Review: The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb

I picked up The Hour I First Believed for two reasons: one, I liked Lamb's first novel, She's Come Undone, very much when it came out years ago (he has written other novels since, but that was the last one I read) and was looking for more of the same, and two, it discusses the events at Columbine High School from an inside vantage point, which I found interesting. What I got wasn't quite what I expected.

Lamb's emotionally closed-off main character, Caelum, is a middle-aged high school teacher who is working on his third marriage, to Maureen, the school nurse. Although from the east coast originally, the two move to Columbine, CO to escape the memories of Maureen's infidelity and Caelum's resulting violence on both her and her lover. Their attempt to start anew puts them directly in the path of the runaway nightmare train that two students brought down upon the school; while Caelum is away at his aunt's funeral, Maureen is trapped in the Columbine school library, hiding in a cabinet, listening to the shooting and waiting to die. The overwhelming PTSD Maureen suffers as a result of the events leads them back to the east coast, to live in Caelum's aunt's home and try, again, to restart their lives. Unfortunately, like an unwinding top, events spin ever further out of control, and their lives go into freefall. No one will hire Caelum for a teaching position at a high school because of his previous actions, and when Maureen is finally able to work once again, her choices bring their own unhappy consequences.

Within this story, there is another, far less interesting, mostly unrelated one regarding Caelum's family history. Much is made of the local women's prison that his grandmother used to run, and in the last third of the book many many pages are used detailing the information the woman who is renting the upstairs of Caelum's house finds in the many boxes of papers left by his aunt. These papers, in their convoluted way, lead Caelum around the mulberry bush as to who his mother, who had died years before, really was.

This plot line, if it can be called that, is one of the major things I didn't like about this novel. Ironically, even Caelum himself comments that he couldn't get through the research papers his renter writes based on her findings; if Lamb didn't think that his own character would be interested in his own history, then for heaven's sake, why would he think the readers would be?! It was some pretty seriously boring stuff, and had nothing to do with the real plot of the book. In addition, there were several other, smaller side plots that were half-developed, and really only served to distract the reader.

The other major hurdle of the story is the fact that the characters were entirely unlikeable. I mean, entirely. Caelum is a dissociated, detached wife-abuser / violent offender who couldn't even summon enough emotion over the death of the woman who raised him to shed a tear. Maureen is an adulterous, argumentative woman whose behavior after the shootings, while understandable with PTSD, certainly didn't make her any more likeable. I'm not sure why they stayed married, frankly, especially since Caelum referred to her as his 'three-strikes-and-you're-out wife'.

Lamb obviously did a great deal of research on the events at Columbine, and the descriptions of the scene in the library, as well as the publication of the writings of the killers, were chilling. Maureen's PTSD was very aptly described, and again, it was plain that Lamb had done his work well. However, in his attempt to make the characters human, Lamb forgot that some people are so awful that really, no one would want to spend time with them; his characters are this way, and the fact that I spent several hours reading about them, and letting them into my mind, isn't something I feel great about. Yes, there are people this messed up and unpleasant out there, and that's reality; most people, somewhere, also have redeeming qualities, and certainly all great literary heroes do. These characters really didn't.

Rating: one star - massively disappointing, scattered with stray underdeveloped subplots