The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb (2008:Harper. ISBN 978-0-06-039349-6)
$7.95? For a Wally Lamb novel in hardcover? How could I pass it up? I couldn’t. So when I saw remainder copies of Lamb’s latest book, The Hour I First Believed on the bargain table at Barnes and Noble in Duluth, well, I couldn’t resist. I mean, I absolutely loved Lamb’s classic, I Know this Much is True which I read a few years back.
A Wally Lamb novel. For under eight bucks. What could go wrong?
And it didn’t hurt that the subject matter of the book, at least as set out in the jacket blurb, was the Columbine massacre. You remember. The day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris decided to end the lives of teachers and students at their high school in Littleton, Colorado. The day that, for some of us, true innocence died. The subject matter, how a teacher and his nurse wife (Caelum and Maureen Quirk) survive (or don’t survive: don’t want to spoil the story) the assault on the school they work at, intrigued me. I’d been through the Department of Justice’s “Safe Schools” training in San Antonio a few years ago and much of what we reviewed, in terms of school safety protocol, has been cobbled together by the experts in the aftermath of tragedies at Columbine, Paduca, and Virginia Tech.
On to the book. The Columbine story is chillingly retold through the eyes of Caelum, who was at a family funeral when the shooting started. Lamb walks through a fictional account of the immensity of evil and slaughter that manifested from two seemingly inconsequential young men that day in Littleton. In the sections dealing with Columbine, Lamb is at the peak of his powers as a fiction writer and factual reporter; weaving truth and emotion into a seamless pattern of reality that seems too real to be merely a tale. And yet, there it is: A fictional account of the murders and the cowardice and the terror and the heroism that befell a quiet suburb of Denver that fateful day.
Lamb is equally adept at delving into the emotional wreckage the tragedy causes Caelum and other survivors. Amidst the retelling of the cold, brutal reality of students hunting down and executing fellow students, Lamb builds marital and psychological tension until the reader is nearly overcome by surrogate emotion. Again, the work on the page is masterful.
And then, the whole thing goes south. We are dragged into an endless parade of circumstances and histories tied to the Quirk family’s ancestry. On and on, Lamb chronicles past secrets, deeds, events, and mischief; all of which demonstrates Lamb’s ability to organize bins of facts into a parade of existence, but does nothing to advance the main storyline. I want more of Maureen. I want more of the inner turmoil, the attempts at reconciliation and resolution between Maureen and her husband. And I don’t give a damn about the secrets hiding in Caelum’s past because, guess what? They aren’t relevant to the main theme of this imperfectly crafted mess.
The eight bucks? About half the cost of a good trade paperback these days. That seems fair because half a book is about all I got. 3 stars out of 5.
