The Hour I First Believed: A Novel
by Wally Lamb
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Book Reviews of The Hour I First Believed: A Novel
Book Review: Good golly, Wally...
Summary: 2 Stars
Having just finished The Hour I First Believed, I'm exhausted, but I'll try to summon enough strength to urge would-be readers to borrow this one from the library.
My first reaction is, WHEW! Am I glad that's over--quite the opposite reaction I hope for when reading the work of an author whom I have admired in the past.
My second reaction is, wow, do I dislike every character in this book, except maybe Aunt Lolly. Caelum starts out as a jerk and continues to be a jerk, no matter what else happens. He is cold, violent, and a sexist dork (I mean come on, he gets wildly angry when he discovers his poor, traumatized wife owns a vibrator. Does it really take a therapist to make that okay for him???). I am fully cognizant that a protagonist with faults is a more interesting, well-rounded everyman. But Caelum is an unrelenting asshat.
It took Wally Lamb ten years to write the book, and I believe that is EXACTLY what sunk the ship. According to his afterword, he started out with a story of family secrets and intrigue. Good enough. But during the long...loooong course of writing the novel, lots of awful stuff kept happening in the world around us: Columbine, Katrina, 9/11, the Bush administration. Lamb just kept dumping all that stuff into the book.
Any one of his central topics--disaffected teen violence and its aftermath, family secrets, the history of women's correctional facilities--would have made a splendid and engrossing novel. And he almost gets there with the Columbine story. But he throws out so many story lines that the novel unravels as it goes along. I dare say, if this had been Wally Lamb's first novel, the editors would have had a big, blue pencil reality check. Sadly, that did not happen here.
Remember Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys? He had an out-of-control book that just kept getting longer, and longer. Finally, his student Hannah tells him that his book reads as if he didn't make any choices. At all.
Now, I wonder if the used bookstore will take this one in on trade....
Book Review: Disturbing, great read ...
Summary: 4 Stars
If I could, I'd give this a 3 and a half but.. I can't so it's a 4 star. But who am I to rate this exceptional writer? If you haven't read anything of his, I wouldn't start with this -- I'd first go back to his earlier writings, and then come to this.
Like many other Lamb fans, I have been waiting for years for Wally Lamb's next book - I loved (as in loved loved loved) She's Come Undone (which I read LONG before it hit Oprah's book club) and really enjoyed I Know This Much. If I were not a fan, I'm not sure I would have picked this book or finished it. Here's what I like. The story is not just one simple storyline, where you go from a to b and end up where you might think. There are bumps and turns and spins that might be similar to real life.. more so in She's Come Undone. Perhaps starting with Columbine is what got this one off to a strange spin for me. His mixing of fiction with reality - real characters mixed in with fictional was, at least, unsettling - I wanted to see somewhere a notation that he'd received permission from the families to mention friendships and conversations with those who had died. The information about women in prison was interesting - I want to read the book he sponsored written by women inmates. But the writing kept me reading - I finished it in two days, almost non-stop reading as I wanted to know what would happen next. Small unimportant details stood in the way of my thoroughly enjoying this (making me wonder what other errors I might have missed) though (for example, mention of a character who was born into a Hicksite Quaker family in 1804 when the Hicksite split didn't happen until 1827). And some personal disagreements with what a Quaker woman would have been like in the 1800's but these are very minor complaints.
The book doesn't answer any questions about Columbine, just helps you think some more about it and our world -- the effects we have on one another. It's really a positive book, given the world we live in and the things that can happen to us. Read it. It'll make you pause.
Book Review: A Disappointing, Frustrating Waste of My Time
Summary: 1 Stars
Like others, I'll start off by saying I enjoyed Lamb's previous books, and I know I'm posting this long after the publication date but I was JUST reading this book and had to say: WHAT A SACK OF[...]! Both Mo and Caelum were arrogant, narcissistic, unempathetic characters who were seemingly incapable of self-understanding or owning up to their own actions, despite (or maybe because of) the author's use of myth, psychology and family history/revelations in the supposed search for meaning/faith. The book was saturated in liberal propaganda and cliches, perpetuating society-damaging lies. The Lizzy Porter 'history' section was a paean to revisionist history; her character was a 'social justice' activist who knew nearly EVERY 'celebrity' in her time and was involved (in an elevated position of course) in EVERY favored 'cause' or fashionable fad - it was so overdone that it was just impossible to accept her as a 'believable' representation of an 1800's woman, let alone a source of any meaning for Caelum. Supporting characters were caricatures (good liberals all of course); any traditionalists or authority figures were negative stereotypes. I kept waiting/hoping for "The Hour I First Believed" of the title to come - some self-adjustment or redemption or maturation of thought to finally arrive for the protaganist Caelum, but with 140 pages yet to go couldn't take anymore and threw the book down in disgust. I've been a voracious reader for decades (preferring history/nonfiction and good literature/novels that educate/inspire/put me in another's shoes, life or world) and long ago matured into a Conservative; maybe it's because U.S. culture has become so overwhelmingly liberal (preachy, nasty, unreasonable, shallow, self-righteous, willfully obtuse, lacking common sense), but the last thing I want to do is willingly suffocate under the same depressing, nihilistic tide in my pleasure reading! I honestly did not anticipate nor can I say I ever have before experienced such a strong reaction, but there it is. Fellow Conservatives, be forewarned!Book Review: A slumber book as in 'consciousness of the rest of the world is suspended'
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been in a slumber this past three days...a slumber of deep reading where once the kids leave for school, one opens a book and read till 3 p.m, then in 45 minutes before the school bus is back, one throws together a super quick super, straighten the main level of the house in the style of 'sweeping under the rug' i.e it looks someone tidied up but please don't open the hallway closet.
I go into these deep slumbers when I am reading a book that I can't put down. The writing is so good, the prose is so powerful and the hunger for what happened next is so strong that I simply have to put the rest of life mundanes and pleasures on hold.
The book "The Hour I First Believed" by Wally lamb is one such book. I don't how to categorize this massive 752 pages monster that I devoured in less then 72 hours. For some reason the movie Forrest Gump comes to mind..remember how entertaining it was and yet equal parts tragic and uplifting. The hour I First Believed is as American a novel as Forrest Gump was a movie about America and Americans.
The book is about a family whose dysfunctions elements are quintessential American: thrice divorced people, alcoholic parents, adopted children who don't know they are adopted,devastating school violence, teenage drug use, teenagers who haven't come out of the closet, there is crime and then there is punishment...American style.
There is a strong undercurrent of history through out the novel from civil war to Iraq war yet I did not see as a war novel.. one can very well argue it is a modern day love story between the main characters ,a middle age couple who has been married for 12 years.
I will end this review by quoting what Jennie Yabroff said in her 12/22/08 Newsweek article about 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen ( a book I have Not read so forgive me if I am totally off tangent here):
"It is a warm social novel on an epic scale, (a) sort of cultural temperature-taking....."
Book Review: Moments of brilliance....but an overall disappointment
Summary: 2 Stars
Let me preface this review by saying that I loved Wally Lamb's first two novels - She's Come Undone and I Know this Much is True. So maybe my expectations were set too high for his third book, The Hour I First Believed. Anyway, to be honest, I didn't even read the entire book. I quit about 2/3rds into it. I just couldn't go on anymore, it was that bad. Had Lamb ended the book after Part 1, this review would have been quite different. It would have been much more positive. But Lamb tries to cover too many topics and include too much information into one book, resulting in a tedious work that's stretched too thin.
For instance, the pages upon pages of content from the Columbine killers journals and homemade videos was unnecessary. Had this been a true crime book, then that information would have been appropriate. But in this case, it got to be, well, kind of boring. Same with Maureen's lengthy questionnaire for her therapist. Why include this stuff? It certainly didn't add any important elements to the story. The reader gets how disturbed the Columbine killers were by the damage they created; and how traumatized Maureen was by her experience.
Also, the book kept splitting into all these little sub plots, without ever really delving into some intriguing characters, like Maureen or Velvet. The final straw for me was when the Hurricane Katrina couple and Caelum meet at the Mama Mia coffee shop. I mean come on, Columbine, a tragic car accident that takes the life of a kid, drug/alcohol addiction, women's prisons, and then Hurricane Katrina? It's just too much to cram into one book!! And that's not even mentioning the whole side story about Caelum and his family! I think this book should have been split into several different books. What was Lamb's editor thinking?!
When I sit down to read a book, I want it to be a pleasurable or enlightening experience. In the best of works, it will be both. In The Hour I First Believed, it was neither.