We Are the Light Doesn't Ignite

WE ARE THE LIGHT (2022)

By Matthew Quick

Avid reader Press, 246 pages.

★

 

 

 

Sometimes minimalism is efficient and appropriate. Sometimes it’s just minimal. We Are the Light falls into the second category. Perhaps I should have known better. Matthew Quick also wrote Silver Lining Playbook, which was made into a movie that I found schmaltzy. Like it, Lucas Goodgame, the central character of We Are the Light, is a damaged man.

 

Goodgame is part of a survivors’ group from a mass shooting at the Majestic Theater in Somewhere or Other, Pennsylvania, that left his wife Darcy and 16 others dead. Lucas isn’t too sad, though, because he believes that Darcy is an angel who visits him regularly. He even collects feathers that he says are from her wings and claims to have seen the souls of all the dead rise.

 

But when he writes to Karl, his Jungian therapist, and asks to see him to talk about all of this, Karl ghosts him. He writes letter after letter–often dropping them off at his door–until a restraining order makes him stop. Is Lucas so delusional that he has scared off his therapist? Lucas also angers Sandra Coyle from the group when he rebuffs her effort to enlist him in a gun control movement because he says he needs to focus on his grief before getting involved in politics.

 

The entire story is told through letters to Karl, which are loaded with Lucas’ take on Jungian theory in which he tries to apprise him of how he’s trying to heal himself. He tells of how his African-American friends Isiah and Bess are praying for him, of how Jill from the Cup of Spoons Diner has been cooking for him, and  how he has allowed young Eli Hansen to camp out in his backyard. That’s surprising because Eli has become the town pariah as it was his older brother Jacob who was responsible for the mass murder.

 

An old adage holds that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing and this holds true for Lucas’ various “insights” into Jungian psychology. Even if you have only passing familiarity with such concepts, you can tell that Lucas understands some of its form, but not much about its function.

 

The plot takes other odd twists. Jill, who was Darcy’s best friend, seems to have moved in with Lucas almost immediately after Jacob shot up the town. Is she a grief maven or a grifter? That’s not nearly as weird as a subplot involving a way to help Eli to graduate from high school via a credited post-drop out project. The grand idea is to make a monster movie starring Eli and other locals that will debut at (gulp!) the Majestic Theater. This, somehow, is supposed to help the community heal. This really angers Sandra, who is convinced that Eli is as psychotic as his sanguinary brother. Lucas tells of his battles with Sandra, how the movie is proceeding, and his sadness that Eli has grown closer to two others and has moved out. All of this is detailed in, yep, letters to Karl–17 in all, one for each victim. Karl remains silent.

 

The last part of the book takes place nearly four years later and updates us on Lucas, his new Jungian therapist, his relationship with Jill, how Eli has fared, and Karl’s fate. If you sense you’ve been setup for a cheap plot ploy, who am I to dissuade you? You might like the resolution and manipulative sentimentality better than I did, but everything is pretty much what I expected from a novel that’s a classic one-trick pony.

 

About the best I can say for We Are the Light is that it didn’t turn into an evangelical Christian novel filled with miracles. Still, if this book is optioned, you’d do well to read reviews from respected film critics before viewing it. By all means avoid  trade magazine hacks and anyone who calls it “timely” because of it deals with the national plague of mass shootings. Let me be clear; those people insult Aurora, Buffalo, El Paso, Nashville, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Virginia Beach, and all the other places where real people suffering from real anguish continue to grieve.

 

Rob Weir