Wally Lamb’s 1998 best seller, “I Know This Much is True,” revolves around twin brothers, one of whom is a paranoid schizophrenic. It is a difficult topic, and he knew at the time that “if you are going to take up this subject matter, you better write it responsibly.”
He approaches his new novel, “The Hour I First Believed,” with the same “reserve and trepidation.” Much of the story is rooted in the shootings at Columbine, and Lamb said it was not his intent to cause more pain.
Lamb spoke by telephone from his home in Mansfield, in eastern Connecticut, a place he described as “more feisty than fashionable, more liverwurst than pate.” It’s a description that would easily fit the Connecticut locale where much of the novel is set.
The book’s cover, which shows a hand holding a candle lit at the top and the bottom, is a good reflection of the work’s mix of the logical and illogical, Lamb said. Though the shootings at Columbine are central to this work, Lamb also takes on addiction, incarceration and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The book is about chaos and order, hope and despair, and the delicate balancing act between those things,” he said.
Lamb found it important to use the names of those who died at Columbine, instead of creating fictional characters to stand in their place. He writes in the novel’s afterword:
“I felt it was my responsibility to name the Columbine victims — the dead and the living — rather than blur their identities. To name the injured who survived is to acknowledge both their suffering and their brave steps past that terrible day into meaningful lives. To name the dead is to confront the meaning of their lives and deaths, and to acknowledge, as well, the strength and suffering of the loved ones they had to leave behind.”
The author’s experience as a high school teacher allowed him to put himself in those corridors “to some extent,” but he also noted that much is unknowable even “if you were there.” His research into that day was primarily Internet-based. He said, “The most troubling research . . . was the videos that the kids had made. They got in my head in a way that didn’t feel comfortable.”
The work took root as the result of a school shooting that took place prior to Columbine. Lamb has a cousin whose daughters were attending Heath High School, in West Paducah, when a student opened fire on a prayer circle in December 1997.
Lamb said the daughters were “friendly with the shooter’s older sister. On the day that chaos happened, she was walking up and down the corridors, with no one there to comfort her. I would think about that kid. Tears would come. I was very focused on families of the siblings, the Klebold and Harris siblings. They had older brothers who were very good kids. What happens when your surname becomes notorious, how do you go on?”
Lamb’s work in Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute for Women also shaped the current work; he teaches writing workshops and has edited two published collections of the inmates’ work, “Couldn’t Keep It To Myself (2003)” and “I’ll Fly Away (2007).” In this role Lamb, like his central character Caelum Quirk, is a witness once removed. The inmates, he said, can write anything they want but tend toward autobiography.
“For a while, they hover around safe pieces, but little by little they get to the tough stuff. I was on the receiving end of those stories, filled with traumas of all kinds. . . . I was in a reactive mode with them.”
The experience with the women contributed more than insight into his central character.
“The same summer I started the novel, that was also the summer I also started working with women in prison … As I was writing this novel, they gave me an education about how and why women end up in prison. They were in prison for unpremeditated acts of violence. If you connect the dots between those stories, post-traumatic stress disorder comes to the foreground.”
Lamb said that music is integral to his thought process; the title of each of his novels is drawn from a song. The title of his first, “She’s Come Undone,” came after the novel was finished, when a song by the Guess Who seemed a perfect fit. “I Know This Much is True” was drawn from the group Spandau Ballet.
This time, he said, “I had the title before I had the story. I was in the car, where I had a CD of hymns, Americana, that included “Amazing Grace.” That line in the second verse, it came vibrating at me. I knew, before I had the story, that I thought I might call it that. I’m always envious of writers who have end in sight, who write toward it.
“The song became a riddle for me. I had to ask myself, over a nine-year period, what had he come to believe, and what hour had that happened?”
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
Readings today and Monday
Wally Lamb will read from and sign copies of “The Hour I First Believed” at the Boulder Book Store (1107 Pearl St., Boulder) at 3:30 p.m. today and at the Tattered Cover Book Store (9315 Dorchester St., Highlands Ranch) at 7:30 p.m. Monday.
