AuntShecky
12-10-2008, 03:48 PM
I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb (New York: HarperCollins/ReganBooks,1998),
897pp.
At a time too long ago for me to admit, I once heard a college professor say about one of Shakespeare’s characters, “When you spend too much time feeling sorry for yourself, you don’t leave any room for others to feel sorry for you.” I remembered that line as I read Wally Lamb’s voluminous novel, I Know This Much Is True. For sure, the book is a marathon pity party. On the other hand, it’s the epitome of the saw, “Once you pick this book up, you can’t put it down again.” Painfully aware of the book’s tragic flaws, I kept reading and reading until I finished it. In a sense, it’s like seeing a roadside accident; you know you shouldn’t rubberneck, but somehow you just can’t look away.
Dominick, the narrator and protagonist, has suffered through a lifetime with his twin, Thomas. (Though nicknames are never mentioned, like many twins their names are a rhyming pair: “Dom” and “Tom.”) What distinguishes the identical brothers is the fact that Thomas is profoundly schizophrenic. A meaty “List of Sources” appears as an appendix; it is clear that the author has done his homework. Because of its structural problems, this book will not be the best novel you’ve ever read, but I guarantee that it will be the best one you’ll ever read about schizophrenia. (Or at least the lengthiest!)
Even before Thomas’s mental condition manifested itself, Dominick has been his brother’s keeper by default. His temper is a volcano with the lava of a lifetime of resentment ready to explode. Though Dominick never uses the term “martyr” to describe himself, yet that’s exactly what his self-image is. Except for a number of chapters interspersed through the last half of the tome which consist of his maternal grandfather’s memoir, the entire novel revolves around not Thomas, but Dominick’s reaction to him and others in his life. Occasionally the narrator approximates lyrical sensitivity (such as the scene in which he and his stepfather are returning from a funeral) but the majority ofthe narration is one big whine. Not that Dominick doesn’t have plenty to cry about– I kid you not– for there is something here for every masochist on your shopping list: the aforementioned schizophrenia, and in no particular order, child abuse, child molestation, SIDS, facial disfigurement, two murders, two amputations, two suicides, an automobile accident, at least two rapes, hints about possible bestiality and incest, wife beating, heartless bureaucracy, trouble with local law enforcement, racial prejudice, cancer, AIDS, and other atrocities ad infinitum. It’s almost as if the author had taken a Pandora’s box and shaken it into his word processor. It’s like a Lifetime Movie of the Week --hell, the Millennium!-- as produced by the censor-free HBO. And to top it all off Dominick has had a failed marriage (almost de rigueur for every middle-aged protagonist in twentieth century American literature), a live-in girlfriend with some heavy baggage of her own, and traumas both psychological and physical, sustained from his house-painting business.
A few of the secondary characters, such as the boy’s wicked stepfather and the arrogant grandfather as he shows himself in his memoirs, are finely painted. Others are mere puppets to propel the plot, which moves from flashbacks of the twins’ boyhood toward the late 1960s, through the book’s present day, the early 1990s. Indeed, it is at the height of the first Gulf War, about which Thomas only experiences through media reports, that sparks the violent religious “sacrifice” which opens the book.
Dominick and his name-sake grandfather are both macho types with the potential to punch a hole in any given wall without warning. With the exception of Thomas’s gentleness, most of the male characters in the book are arrogant bullies who throw their weight around. By contrast, the depictions of female characters are not as vivid as the male characters. In my opinion, Wally Lamb seems to have caught the Oliver Stone Syndrome in that creating realistic women seems to be a struggle. It seems to me that Dessa,(the ex-wife)and the ironically named “Joy,”( the girlfriend) are almost twins themselves, despite the age differences. Even their speech patterns and words of comfort are the same. In an aesthetic sense they’re the same woman, the embodiment of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, an Old World male concept made vividly clear in the manuscript by the grandfather. The psychiatrist who is Dominick’s on-again, off-again therapist exudes serenity, but aside from a few cultural knickknacks, we don’t learn very much about Dr. Patel. She exists as a sounding board for Dominick’s complaints, and the bits of Eastern philosophy, Jungian therapies, and
reading lists are introduced so superfluously that they seem like stones skipped across the river in Dominick’s Connecticut hometown, the stream that figures prominently in two of the book’s ever-flowing tragedies. Dominick’s mother and to a certain extent his maternal grandmother are perpetual victims so weak that they ultimately can’t fight back against assaults from both their abusive spouses as well as life’s relentless slings
and arrows. The two feisty females in the novel are both minor characters – the graduate student whom Dominick hires to translate the Sicilian dialect of his grandfatherdisappears with the manuscript, and then returns with it in a irritatingly-contrived fashion. The social worker at Thomas’s mental institution seems to be the sole female in the book who seems real – and she is revealed be a lesbian. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but living, breathing, heterosexual women with healthy self-esteem are hard to find in this book.
Paradoxically, the book’s major shortcoming is not necessarily its length, but one would think that nearly 900 pages would reserve some room for the reader. Because the narrator tells the reader everything, the reader has no opportunity to make his or her own judgement or to participate in the creative process. Instead the reader is left with only one role, that of emotional voyeur.
Additionally, the narrator’s prose style apparently is meant to be colloquial and conversational, even down to ending declarative prose statements with a question mark, which is how Americans started talking beginning around the early 1990s for some unknown reason. There’s no problem with avoiding affectation, yet the effect to make Dominick sound like a Joe Six-Pack, regular masculine guy goes too far. Evidently, Dominick never met a cliche he didn’t like. At one point he calls Dr. Patel out on her esoteric vocabulary, yet we’re told that Dominick is a college graduate and a former secondary school teacher, so his lack of expressive language and generally mundane prose smacks of disingenuousness. Equally baffling is the novel’s tacked-on fairy tale ending -- iit materializes out of nowhere, though Bruno Bettleheim appears on Dr. Patel’s reading list.
But I don’t fault the narrator for his repetition, continually reprising a medley of incidents. On occasion, real life seems like a disillusioned shrew who has a habit of confronting her spouse with by bringing up rehashed injustices and slights from decades past. As a pundit recently said,“Life is not one damned thing after another. It’s the same damned thing, over and over again.”
897pp.
At a time too long ago for me to admit, I once heard a college professor say about one of Shakespeare’s characters, “When you spend too much time feeling sorry for yourself, you don’t leave any room for others to feel sorry for you.” I remembered that line as I read Wally Lamb’s voluminous novel, I Know This Much Is True. For sure, the book is a marathon pity party. On the other hand, it’s the epitome of the saw, “Once you pick this book up, you can’t put it down again.” Painfully aware of the book’s tragic flaws, I kept reading and reading until I finished it. In a sense, it’s like seeing a roadside accident; you know you shouldn’t rubberneck, but somehow you just can’t look away.
Dominick, the narrator and protagonist, has suffered through a lifetime with his twin, Thomas. (Though nicknames are never mentioned, like many twins their names are a rhyming pair: “Dom” and “Tom.”) What distinguishes the identical brothers is the fact that Thomas is profoundly schizophrenic. A meaty “List of Sources” appears as an appendix; it is clear that the author has done his homework. Because of its structural problems, this book will not be the best novel you’ve ever read, but I guarantee that it will be the best one you’ll ever read about schizophrenia. (Or at least the lengthiest!)
Even before Thomas’s mental condition manifested itself, Dominick has been his brother’s keeper by default. His temper is a volcano with the lava of a lifetime of resentment ready to explode. Though Dominick never uses the term “martyr” to describe himself, yet that’s exactly what his self-image is. Except for a number of chapters interspersed through the last half of the tome which consist of his maternal grandfather’s memoir, the entire novel revolves around not Thomas, but Dominick’s reaction to him and others in his life. Occasionally the narrator approximates lyrical sensitivity (such as the scene in which he and his stepfather are returning from a funeral) but the majority ofthe narration is one big whine. Not that Dominick doesn’t have plenty to cry about– I kid you not– for there is something here for every masochist on your shopping list: the aforementioned schizophrenia, and in no particular order, child abuse, child molestation, SIDS, facial disfigurement, two murders, two amputations, two suicides, an automobile accident, at least two rapes, hints about possible bestiality and incest, wife beating, heartless bureaucracy, trouble with local law enforcement, racial prejudice, cancer, AIDS, and other atrocities ad infinitum. It’s almost as if the author had taken a Pandora’s box and shaken it into his word processor. It’s like a Lifetime Movie of the Week --hell, the Millennium!-- as produced by the censor-free HBO. And to top it all off Dominick has had a failed marriage (almost de rigueur for every middle-aged protagonist in twentieth century American literature), a live-in girlfriend with some heavy baggage of her own, and traumas both psychological and physical, sustained from his house-painting business.
A few of the secondary characters, such as the boy’s wicked stepfather and the arrogant grandfather as he shows himself in his memoirs, are finely painted. Others are mere puppets to propel the plot, which moves from flashbacks of the twins’ boyhood toward the late 1960s, through the book’s present day, the early 1990s. Indeed, it is at the height of the first Gulf War, about which Thomas only experiences through media reports, that sparks the violent religious “sacrifice” which opens the book.
Dominick and his name-sake grandfather are both macho types with the potential to punch a hole in any given wall without warning. With the exception of Thomas’s gentleness, most of the male characters in the book are arrogant bullies who throw their weight around. By contrast, the depictions of female characters are not as vivid as the male characters. In my opinion, Wally Lamb seems to have caught the Oliver Stone Syndrome in that creating realistic women seems to be a struggle. It seems to me that Dessa,(the ex-wife)and the ironically named “Joy,”( the girlfriend) are almost twins themselves, despite the age differences. Even their speech patterns and words of comfort are the same. In an aesthetic sense they’re the same woman, the embodiment of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, an Old World male concept made vividly clear in the manuscript by the grandfather. The psychiatrist who is Dominick’s on-again, off-again therapist exudes serenity, but aside from a few cultural knickknacks, we don’t learn very much about Dr. Patel. She exists as a sounding board for Dominick’s complaints, and the bits of Eastern philosophy, Jungian therapies, and
reading lists are introduced so superfluously that they seem like stones skipped across the river in Dominick’s Connecticut hometown, the stream that figures prominently in two of the book’s ever-flowing tragedies. Dominick’s mother and to a certain extent his maternal grandmother are perpetual victims so weak that they ultimately can’t fight back against assaults from both their abusive spouses as well as life’s relentless slings
and arrows. The two feisty females in the novel are both minor characters – the graduate student whom Dominick hires to translate the Sicilian dialect of his grandfatherdisappears with the manuscript, and then returns with it in a irritatingly-contrived fashion. The social worker at Thomas’s mental institution seems to be the sole female in the book who seems real – and she is revealed be a lesbian. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but living, breathing, heterosexual women with healthy self-esteem are hard to find in this book.
Paradoxically, the book’s major shortcoming is not necessarily its length, but one would think that nearly 900 pages would reserve some room for the reader. Because the narrator tells the reader everything, the reader has no opportunity to make his or her own judgement or to participate in the creative process. Instead the reader is left with only one role, that of emotional voyeur.
Additionally, the narrator’s prose style apparently is meant to be colloquial and conversational, even down to ending declarative prose statements with a question mark, which is how Americans started talking beginning around the early 1990s for some unknown reason. There’s no problem with avoiding affectation, yet the effect to make Dominick sound like a Joe Six-Pack, regular masculine guy goes too far. Evidently, Dominick never met a cliche he didn’t like. At one point he calls Dr. Patel out on her esoteric vocabulary, yet we’re told that Dominick is a college graduate and a former secondary school teacher, so his lack of expressive language and generally mundane prose smacks of disingenuousness. Equally baffling is the novel’s tacked-on fairy tale ending -- iit materializes out of nowhere, though Bruno Bettleheim appears on Dr. Patel’s reading list.
But I don’t fault the narrator for his repetition, continually reprising a medley of incidents. On occasion, real life seems like a disillusioned shrew who has a habit of confronting her spouse with by bringing up rehashed injustices and slights from decades past. As a pundit recently said,“Life is not one damned thing after another. It’s the same damned thing, over and over again.”