You Had Me at Hello

During our FOL day in La Jolla this past Saturday, one of my Friends highly recommended a book she recently read, written by an author I, too, have read, so we stopped by the bookstore and I purchased a copy. Yesterday, I began reading the 728 page doorstop and couldn't put it down! I'm not sure what time I finally fell asleep, but I fought it because I wanted to keep reading.

Wally Lamb, the author of The Hour I First Believed, has written two other novels that I have also read: I Know This Much Is True and She's Come Undone. Lamb's one of those writers who writes the way I would write if I, too, were a writer. He tells the story with words that are exactly right both the way they are used and in the context. He creates characters who are real: noble sometimes and ignoble other times, flailing about to handle life as it comes at them. Often his flawed individuals seem to mature past their flaws, but the flaws always remain, waiting to unfurl at what could be either the most opportune time -- or the most inopportune time. Who we are is a result of who we've been, and we never really completely eradicate our past selves in our present selves, but sometimes we do learn to co-exist. Lamb constructs an engrossing and conflicted web of people, places and events, the threads of which weave a perfect finished product that simply has to be experienced by a reader.

The narrator, Caelum, is a teacher who's working on his third marriage. He's learned the lesson of the life-sucking force some students bring to school with them, but he's become jaded by his inability to interact with those students. Rather than setting boundaries, he tapes black construction paper over his classroom window, locks the door, and retreats to a corner so he can be alone, not realizing that any one of those actions would have worked and all three of them are over-kill. His third wife, Maureen, is a school nurse; there are problems with their marriage stemming perhaps from her affair with a colleague that resulted in the move to Littleton, Colorado and employment at Columbine High School, but perhaps more significantly relating to the lack of intimacy with her husband, who guards himself all too well from intimate relationships with anyone: students, colleagues, friends, family. Maureen needs forgiveness, but Caelum wants contrition, two mutally exclusive needs that become the impetus for an inexorable slide into a dead marriage.

When his beloved Aunt Lolly dies, Caelum flies back home to deal with what has to be done, leaving Maureen to make her arrangements and join him for the funeral. Every detail he needs to know about his Aunt requires him to call Maureen: he has distanced himself too well from the woman who raised him when his parents could not. The places he's lived open the windows to his past. As he's reacting emotionally to his childhood, he sees on the news that there has been an incident at Columbine High School -- and he recognizes the faces of both students and staff fleeing the campus. His first thought is that Maureen works on the first floor, so she could not possibly be in the second-floor library, which seems to be ground zero for the carnage; he calls her to assure himself that she is okay.

At this point, the story explodes, almost as if this transforming event is the catalyst Caelum needs to confront his deepest fears and come to grips with life as it is, not as it isn't.

I'm just about the half-way point, so I'll be reading this week: leave a message.