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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Book review and it's not even the end of the month.
Let's face it; I've not exactly been Miss Johnny On The Spot with my monthly book review posts this year. I wanted to review this one while it was still fresh and post it now in case I forget later. Plus this is actual content, which is hard to come by nowadays. And it's also a little long to be thrown in with all my other reviews. OK, shut up, Rachel, and get on with it. (Yes ma'am.)
The Hour I First Believed -- Wally Lamb -- 2.25
I loved (and still love) She's Come Undone, and liked I Know This Much Is True well enough, so when I saw that Wally Lamb had come out with a new book I got it from the library to give it a try. Sadly, it doesn't measure up to either of his previous books. The first 400-ish pages (that is to say, the first half) are a compelling and disturbing, if somewhat overly-drawn-out, retelling of the Columbine shootings and their effect on Wally's fictional protagonist, Caelum Quirk, a teacher at Columbine, and his equally fictional wife, Maureen, a school nurse there. Caelum was a highly unlikeable character: he's emotionally wooden (an issue that I was sure would come up at some point, but it didn't), rather obtuse, and also unevenly written. Lamb tends toward overdoing it in his extremely detailed chapters about the school and the shootings, but who can blame him, really? In spite of its flaws, this first half of the book holds up well enough.
In the second half I got bored, though, and when you've written a nearly-800-page novel, you really don't want to start boring people. As part of the fallout from the shootings in Columbine, Caelum and his wife (who is battling an addiction to tranquilizers) have moved back to his family's farm in Connecticut, willed to Caelum by his aunt. Just as Maureen is starting to get better, sort of, things really go haywire, very badly, and while Maureen is serving time in prison, Caelum and a tenant he's installed in the farmhouse -- a women's studies major from Tulane who wound up in Connecticut with her husband after Katrina -- begin unearthing Caelum's family history, and needless to say, All Is Not As It Seemed. This is spread out over four hundred pages, consisting largely of made-up century-old letters, articles, and diary entries -- and let's not forget the tenant's doctoral thesis, all sixty pages of it. There are a couple of twists as the end gets closer (one of which, I have to say, was a bit shocking, which at this point was a good thing, but since it was part of the very predictable Family Mysteries theme, it lacked the punch it might have had coming out of a clear blue sky). In those same last 100 pages or so, there's also an increasingly heated subtext that's basically a diatribe against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the Iraq war, and anyone who ever voted Republican ever (you know, I'd say I hated this regardless of the author's politics, because I would, but you never see it happening from the other side, at least not in novels that are intended for the mainstream market). Then the diatribe gives up on the whole "subtext" thing in the afterword, and then the novel's finally over.
Also, OK, look, male writers (or, hey, female ones too; this is an equal-opportunity complaint). I have to say it. Please, please stop writing detailed accounts of your characters' masturbation sessions. I am begging here. Nobody needs to see that. OK? Thank you.
All right, so it's not ALL terrible. There's some good symbolism, although I got tired of being whacked over the head with it (I get it: praying mantises = triumph over adversity, thank you very much). The first chapter, wherein Caelum encounters Dylan and Eric at the pizza parlor where they worked and has a normal conversation with them, with no clue what's coming in just a few days, is really very good. The character of Velvet is a bright spot in the book, someone I felt I could know and maybe do know. Maureen wasn't so bad once I got to know her. Lamb's a good writer, although I think he needs a new editing team; he seems to fall victim to the same foible that has sunk Diana Gabaldon so low. He knows (or imagines, in the latter half) so much about his subjects, and it's all such interesting stuff, and much of it throws light on some very important topics (small sample of the many Issues in this novel: the treatment of women in prison, school bullying, PTSD, war, Hurricane Katrina, teenage prostitution, drug addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, child molestation, incest), and he just can't bear to leave any of it out -- and his editor didn't make him leave it out. (If I'd had the editing of this novel, I'd have wanted to cut it probably in half. Or make it a really punchy novella that grabbed you and wouldn't let go. Or I would have left the first chapter alone as a short story and thrown out the rest. But that's just me, and I'm neither a writer nor an editor, a fact for which I'm sure Mr. Lamb, the publishing industry, and the rest of Western civilization can be grateful.)
Overall, I think the guy just tried to do too much. He admits something in the author's notes that I had pretty much suspected from the beginning, given the ten years since the release of his last novel and the forced feel of much of the text: he had a deadline, a contract, and waiting readers, and nothing to give them. He follows his admission with the story of how the novel was inspired, but the bottom line is that this novel felt like work. Work for him to write, work for me to trudge through waiting for the good parts that kept getting fewer and farther between. The effort he put into it is so evident that I feel really bad not liking it, and I kind of hope that other people do like it, because tenderhearted me can't stand the thought of even Wally Lamb (who I'm pretty sure would hate me to my core if he knew me, based on that afterword) sitting with his head in his hands, washing down Tums with vodka, and looking back on ten years' wasted work writing a book that ended up tanking. Good luck, Mr. Lamb, and here's hoping for your sake that my opinion is the minority view.
Comments
That was an awesome review. Enough for me to just say no to the book.
Posted by: mary at December 23, 2008 08:15 PM
That sounds like an extremely repugnant novel. Honestly, I haven't even read She's Come Undone-- kept passing it over in library sales, for some reason. (Maybe it was the Oprah sticker most of them had. I promise I'm not a literary snob, but the Oprah brainwash irritates me.) I'll pick up the next cheap copy I see, or get it from the library, sometime.
Posted by: Michael at December 24, 2008 05:14 AM
You know, somehow, even your bad reviews generally make me want to read the books. That's pretty impressive of you. I think. ;) I've never read Lamb - I assume I should start with She's Come Undone? And if I'm really curious about this new one, clearly I should get it from the library rather than spend any money on it...
Posted by: Kat with a K at December 25, 2008 07:27 PM
