It is not always entirely clear that “Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock” has the stylistic brawn to bear its heavy load. When the book is intended for teenagers, the moral responsibilities of the project become steeper still. It’s one thing, after all, to write a novel from the point of view of a shooting victim, but something else to trace the mind-set of the perpetrator. Books like Quick’s are necessary, if only because novels, at their best, do what horrific headlines cannot: they reintroduce human subjectivity into large-scale national disaster. Teenage gunmen may once have seemed a chilling aberration, but have become, hauntingly, as much a part of the American risk landscape as joy riding and misadventure at prom. Quick is not the first writer to take on the subject of high school shooters. Yet he’s conventional enough to be concerned when Leonard shows up dispersing valedictions and urges his troubled charge to write himself “letters from the future,” imagining the life he’ll live if he can make it beyond high school. Herr Silverman challenges students to think of people as both “human and monster,” and has his own secrets: for some reason, he never rolls up his sleeves. He thinks his school is filled with “repressed monkeys” and “über morons,” with the exception of Herr Silverman, a teacher who leads his favorite Holocaust-history class. The day he plans to commit his murder-suicide, he sets about delivering presents to those people he respects as a way of saying goodbye. “Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock,” in this vein, is meant to be a richly empathetic foray into violent mental illness, and much of the book follows the tortured logic of Leonard’s unsettled mind. Quick’s previous novels include “The Silver Linings Playbook” he specializes in voicey, first-person stories of young people on the ropes. They watch old Bogart films together and talk in film-noir quotations - a conversation style limited enough to hide Leonard’s turmoil. Otherwise, he mostly hangs around with his favorite neighbor, a derelict widower named Walt. Some days, he plays hooky and dresses up in businessman attire (he calls it his “funeral suit”) to follow the most unhappy-looking grown-ups he can find, trying to understand what keeps them going. His burned-out rocker father flew the coop some years ago his mother, a fashion designer, is so checked out she doesn’t remember his birthday. Leonard is the product of a wild imagination and a troubled home. Creeping through the morning with this secret knowledge, he attempts to reconcile the lives that have gone wrong around him, and to savor the freedom that comes from his imminent demise. On the morning Leonard Peacock, the high school narrator of Matthew Quick’s young adult novel, prepares a murder-suicide, he packs the Nazi pistol his grandfather brought back from the war and starts his school day with a plan.
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