black comedy and genuine tragedy with a total lack of contrivance or mawkishness.

The truth of the titular phrase is proven many times – particularly in relation to mothers and their children – and if the novel has a weak point, it is a brief monologue of letters that belabours the point, better made elsewhere, that any substance, behaviour or credo can be abused by fallible people. This is a minor flaw in a beautifully readable novel by a writer of power and insight who gives one of the last words to the great humanist Vonnegut, from whose line in Jailbird the title comes: “Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.”