Title: The First Hour I BelievedAuthor: Wally Lamb
It's been a long time since I read a Wally Lamb novel, and I was a bit daunted that this one weighed in at about 800 pages. But the story of Caelum and Maureen Quirk grabbed me and held me tight. Already messed up by life and abuse and loss and hard knocks, the couple tries and fails (and tries again) to pull their lives together after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold open fire at Columbine, where they both work. At first I was really mad about the way the novel ends, but I began to see it as redemptive. Lamb does a great job with his characters-- even the supporting ones (like Caelum's best friend the baker and his mom) seem so real that I felt like they were people I knew in the flesh by the end of the story. At first I couldn't decide if I liked the way Lamb brought two of the most catastrophic events in recent American history together in the novel (Columbine and Katrina) but I eventually decided that these "real life" events only highlighted the way that the modern world is often "too much with us." It was evident that Lamb's recent life mission, working with inmates in a writing program, served as a great inspiration for this piece, and he does a great job of helping us sympathize with Maureen's character without oversentimentalizing.
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