by Karen Karbo
In this follow-up novel to Wally Lamb's Oprah- sanctioned best seller, ''She's Come Undone,'' everyone is bereft, in realms both seen and unseen. Characters have lost love, faith and hope, not to mention hands, legs, thumbs, even lips.
Lamb's narrator, Dominick Birdsey, has lost his mother, his wife, his infant daughter, his career. His identical twin brother, the gentle Thomas, has lost his mind. A paranoid schizophrenic with the usual obsessive interest in alien life-forms, Communism, God and government conspiracy, Thomas goes into the public library one morning during the early rumblings of Desert Storm and cuts off his hand in a biblically inspired protest against the impending war.
What follows is the 40-year-old Dominick's meltdown. In his struggle to do right by Thomas, the brother he loves, resents and envies in equal measure, he is forced to face not just his own demons but the entire cavalcade of nightmares that have bedeviled the Birdsey clan. After Dominick decides on Thomas's behalf not to have his hand reattached -- '' 'I'll just rip it off again,' my brother warned. 'Do you think a few stitches are going to keep me from doing what I have to do? I have a pact with the Lord God Almighty' '' -- Thomas is transferred from the state hospital to a maximum-security forensic institute that ''houses most of the front-page boys: the vet from Mystic who mistook his family for the Vietcong, the kid at Wesleyan who brought his .22-caliber semiautomatic to class.''
Meanwhile, Dominick has been trying to put other parts of his unhappy past to rest -- by getting over his divorce from Dessa, the woman he still loves, and sorting things out with Joy, his current live-in girlfriend, a perky, twice-divorced 25-year-old who works at the local health club and whose life is a mess, even by Dominick's liberal standards.
Happily, this isn't the half of it. Also running through the story is Dominick's quest to get a translation of the memoir written by his Sicilian grandfather (and namesake) as a present for his dying mother. The memoir is lost, then found, then eventually shared with the reader in its entirety.
Lamb takes a great risk here. The bombastic, self-aggrandizing ''History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man From Humble Beginnings'' begins two-thirds of the way through a novel that is already full to bursting with calamitous activity, appearing just when Dominick has hit bottom. It's a tribute to Lamb's considerable gifts that we wind up feeling sorry for this obnoxious patriarch, even as we loathe him.
''I Know This Much Is True'' is big and somewhat blowzy -- there should be an enforceable limit to how many psychotherapy sessions can be included in one novel -- but it never grapples with anything less than life's biggest questions. How do you live with unresolved issues that die with the dead? How do you deal with an abusive parent who, nevertheless, was always there for you? Being touched by an angel is not an option.
Lamb clearly aims to be a modern-day Dostoyevsky with a pop sensibility. In his view, it's not just the present that's the pits, that gives you nightmares and ruins your chances for happiness, it's also the ghosts of dysfunctional family members and your nonrelationship with a mocking, sadistic God, whom you still turn to in times of trouble -- which is all the time.
About the death of his 3-week-old daughter, Dominick says: ''Life didn't have to make sense, I'd concluded: that was the big joke. Get it? You could have a brother who stuck metal clips in his hair to deflect enemy signals from Cuba, and a biological father who, in 33 years, had never shown his face, and a baby dead in her bassinet . . . and none of it meant a . . . thing. Life was a whoopee cushion, a chair yanked away just as you were having a seat. What was that old Army song? We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.''
Luckily for lovers of the novel, so is Wally Lamb.
via:
In this follow-up novel to Wally Lamb's Oprah- sanctioned best seller, ''She's Come Undone,'' everyone is bereft, in realms both seen and unseen. Characters have lost love, faith and hope, not to mention hands, legs, thumbs, even lips.Lamb's narrator, Dominick Birdsey, has lost his mother, his wife, his infant daughter, his career. His identical twin brother, the gentle Thomas, has lost his mind. A paranoid schizophrenic with the usual obsessive interest in alien life-forms, Communism, God and government conspiracy, Thomas goes into the public library one morning during the early rumblings of Desert Storm and cuts off his hand in a biblically inspired protest against the impending war.
What follows is the 40-year-old Dominick's meltdown. In his struggle to do right by Thomas, the brother he loves, resents and envies in equal measure, he is forced to face not just his own demons but the entire cavalcade of nightmares that have bedeviled the Birdsey clan. After Dominick decides on Thomas's behalf not to have his hand reattached -- '' 'I'll just rip it off again,' my brother warned. 'Do you think a few stitches are going to keep me from doing what I have to do? I have a pact with the Lord God Almighty' '' -- Thomas is transferred from the state hospital to a maximum-security forensic institute that ''houses most of the front-page boys: the vet from Mystic who mistook his family for the Vietcong, the kid at Wesleyan who brought his .22-caliber semiautomatic to class.''
Meanwhile, Dominick has been trying to put other parts of his unhappy past to rest -- by getting over his divorce from Dessa, the woman he still loves, and sorting things out with Joy, his current live-in girlfriend, a perky, twice-divorced 25-year-old who works at the local health club and whose life is a mess, even by Dominick's liberal standards.
Happily, this isn't the half of it. Also running through the story is Dominick's quest to get a translation of the memoir written by his Sicilian grandfather (and namesake) as a present for his dying mother. The memoir is lost, then found, then eventually shared with the reader in its entirety.
Lamb takes a great risk here. The bombastic, self-aggrandizing ''History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man From Humble Beginnings'' begins two-thirds of the way through a novel that is already full to bursting with calamitous activity, appearing just when Dominick has hit bottom. It's a tribute to Lamb's considerable gifts that we wind up feeling sorry for this obnoxious patriarch, even as we loathe him.
''I Know This Much Is True'' is big and somewhat blowzy -- there should be an enforceable limit to how many psychotherapy sessions can be included in one novel -- but it never grapples with anything less than life's biggest questions. How do you live with unresolved issues that die with the dead? How do you deal with an abusive parent who, nevertheless, was always there for you? Being touched by an angel is not an option.
Lamb clearly aims to be a modern-day Dostoyevsky with a pop sensibility. In his view, it's not just the present that's the pits, that gives you nightmares and ruins your chances for happiness, it's also the ghosts of dysfunctional family members and your nonrelationship with a mocking, sadistic God, whom you still turn to in times of trouble -- which is all the time.
About the death of his 3-week-old daughter, Dominick says: ''Life didn't have to make sense, I'd concluded: that was the big joke. Get it? You could have a brother who stuck metal clips in his hair to deflect enemy signals from Cuba, and a biological father who, in 33 years, had never shown his face, and a baby dead in her bassinet . . . and none of it meant a . . . thing. Life was a whoopee cushion, a chair yanked away just as you were having a seat. What was that old Army song? We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.''
Luckily for lovers of the novel, so is Wally Lamb.
via:
