The hour I first believed

In Wally Lamb's new novel, a high school shooting is just the beginning of a couple's misfortune. FOR those who may have forgotten him - it's been 10 years since his last novel - Wally Lamb has wrapped his new book, "The Hour I First Believed," in reminders. The dust jacket is filled with praise for the book's predecessors, "She's Come Undone" and "I Know This Much Is True," both selections of Oprah's Book Club that spent considerable time on the best-seller lists. There's also an afterword about the writing of the book, a section of "notes from the author," a detailed list of sources ("I hope I've remembered them all") and information on how to make charitable donations to related nonprofit organizations. Who needs Oprah? Lamb's publisher has managed to fit an entire segment of her show between hard covers. And what about the novel itself? Over the course of more than 700 pages, the narrative takes on major events (the Columbine High School shootings, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina) and weighty issues (motherhood, marriage, alienation, psychological trauma, drug addiction, chaos theory, prison reform, grief, the connection between ancestry and identity - to name just a few). The story is narrated in the caustic, breezy voice of Caelum Quirk, a high school English teacher living in Littleton, Colo., who has an anger management problem and a tender heart. From the start, Caelum is unlucky and unhappy. Before the action even begins, he's been struggling to hold his third marriage together. (He and his wife, Maureen, separated and nearly divorced after he discovered she was having an affair and went after her lover with a wrench.) Things are at a standstill when Caelum is called back home to Connecticut, where the aunt who helped raise him is ailing; he gets to sit at her bedside just once before she dies. Taking a break from the funeral arrangements, he sees the name of the school where he teaches - Columbine - on the television news. Maureen, a nurse at Columbine, is in the library when the shootings start and survives by hiding in a cabinet. But for her - and for Caelum - the ordeal is just beginning. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor's guilt, Maureen becomes addicted to Xanax. A move to Caelum's childhood home in Three Rivers, Conn. - down the road from the women's prison founded by Caelum's greatgrandmother - doesn't help. Meanwhile, Caelum is wrestling with his own demons, including troubling childhood memories and startling revelations about his parents. From there, things only get worse. Yet the novel isn't all misfortune. There are moments of levity - detours into the history of Rheingold beer, an assessment of rock 'n' roll hits, a brief doughnut-making tutorial - and moments of salvation. It's part picaresque, part Russian novel, part mystery. Mostly, though, it resembles an evangelist's redemption narrative. And like any evangelist, Lamb is pitching more than a story: he wants to lead his readers to a larger (nondenominational) truth. Readers of "I Know This Much Is True" will find some similarities, including the slangy, vivid voice of the narrator. Both novels feature the town of Three Rivers and include the wise and slightly loopy therapist Dr. Patel; they also touch on some of the same conflicts. But "The Hour I First Believed" is more ambitious (if, remarkably, shorter). Lamb seems determined not only to portray the range of the human condition through the life of Caelum Quirk but also to convey the sum of human experience. Caelum's trials are like Job's, and his rewards seem the gift of angels. Caelum is an unusual, provocative character, neither a hero nor an antihero but a regular guy experiencing both the tragic and the absurd. His tone is by turns funny, irritating, depressive and sentimental - which is to say, recognizably human. But he's only a front for an omniscient power - let's call him Wally Lamb - who has sought out remedies for life's uncertainties and is more than willing to share them. He's on a mission to help us help ourselves. Read this way, the supplementary pages are an integral part of Lamb's novel, anchoring and explaining the story in an easily digestible fashion. IN a preface that was included in prepublication review copies of the book, Lamb talks about the hope he felt when his son's praying mantis egg case - which they had thought a dud - hatched. And, sure enough, at several moments in the story, a praying mantis appears like a big flashing sign: "Be hopeful." Such moralizing is threaded throughout the book. Oprah Winfrey has said of "I Know This Much Is True" that it's "not just a book, it's a life experience." But this new novel does more than simply evoke a life's experience (including horrifying actual events) and leave the reader to do the hard work of understanding it. Instead, it offers to do the interpretive work for us, suggesting that in the aftermath we'll be stronger and happier, more deeply engaged with those whose lives touch our own. That's certainly a noble aim. But Lamb doesn't trust his storytelling to pull it off, and he's right not to. Near the end of the novel, during a discussion of the legend of the Minotaur, one of Caelum's students "summed up what they'd learned": "Life is messy, violent, confusing and hopeful." Heartened, Caelum gives all his students A's. Reading this, I felt the A was being extended to me too. I hadn't earned it. Fiction can indeed deepen our understanding of trauma; it can expand our capacity for empathy and provide consolation. But its highest achievement is to complicate, not simplify - to leave us better students of our messy lives, not to graduate us with honors and send us blithely on our way. Louisa Thomas is a contributing editor for Newsweek.

Lamb draws for this heady book from his experience teaching women inmates and editing their stories, the fruit of which can be found in his nonfiction titles Couldn't Keep It to Myself and I'll Fly Away. Guidall is resonant as Calem Quirk and believably voices the female characters. For public libraries.-Carly Wiggins, Allen Cty. P.L., Fort Wayne, IN While one admires Lamb's ambition in writing this sprawling tale of trauma after trauma met head on, one may well wish he hadn't been so thorough in describing, say, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or the details of protagonist Quirk's complex family history. Guidall narrates adequately, though women's voices are not his strength. Buy for Lamb's many fans.-John Hiett, Iowa City P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The Hour I First Believed Chapter One They were both working their final shift at Blackjack Pizza that night, although nobody but the two of them realized it was that. Give them this much: they were talented secret-keepers. Patient planners. They'd been planning it for a year, hiding their intentions in plain sight on paper, on videotape, over the Internet. In their junior year, one had written in the other's yearbook, "God, I can't wait till they die. I can taste the blood now." And the other had answered, "Killing enemies, blowing up stuff, killing cops! My wrath will be godlike!" My wrath will be godlike : maybe that's a clue. Maybe their ability to dupe everyone was their justification. If we could be fooled, then we were all fools; they were, therefore, superior, chaos theirs to inflict. But I don't know. I'm just one more chaos theorist, as lost in the maze as everyone else. It was Friday, April 16, 1999, four days before they opened fire. I'd stayed after school for a parent conference and a union meeting and, in between, had called Maureen to tell her I'd pick up takeout. Blackjack Pizza was between school and home. It was early still. The Friday-night pizza rush hadn't begun. He was at the register, elbows against the counter, talking to a girl in a hairdresser's smock. Or not talking, pretty much. There was a cell phone on the counter, and he kept tapping it with his index finger to make it spin--kept looking at the revolving cell phone instead of at the girl. I remember wondering if I'd just walked in on a lover's spat. "I better get back," the girl said. "See you tomorrow." Her smock said "Great Clips," which meant she worked at the salon next door--the place where Maureen went. "Prom date?" I asked him. The big event was the next night at the Design Center in Denver. From there, the kids would head back to school for the all-night post-prom party, which I'd been tagged to help chaperone. "I wouldn't go to that bogus prom," he said. He called over his shoulder. "How's his half-mushroom-half-meatball coming?" His cohort opened the oven door and peered in. Gave a thumbs-up. "So tell me," I said. "You guys been having any more of your famous Blackjack flour wars?" He gave me a half-smile. "You remember that?" "Sure. Best piece you wrote all term." He'd been in my junior English class the year before. A grade-conscious concrete sequential, he was the kind of kid who was more comfortable memorizing vocab definitions and lines from Shakespeare than doing the creative stuff. Still, his paper about the Blackjack Pizza staff's flour fights, which he'd shaped as a spoof on war, was the liveliest thing he'd written all term. I remember scrawling across his paper, "You should think about taking creative writing next year." And he had. He was in Rhonda Baxter's class. Rhonda didn't like him, though--said she found him condescending. She hated the way he rolled his eyes at other kids' comments. Rhonda and I shared a free hour, and we often compared notes about the kids. I neither liked nor disliked him, particularly. He'd asked me to write him a letter of recommendation once. Can't remember what for. What I do recall is sitting there, trying to think up something to say. He rang up my sale. I handed him a twenty. "So what's next year looking like?" I asked. "You heard back from any of the schools you applied to?" "I'm joining the Marines," he said. "Yeah? Well, I heard they're looking for a few good men." He nodded, not smiling, and handed me my change. His buddy ambled over to the counter, pizza box in hand. He'd lost the boyish look I remembered from his freshman year. Now he was a lanky, beak-nosed adult, his hair tied back in a sorry-looking ponytail, his chin as prominent as Jay Leno's. "So what's your game plan for next year?" I asked him. "University of Arizona." "Sounds good," I said. I gave a nod to the Red Sox cap he was wearing. "You follow the Sox?" "Somewhat. I just traded for Garciaparra in my fantasy league." "Good move," I said. "I used to go to Sox games all the time when I was in college. Boston University. Fenway was five minutes away." "Cool," he said. "Maybe this is their year, huh?" "Maybe." He didn't sound like he gave a shit either way. He was in Rhonda's creative writing class, too. She'd come into the staff room sputtering about him one day. "Read this," she said. "Is this sick or what?" He'd written a two-page story about a mysterious avenger in a metal-studded black trench coat. As jocks and "college preps" leave a busy bar, he pulls pistols and explosives out of his duffel bag, wastes them, and walks away, smiling. "Do you think I should call his parents?" Rhonda had asked. I'd shrugged. "A lot of the guys write this kind of crap. Too many video games, too much testosterone. I wouldn't worry about it. He probably just needs a girlfriend." She had worried, though, enough to make that call. She'd referred to the meeting, a week or so later, as "a waste of time." The door banged open; five or six rowdy kids entered Blackjack. "Hey, I'll see you later," I said. "Later," he said. And I remember thinking he'd make a good Marine. Clean-cut, conscientious, his ironed T-shirt tucked neatly into his wrinkle-free shorts. Give him a few years, I figured, and he'd probably be officer material. At dinner that night, Maureen suggested we go out to a movie, but I begged off, citing end-of-the-week exhaustion. She cleaned up, I fed the dogs, and we adjourned to our separate TVs. By ten o'clock, I was parked on my recliner, watching Homicide with the closed-caption activated, my belly full of pizza. There was a Newsweek opened on my lap for commercial breaks, a Pete's Wicked ale resting against my crotch, and a Van Morrison CD reverberating inside my skull: Astral Weeks , a record that had been released in 1968, the year I turned seventeen. The Hour I First Believed . Copyright © by Wally Lamb. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.