Book Review: The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

by Wally Lamb, Harper Collins Publishers

The Hour I first Believed, Wally Lamb's first novel in ten years, is a heart-wrenching and gripping novel. Like his first two novels, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much is True, it is a survey of the human condition. Ordinary characters struggle with overcoming their pasts while dealing with obstacles in the present that test their faith and resilience.

Forty-seven-year old Caelum Quirk and his younger, third wife Maureen have moved to Littleton, Colorado in an effort to start over and to repair their already troubled marriage. Both acquire jobs at Columbine High School. He is an English teacher, and she is a school nurse. In April 1999, their lives are further complicated when Caelum returns to his childhood home in Connecticut to be with his Aunt Lolly, who has had a stroke. She dies, and Caelum deals with grief and regrets and begins to put her affairs in order. Then breaks the news of the Columbine tragedy. Caelum has to put his grief on hold as he rushes back to Littleton. Stricken with panic, he doesn't know whether or not his wife has survived.

We eventually find out that Maureen has survived, but not before experiencing the fear what the victims' family members must have felt. Maureen was in the library when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold burst in. She hides in a cabinet, expecting to be discovered and killed. She witnesses the voices and sounds of the murderous rampage. Miraculously, she is spared, but she never recovers from the trauma. She spirals downward, suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, survivor guilt and an addiction to Xanax.

As the details of the massacre unfold, through Maureen's and other survivors' telling, my heart races, and I am moved to tears. This section of the novel is powerful. The sensory images left me breathless and stuck with me for days. The sounds of chirping cell phones from hundreds of backpacks. The parents waiting in the gym for names of the dead. I grieved along with the waiting parents. Caelum's panic was palpable. Lamb uses real names from the tragedy and frightening details I had not known.

In an attempt to put the tragedy behind them and to piece together their marriage, Caelum and Maureen move back to Connecticut, to the farmhouse where Caelum was raised. It's supposed to be safe and quiet, but tragedy strikes again. It seems that Maureen is finally recovering, or at the least, being able to function again. But she makes a fatal mistake. Caelum and Maureen are separated by her prison term. Ironically, she is serving time in the prison one of Caelum's ancestors founded 100 years ago. Both struggle separately to regain sanity and to deal with their grief, anger and guilt.

Caelum meets Moses and Janis Micks, another couple affected by tragedy. They have escaped Hurricane Katrina. With mounting legal bills looming, Caelum offers to rent the upstairs of the farmhouse to them. Janis discovers boxes of letters, diaries and newspaper clippings Caelum was planning to dispose of. She happens to be on a sabbatical from working on her doctoral thesis in women's studies. While sifting through the boxes, she decides to write her thesis on Caelum's female ancestors. He is resistant and has no interest in it at first. He even pronounces it boring until family secrets and the mystery of who his parents are surfaces. It's a diversion from the immediate problems that plague him, and puts him on a journey of self discovery. The family history drops names like Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nikola Telsa but doesn't reveal anything remarkable about how they related to Caelum's family history.

I have to admit, I was jarred at first when the narrative switched to Caelum's ancestor Lydia. I almost skipped over it, because at first it didn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the story. When I realized Janis was chronicling Caelum's family history, I did want to know more. But I didn't feel that storyline was as powerful as the events in the first part of the novel. I wanted the author to get back to the characters in the present. In some ways I felt Maureen was being ignored and forgotten, like a character written in a story you don't know what to do with. That may well have been Lamb's intent. Maureen was serving time in prison. She wasn't going anywhere.

Another character I felt Lamb shelved for a while was Velvet. She's an emancipated minor with a chip on her shoulder. Before Columbine, Caelum tries to save her, but she's so infuriating that he gives up on her. Velvet latches onto Maureen and begins to call her "Mom," which annoys Caelum. Velvet becomes a source of tension between the couple. She disappears during the Columbine massacre, and we don't know for a while whether she's dead or alive. She was with Maureen in the library, but they got separated. When we find out Velvet has survived, we get postcard glimpses of her throughout. Later she moves in with Caelum and the Micks in the farmhouse, but she becomes more of a background character. I wanted to know more about Velvet and the conflicts between her and Caelum. I felt the resolution to her subplot came too quickly and too pat.

The Hour I First Believed is heavy with tragedy. It is peppered with references to the Gulf War, the Korean War, rape, suicide as well as the aforementioned Columbine tragedy and Hurricane Katrina. The students he teaches in the second half of the novel are troubled, and Lamb heaps tragedy upon tragedy. I began to wonder if Lamb's intent was to show how sad and tragic the world is, or was he trying to get the reader to realize her blessings? Maybe a little of both. For the most part, I felt the novel was excellent. When I finished it, the story stuck with me for days, like a good story should.