“The Hour I First Believed,” by Wally Lamb. HarperCollins. 2008. 723 pp. $29.95.
By Jenni Koerner
For the Salisbury Post
Wally Lamb is well-known for his two excellent novels, “I Know This Much Is True,” and “She’s Come Undone.” His third and newest novel, “The Hour I First Believed” is both more ambitious and more uneven. It took Lamb 10 years to write the book, which runs to 723 pages, plus another 16 pages of notes and afterword. The book, however, feels curiously unfinished.
The year is 1999, and the novel’s protagonist, Caelum Quirk, is an English teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. ó site of the infamous events of April 20, 1999, in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on their shooting rampage. Caelum’s wife, Maureen, is one of the school’s nurses.
In the days before the shootings, Caelum leaves for Connecticut to visit his sick aunt. Maureen stays in Littleton and is in the school when the murders occur; she hides inside a library supply cabinet to survive.
This first part of the novel is Lamb at his best. He interweaves the lives of Caelum and Maureen (entirely fictional characters) with a carefully researched retelling of the actual events at Columbine, captured with gripping realism.
In the aftermath of the shootings, Maureen suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and becomes addicted to pills. Caelum struggles to deal with his wife’s mental deterioration and his own grief and confusion. The novel looks poised to profoundly investigate a marriage in peril.
At this point, however, with half of the book still to go, Lamb begins adding in new subjects helter-skelter, and the narrative thread unravels. The plot expands to cover topics including the Civil, Korean and Iraq wars, 9-11 and Katrina. There are also three murders, three suicides, the history of a beer company, prison reform, women’s suffrage, interracial relationships, alcoholism, mythology, chaos theory and more.
The reader suffers from information overload. And if that hodgepodge of a conglomeration isn’t confusing enough, Lamb adds a lengthy academic dissertation on Caelum’s family history ó a sterile exercise that even the main character admits is boring. The effect of so many historically loaded and sensationalized subplots is emotionally numbing.
The book has its virtues, but “The Hour I First Believed” could’ve been improved if it had stuck to its main plot of the struggling couple and the aftermath of Columbine, and followed the axiom that sometimes, less is more.