The book is about Pat Peoples. A man suffering from severe mental health problems. He hates Kenny G, wants to end "apart-time" with his wife Nikki, and is stalked by probably his only friend ... Tiffany. Then we have his mom who loves him to a fault, but heck, let's face it ... she's miserable because her husband is almost always a mean-spirited jackass, and he's even worse when the Eagles lose a game. The first part of the book focuses on Pat trying to better himself as a man to end "apart-time" with his estranged wife Nikki, whom everyone in his family hates ... no, despises, and who he needs so badly. The part of the book that bored me to tears is Pat's adjustment to life outside the "Bad Place," or the mental hospital where he spent years of his life that he no longer remembers. His life is consumed by the Eagles football team, and his happiness is affected by whether or not they win. Then we see Tiffany, another mentally challenged (woman) who you can figure out from the first few pages is in love with Pat.
I don't want to give away the book, but let me say that overall I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it as much as someone enjoys the feeling of love, and then realizes that when love is taken away it feels like a rock at the pit of your stomach that keeps slamming into your insides, and it hurts so bad, but it's that dull pain you can't seem to get rid of, and so all you can do is cry, and be hateful toward others.
Yeah, depressing, isn't it? That's this novel. The whole time, Pat Peoples is just looking to reconcile with his wife, the woman who he wants to treat better, love better, who he wants to impress by bettering himself, but guess what? That woman, that mean, abandoning woman ... she doesn't love him. And she never will. As the reader, you can guess that from the moment the book starts. Pat views his life as a movie, and hey ... all movies have to have happy endings, right? Wrong. He's so pathetically, yet romantically, yet incessantly obsessed with getting this woman back, that the rest of the world stops to make it happen, but yes, we as pessimistic readers, we know ... hey buddy ... it's never going to happen.
This book has themes of life and fairy-tale endings, of reality, of pessimism vs. optimism of knowing that to live is just to move on. At one point, Pat writes to God that it's so great he sent Jesus down here to teach us about miracles, "because the possibility of miracles happening keeps a lot of people moving forward down here." Then on Christmas, what shattered his hopes of a happy-ending, really allowed him to experience a new kind of miracle he didn't know he wanted. But hey, according to his friend Danny "Miracles happen on Christmas, Pat. Everyone knows that shit."
Life is funny. What Pat Peoples thought he wanted, was not what he needed. Who he needed was the crazy-ass woman across the street who through her own incredibly messed up ways, tried to end the move going on in Pat's head ... she tried to let him know that there was a silver lining to his life ... but it couldn't be reached until he let go of that pit in his stomach that represented a past love. A love that no longer wanted him.
Love is harsh. Life is harsh. The people that love us often don't understand us, but they stick by us anyway. But really ... to be happy, to embrace the "silver linings" in life, we must move on and recognize that maybe the best thing we have is loving that one person who is just as crazy as us, and needs us just as badly as we need them. Read it, and let me know if you agree.
Love doesn't hurt. It gives us scars that we have to forget in order to move on and try all over again.
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