Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Can’t put Wally Lamb down

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

—Charles Caleb Colton

I’ve owned the first two books for several years. I always meant to read them, but they were both long and seemed daunting. Later, I thought. This year, I finally got around to reading them, and what a delight it was to discover Wally Lamb.




This big, warm, embracing book . . . is all about the self and about rebirth, all about creating the family we wish to belong to and making peace with the one we were given. . . . Filled with a generous love and understanding of women . . . a healing vision of the way we must learn from, possess, and then undo the past in order to make a future.

—New Orleans Times-Picayune



A friend of mine read Lamb’s She’s Come Undone from 1992 on the train from the suburbs to Chicago’s Loop. I acquired a copy and meant to read it for about five years. It’s a rather long book with 465 pages. I started it one morning and read until 4pm, then showered, went to dinner, came home and finished it at 2am. I didn’t want to wait until the next day to finish it. I don’t think I so much read this novel as inhaled it. It’s amazing that a man can create the character of a young woman so convincingly. A good read.


Excerpt: According to my father, we should have been rich. Money was, in his mind, somehow due us and would have been ours had his simple parents not sold their thirty acres on Fisherman’s Cove for $3,000 to a Mr. Weiss the month before drowning in the Great Hurricane of 1938. During the Depression, when my father was coming of age, Fisherman’s Cove had been just marsh grass, wide blueberry bushes and cabins with outhouses; by the time he went to work for Mrs. Masicotte, it was the cozy residence of millionaires. These included Mr. Weiss’s son, who lived two driveways down from Mrs. Masicotte and golfed for a living.

My father forgave Mrs. Masicotte her wealth because she was generous with it—“spread it around,” as he put it. In those years, the television was only the first in a stream of presents that included a swing set for me, kitcheny things for my mother (a set of maroon-colored juice glasses, a black ice bucket with brass claw feet), and for my father, gifts he wore home from the big house on the cove: a houndstooth sports jacket, leather gloves lined in genuine rabbit’s fur, and my favorite—a wristwatch with a Twist-O-Flex band you could bend but not break.



Every now and then a book comes along that sets new standards for writers and readers alike. Wally Lamb’s latest novel is stunning—and even that might be an understatement. . . . this is a masterpiece.

—Associated Press

I thought She’s Come Undone was a good book, but after reading his second novel—I Know This Much Is True, 1998—the earlier book feels like a warm-up excercise in preparation for creating the book equivalent of The Moonlight Sonata. This is a multi-layered book, full of rich characters who aren’t easy to forget. It’s the story of a man with an identical twin brother, a paranoid schizophrenic who is institutionalized after performing a grotesque act of self-mutilation. Lamb looks at the issues of mental illness and the responsibility of a man to care for his sick brother at the expense of his own life. It’s at once a sad book and a book full of hope. This book is 897 pages long and impossible to put down.

First paragraphs: On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut Public Library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable. Mrs. Theresa Fenneck, the children’s librarian, was officially in charge that day because the head librarian was at an all-day meeting in Hartford. She approached my brother and told him he’d have to keep his voice down or else leave the library. She could hear him all the way up at the front desk. There were other patrons to consider. If he wanted to pray, she told him, he should go to a church, not the library.

Thomas and I had spent several hours together the day before. Our Sunday afternoon ritual dictated that I sign him out of the state hospital’s Settle Building, treat him to lunch, visit our stepfather or take him for a drive, and then return him to the hospital before suppertime. At a back booth at Friendly’s, I’d sat across from my brother, breathing in his secondary smoke and leafing for the umpteenth time through his scrapbook of clippings on the Persian Gulf crisis. He’d been collecting them since August as evidence that Armageddon was at hand—that the final battle between good and evil was about to be triggered.



Lamb progressed through three novels, getting better each time. The Hour I First Believed, released in 2008, was worth the ten-year wait. It takes place at Columbine High School on the day Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold came to school and killed thirteen people.

Caelum Quirk and his wife Maureen teach at the school, but on that fateful day Caelum is on his way to Connecticut, where his aunt has had a stroke. Maureen spends terrifying hours in a cabinet as the killing goes on around her. Later they flee to Caelum’s home in Connecticut, where he discovers his family’s history while Maureen struggles to regain her sanity. It’s a compelling book that is as difficult to put away as it is to read.



Excerpt: By Wednesday afternoon, Maureen seemed better. Shaken, still, but functioning. Putting one foot in front of the other. She braided her hair, put on makeup, folded some laundry. The dogs were a comfort to her. Sophie, in particular, seemed to sense she was needed. She stuck close, following Mo from room to room. As for me, I watched.

She kept looking at the phone, wandering over to the windows. When she asked if I thought we should file a missing person report on Velvet, I shook my head. “Give her time,” I said. “She’ll surface as soon as she’s ready.”

“Maybe she thinks I’m dead.”

I tried to stifle the shudder that passed through me. “Well, you’re not, Mo. You survived. And Velvet’s a survivor, too. Look at everything that kid’s been through already. Wherever she is, she’s okay.”

When she turned from the window to face me, her body was outlined in daylight, her face in shadow. “You weren’t there,” she said.



The Hour I First Believed is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of humanity.

—From the dust jacket

Next month Book Fever takes a fictional look at the French Revolution. Happy reading!