Chaos rules in Wally Lamb’s latest
School shootings. Hurricane Katrina. Post-traumatic stress syndrome. Drug addiction. Women’s rights. Prisoner rights. Questions of faith.
Too much to cover in one novel? Not for Wally Lamb, who garnishes it all with generational history and family secrets.
“The Hour I First Believed” shows the popular author of “She’s Come Undone” (1992) and “I Know This Much Is True” (1998) still knows how to force his characters to navigate their way out of the mazes of hell.
Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colo., finding jobs at Columbine High School. He as an English teacher; she as a school nurse.
Caelum must return to his family’s farm in Three Rivers, Conn., after his aunt has a stroke. At the same time, Maureen finds herself trapped in the Columbine library, hiding in a cabinet from two students on a murderous rampage. She survives the shootings, but does not escape unscathed. The screams of the victims and the taunts of the killers haunt her night and day. She suffers flashbacks and becomes emotionally withdrawn.
Trying to regain a sense of safety and normalcy, Caelum and Maureen move back to the farm in Three Rivers. But things are not so easily ordered.
We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere.
While Maureen recuperates, Caelum finds a treasure trove of letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings that allow him to piece together his family history from the Civil War up to his own childhood. He unearths long-buried family secrets, and as he struggles to come to terms with his discoveries, Maureen spirals further and further into despair.
Maybe we’re all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we’re scared shitless of explosive change. But we’re fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium — the devils let loose from their cages. “There but for the grace of God,” the faithful say. “It’s not for us to know His plan.” Which, I’ve concluded, is bullshit.
“The Hour I First Believed,” at more than 700 pages, is packed cover to cover with drama. As with his previous books, I found myself wondering, “What more can happen to these poor characters?” The hits just keep coming.
Also true to Lamb’s style is the weaving of family history throughout the book. He used this technique in “I Know This Much Is True” and does so again, even more successfully, in “The Hour I First Believed.”
In addition, Lamb again proves himself more than capable of crafting a believable female protagonist, as he did in “She’s Come Undone.” His work with women prisoners shows its influence in this novel, and perhaps his intuitiveness and sensitivity allows him to give such an authentic voice to his female characters. However he’s able to do it, he does it well.
“The Hour I First Believed,” though very much representative of Lamb’s writing, did surprise me. Peppered sparingly throughout are references to some familiar names: Dominick and Thomas Birdsey. Don’t know who they are? Not to worry. If you haven’t read “I Know This Much Is True,” the brief references to them will pass you on by, but for those of us who have, it’s nice to encounter them again.
Lamb acknowledges that this story was a hard one to write, I just hope I don’t have to wait another 10 years for his next novel. Hear from Lamb himself in this clip below.
