Lori Duff Writes

  The Good Luck of Right Now: A Novel

The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick is a strange little book, with a narrator reminiscent of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.” Bartholomew Neil is a man in his late 30’s, clearly impaired in some way, though it is unclear in what way. His whole life he has been called a ‘retard,’ but his voice is intelligent enough to belie that fact. Still, he is unemployed and probably unemployable, and has spent his life taking care of his Mother. When his mother dies, he is left lost and purposeless and on his own, without the first clue about how to pay bills or where the money even comes from.

Going through his mother’s things, he finds a form solicitation letter purportedly from Richard Gere. Since his mother, at the end of her illness, called Bartholomew “Richard,” Bartholomew find this connection/coincidence to be unavoidable, and the book is written as a series of letters that Bartholomew writes to Richard Gere.

Bartholomew finds himself living with a self-defrocked Priest, in love with a woman he knows only as “the Girlbrarian” and paired up with a foul mouthed loner as his only friend. To say any more than that would be to give spoilers, which I don’t want to do.

The “thing to think about” in this book is coincidences, and whether or not they have meaning, and the general interconnectedness of everything. The “good luck of right now,” the books title, is what Bartholomew’s Mom called the balance in the universe. If something awful is happening to you, something good must be happening to someone else. It’s more complicated than that, but, well read the book.

So as I was thinking of these things while in the middle of the book, suddenly all kinds of posts started popping up on Facebook about Richard Gere. Given the books, “there are no coincidences” theme, I thought that was kind of spooky.

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Lori Duff

Lori B. Duff is an award-winning author who practices law on the side.  Her latest book, “If You Did What I Asked in the First Place” was awarded the Gold Medal for humor in the Foreword INDIES awards in 2019. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook. For more blogs written by Lori, click here. For more information about Lori in general, click here. If you want Lori to do your writing for you, click here. If you want Lori to help you market your book, click here.