It's Time: The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

January is nearly over, and although we haven't had terrible weather, I did find myself hybernating a little. With the snow on the ground, and the skies looking gray, I was quite often tempted to make a cup of tea and cozy up in my new reading nook. I recently redecorated my home office, and as a part of the design, I incorporated an antique armchair and my favorite bits of art. I can sit comfortably with my feet up and look out the window to the back garden. No wonder I like reading so much...I feel like my pearch is a little piece of heaven!

Now on to Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed.

Over the course of more than 700 pages, the novel takes on major events (the Columbine High School shootings, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina) and weighty issues like motherhood, marriage, alienation, psychological trauma, drug addiction, chaos theory, prison reform, grief, the connection between ancestry and identity — to name just a few.

Here's a brief summary:

"When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues.

While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface.

As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary—and American." (Attributed to Book Browse review)

"Lamb is an amiable, credible storyteller at first. But his writing style is undistinguished, and so is his thinking; the combination leads to mind-numbing mediocrity. This novel is ill-disciplined in the extreme – in its length, its constant repetition of the same information, its sprawling, poorly integrated structure.

The volume bespeaks an arrogance. High sales thanks to the blessing of a certain talk-show host ()prah) seem to have reprieved Wally Lamb from the editorial judgment and often productive self-doubt that other writers continue to exercise in order to craft novels more humbly constrained both in scope and page count."

For more of the catty (and actually entertaining) review check out Lionel Shriver's review in the Telegraph...It's not pretty.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/3708957/The-Hour-I-First-Believed-review.html

I think that Lamb's novel is an easy read, that sprawls over many major events of the early 2000's.  It is not a literary read, more an armchair ride. I enjoyed the easy read, but I was happy to have it finally come to an end. I think his other works like She's Come Undone and This Much I Know is True are stronger.

Now, my blog is up-to-date and I feel like reading some non-fiction.