The Hour I First Believed: A Novel

Wally Lamb is a writer who works very hard and clearly spends a lot of time working on his art. The fact that we must wait so long in between his works of art is a testament to this. Stephen King publishes a dozen or more novels in the time that Lamb will publish one, but despite the fact that King is one of America's best story tellers, Wally Lamb is in a category of his own. It is difficult to compare him to any other writer, largely because each of his books are so very different than the others that unless you know it you would never know that Mr. Lamb penned "She's Come Undone", along with "I Know This Much Is True" and at last, this masterpiece, "The Hour I First Believed."From the start, we know that our central character, in first person, is a man who is troubled. The novel weaves it's way through his difficulty with relationships and how, only recently, he released years of pent up anger and had to face "Anger School" while returning to his childhood home: a farm in Central Connecticut where his Aunt Lolly still lives; she was a woman who had a large and loving hand in raising him. Once again, literature shows us that despite our politicians praise for traditional family values, the bizarre situations of parenting and family life, raised Caelum Quirk (our central character)with three to five parents at any given time, an alcoholic father suffering PTSD from his experiences in the Korean War, his mother and Aunt Lolly who not only worked hard on the family farm with his grandfather but worked outside of the home as well. In the center of the farm is a fifty acre state womens prison that had been designed and started by Caelum's great grandmother,Lydia, the woman who raised Aunt Lolly and her twin brother, Caelum's father. This huge metaphor stands in the middle of the family farm for four generations and carries many secrets, but then so does the Quirk Family-so does any family.PTSD is the prominent element in this book and we see it's effects in subtle ways throughout as well as on grand scales. Caelum's wife Maureen is a school nurse in the same high school where Caelum teaches English: Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The book begins about four days before that fateful Tuesday when, at 11:15 or so, the world stopped to watch two very angry and troubled teenage boys declare war on societal cruelty in the public school setting, killing thirteen and wounding many others, emotionally scarring an entire community and changing the entire world forever.But trauma and tragedy happen all the time and our central character speaks not just in his forty-seven year old guarded and lonely voice, but in his ten year old confused and angry voice, still ripe with guilt and openly discussing his difficulty of allegiance to his drunken father who consistently lets him down and how he allows another student to take the blame for habitually spitting in the school drinking fountains. Right from the start we hear the hints and Mr. Lambs writing style keeps us flipping pages almost as though we are reading Stephen King-a style of writing so different from the thick and intellectual "I know This Much Is True" and the style of "are you SURE this wasn't written by a woman?" in "She's Come Undone." It is in this way that one can see it was no accident: Wally Lamb is one of the finest writers to have ever lived.Caelum is not in school on Tuesday as Aunt Lolly has died and he returns home to Connecticut as the final heir and so his wife, Maureen, is a survivor of the massacre at school but only barely as she was able to hide herself inside a small cabinet in the library where she listened to the worst of the violence that occurred that day. Caelum turns around and comes home to Colorado to be with Maureen which causes him to miss Aunt Lolly's pre-arranged funeral and then, after a little time, he and Maureen return to the family farm where he begins to clean out the family home that holds four generations of diary's letters, photographs and books as well as four generations of secrets, mysteries and answers. The plot of the story is as brilliant as John Irving would write; the psychological twists and fragility of the human mind are captured on a level that Shirley Jackson would have written.No one heals from PTSD, they evolve into acceptance and re-cognition, searching for new ways to feel safe and new ways to trust. Everything in our lives shape who we are and who we become. There is an old Iroquois proverb that sways, "When a man dies with him he takes a library" So that the real meat of the book is in the evolution, understanding and acceptance of how our characters will live.Up until now, 2008 has produced only Richard Russo's "The Bridge of Sighs" that was worthy of The Pulitzer Prize for literature (and in fact, "Bridge of Sighs" is even better than the novel for which Russo already won a Pulitzer) but Mr. Lamb has created a book that stands on it's own, so far above anything else written in such a long time, that "The Hour I First Believed" will join the likes of "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The Sound and The Fury", "Tom Sawyer," and "Gone With The Wind" as remarkable American novels.Read it and see if I'm not right.

My sister and I have worried and complained about the fact that Wally Lamb has not written a novel in 10 years. I worried that Oprah had made him so successful that he did not feel compelled to write more fiction. She worried that he had found his true calling at the women's prison and didn't have time to write. All of this angst was the result of our reactions to "I Know This Much is True." It provided me with one of my best reading experiences ever. Both of his previous novels are constructed in such a way that I could not stop reading them. Despite its length, I read "I Know This Much is True" in a couple days. It is a "drop everything, I've got to read" kind of book.Once the announcement of the release of "The Hour I First Believed" was issued, we vacillated between joy and anxiety. We knew that our expectations were astronomically high. So simultaneously, we fretted that Mr. Lamb could not live up to his past glory and that the book would be so wonderful that we could not fully savor the goodness. Now that I have finished his newest novel, I find that the reality of my experience is somewhere in the middle.Again, his writing is exceptional. He uses wonderful words in clear, consequential prose. I am awed by the psychological insight that he uses to create real, deeply interesting characters. I am overwhelmed (again) with his ability to create tension within the narrative. He, more than any other author that I have read, makes me deeply curious about the psyche of the characters, their relationships, and their journeys.This time around, however, the sum of this book's parts is better than the whole. Unfortunately, the multiple stories and story lines do not create notable literary synergy. I think that there is enough very good stuff in this book to make 2 excellent novels, and I think that we could pluck out several stunning short stories. Disappointingly, when they are put together, they do not merge and create fictional brilliance. There are too many disparate themes to resolve effectively. Furthermore, the past and present story lines do not support each other especially well. For example, the PTSD line is very meaningful in relationship to Columbine, but it did not seem to be a significant part of the Civil War story.I also sense some editorial malaise. Parts of the story could have been tightened up to create better connection among the various plot lines. For, example, Maureen's Columbine experience was riveting. However, once it was over, it almost disappeared. It appears that it was included only to set up the present day connection to the prison in Connecticut. The experiences at and around Columbine High School are extremely powerful when they happen, but their significance wanes as other generations are explored. Furthermore, the memory of Maureen's and Velvet's palpable trauma are all but forgotten by the end of the book. Keeping Columbine alive from beginning to end could have strengthened and intensified the primary themes. I know that there are many reasons to reach the decision that the book is good enough to publish, but I think that this one could have been pushed to another level through some more critical analysis and perhaps some pruning and re-ordering.I remember that some people did not like the "book within a book" approach used in "I Know This Much Is True." I liked it because it provided a counterbalance to the present day emotional action. The present day created the tension, and the journal entries slowed things down and filled in the blanks. This approach did not work so well In "The Hour I First Believed." The present day action dropped off too soon, and the historical pieces slammed on the brakes of the novel's momentum. The center of gravity leans toward the Quirk, Popper, and Hutchinson ancestors without giving enough energy to the Caelum and Maureen plot.One more observation... I think that Elizabeth Popper turns into a combination of Clara Barton and Forest Gump. She travels in the same professional, political, and social sphere as Clara did before and during the Civil War, and she meets every living celebrity of her time just as Forest did.The book is very, very good. If I had been able to control my expectations, I could deem it excellent. Mr. Lamb creates wondrous fiction. Please don't keep us waiting another 10 years!!

I’m hooked on Wally Lamb’s big baggy novels. His titles are odd and unmemorable (She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True, We Are Water) but each has swept me away. The title of this one had me half-fearing it might be preachy, but not at all. The narrator, when he mentions religion at all, is agnostic. The story starts with the Columbine school massacre, witnessed by the narrator’s wife, moves from there into further troubling dramatic events both present and past. It’s not my favourite of Wally Lamb’s books, because the backstory, though interesting, is not as gripping as the foreground story it keeps interrupting, and I felt the lack of a family tree diagram. If you’re new to Lamb, I would start with one of the others.

This is the third of Wally Lamb's books that I have read. Like all the others it is long, at times tortous and can be difficult to follow in parts. It is in effect several books in one.Having said that if you have lived any kind of life at all and taken time to think about the effects of what you have done or failed to do you will find much of yourself in this author's writing.This book is written in a warm compassionate manner full of feeling for those who experience personal disaster and disintegration. It can teach you much about the many ways of coping with disaster and some of the consequences which may follow.While I am unlikely read anymore of this author, as my reading list is already too long, for the unintiated I say do read at least one of his books.

This book has been on my kindle for almost four years. If I had known how good it was going to be I would have read it a lot sooner. It was an engrossing read and I enjoyed the back story to Caelum's life as well as the current story with Columbine and Maureen's reactions to that fateful day. Wally Lamb is a new author to me so I have some cathcing up to do. Looking forward to it.

I bought this having read 'I know this much is true', which I had enjoyed but been disappointed by the ending.I bought 'The hour I first believed' expecting a personal account of a fictional Columbine survivor.Approx the first fifth of the book is pre-Columbine and develops the main character, and his relationships with his wife and family.The next section is given over to Columbine, and long transcripts of the actual killer's videos and diaries. This is space which could have been used to give the character's reactions rather than reproducing information available outside of this book.Then the book skips ahead a significant period, with Columbine being referenced as the "bifurcation" point of their lives, but this seems to be pushed into the background with all of the many themes which are subsequently shoe-horned into this book: drugs, death, law-suits, illegitimacy, family lost and found, infidelity, family trees, PTSD, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War. In addition to the overly busy plot, the narrative skips between the main character's viewpoint, letters and diaries from the 1800s, newspaper articles, excerpts from faux books, transcripts from the Columbine killers' journals, the whole of someone's PhD thesis.As a result it is hard to get invested in any of the characters, of which there are too many spanning hundreds of years. Unfortunately I was skim-reading this book from about halfway through and lost interest in what happened to them.I would give the author another go as I enjoyed one of his other books until the ending, and the first part of this one, but I was disappointed with most of this book.

I've read Wally Lamb's work previously and was not disappointed this time. This was an intricately woven story of emotions, personal challenges and tragedy - this echoing the circumstances of most people's lives . I can see why the book took so long to write. Highly recommended.