After Columbine

By LOUISA THOMAS

THE HOUR I FIRST BELIEVED

By Wally Lamb

740 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.95

For those who may have forgotten him — it’s been 10 years since his last novel — Wally Lamb has wrapped his new book, “The Hour I First Believed,” in reminders. The dust jacket is filled with praise for the book’s predecessors, “She’s Come Undone and “I Know This Much Is True,” both selections of Oprah’s s Book Club that spent considerable time on the best-seller lists. There’s also an afterword about the writing of the book, a section of “notes from the author,” a detailed list of sources (“I hope I’ve remembered them all”) and information on how to make charitable donations to related nonprofit organizations. Who needs Oprah? Lamb’s publisher has managed to fit an entire segment of her show between hard covers.

And what about the novel itself? Over the course of more than 700 pages, the narrative takes on major events (the Columbine High School shootings, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina) and weighty issues (motherhood, marriage, alienation, psychological trauma, drug addiction, chaos theory, prison reform, grief, the connection between ancestry and identity — to name just a few).

The story is narrated in the caustic, breezy voice of Caelum Quirk, a high school English teacher living in Littleton, Colo.,who has an anger management problem and a tender heart. From the start, Caelum is unlucky and unhappy. Before the action even begins, he’s been struggling to hold his third marriage together. (He and his wife, Maureen, separated and nearly divorced after he discovered she was having an affair and went after her lover with a wrench.) Things are at a standstill when Caelum is called back home to Connecticut, where the aunt who helped raise him is ailing; he gets to sit at her bedside just once before she dies. Taking a break from the funeral arrangements, he sees the name of the school where he teaches — Columbine — on the television news.

Maureen, a nurse at Columbine, is in the library when the shootings start and survives by hiding in a cabinet. But for her — and for Caelum — the ordeal is just beginning. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt, Maureen becomes addicted to Xanax. A move to Caelum’s childhood home in Three Rivers, Conn. — down the road from the women’s prison founded by Caelum’s great-grandmother — doesn’t help. Meanwhile, Caelum is wrestling with his own demons, including troubling childhood memories and startling revelations about his parents. From there, things only get worse.

Yet the novel isn’t all misfortune. There are moments of levity — detours into the history of Rheingold beer, an assessment of rock ’n’ roll hits, a brief doughnut-making tutorial — and moments of salvation. It’s part picaresque, part Russian novel, part mystery. Mostly, though, it resembles an evangelist’s redemption narrative. And like any evangelist, Lamb is pitching more than a story: he wants to lead his readers to a larger (nondenominational) truth.

Readers of “I Know This Much Is True” will find some similarities, including the slangy, vivid voice of the narrator. Both novels feature the town of Three Rivers and include the wise and slightly loopy therapist Dr. Patel; they also touch on some of the same conflicts. But “The Hour I First Believed” is more ambitious (if, remarkably, shorter). Lamb seems determined not only to portray the range of the human condition through the life of Caelum Quirk but also to convey the sum of human experience. Caelum’s trials are like Job’s, and his rewards seem the gift of angels.

Caelum is an unusual, provocative character, neither a hero nor an antihero but a regular guy experiencing both the tragic and the absurd. His tone is by turns funny, irritating, depressive and sentimental — which is to say, recognizably human. But he’s only a front for an omniscient power — let’s call him Wally Lamb — who has sought out remedies for life’s uncertainties and is more than willing to share them. He’s on a mission to help us help ourselves. Read this way, the supplementary pages are an integral part of Lamb’s novel, anchoring and explaining the story in an easily digestible fashion.

In a preface that was included in pre-publication review copies of the book, Lamb talks about the hope he felt when his son’s praying mantis egg case — which they had thought a dud — hatched.And, sure enough, at several moments in the story, a praying mantis appears like a big flashing sign: “Be hopeful.” Such moralizing is threaded throughout the book.

Oprah Winfrey has said of “I Know This Much Is True” that it’s “not just a book, it’s a life experience.” But this new novel does more than simply evoke a life’s experience (including horrifying actual events) and leave the reader to do the hard work of understanding it. Instead, it offers to do the interpretive work for us, suggesting that in the aftermath we’ll be stronger and happier, more deeply engaged with those whose lives touch our own.

That’s certainly a noble aim. But Lamb doesn’t trust his storytelling to pull it off, and he’s right not to. Near the end of the novel, during a discussion of the legend of the Minotaur, one of Caelum’s students “summed up what they’d learned”: “Life is messy, violent, confusing and hopeful.” Heartened, Caelum gives all his students A’s. Reading this, I felt the A was being extended to me too. I hadn’t earned it. Fiction can indeed deepen our understanding of trauma; it can expand our capacity for empathy and provide consolation. But its highest achievement is to complicate, not simplify — to leave us better students of our messy lives, not to graduate us with honors and send us blithely on our way.

Louisa Thomas is a contributing editor for Newsweek.

www.nytimes.com