Customer Reviews

The Hour I First Believed

5 star:		(148)
4 star:		(90)
3 star:		(91)
2 star:		(95)
1 star:		(48)

 

 

The story begins with the Columbine School Massacre, having followed the seemingly innocent culprits before the event. It then goes into fiction centred on the two main characters, husband and wife, and how they are affected, along with glimpses into their family's past. It all makes for an epic journey.

I must admit had difficulty finishing this book, the reason? Quite simply I did not like the character who was the narrator. The narrator, Caelum Quirk, is an educated man, a teacher, but he has among other failings anger management problems, a wife who was once unfaithful, and they both are prone to using unsavoury language. To follow them through their traumatic experiences was at time almost a burden. For me it is important to feel something for the main characters in a story, to care about them, but here I was unable to connect.

Maybe the fault is mine. The book is extremely well written and reads with great ease. It is gritty, confident, witty, and direct; putting aside my reservations it would make very involving and rewarding reading. But if I am going to become involved in a story it is essential that I am able to feel something of the main characters; I do not expect them to be perfect, but I need to be able warm to them, to care about them, and here I could not.

I consider Wally Lamb to be one of the most personally influential authors I have ever read. I have waited in anticipation for this book to be released. He lacks in areas I normally site as his strength - character development. Usually Lamb has the power to pull you into the body of the character and feel their emotions with them however in this work, I merely felt that he used side stories to distract from the fact that none of them had depth. Maureen, 'Mo' is the character I found the most appealing, but because the story is written from her husbands point of view, her deep tragedy goes without any sort of lasting impact on the reader. Lamb claims to have chosen events & people that occurred over the past 8 years to draw inspiration from and give them everlasting tributes through their impact in his characters lives. But all he manages to achieve is a listless and unconvincing review of the events of the stories we still see day to day on the 6 o'clock news. His closing remarks reveal that he struggled with writing this book, and I believe the pressure got to him... he wasn't true to himself in this work. Such a shame.

I listened to the first 11 chapters on CD before the print version hit the library and suspect that my ability to finish it had a lot to do with the option if offered to skim/skip many pages of the book. The historical piece was an interesting effort to explain the present, but could have been equally if not more effective with much less of it. Like the narrator of the story, the author seemed to be lost, not quite sure what to do about the people and events in his life, almost but not quite connecting in a way that enriched anyone. It reminded me of papers written by students with an abundance of material but insufficient insight as to the purpose of the assignment and not enough time to figure it out. This was a solid effort but even though I do not regret the time I spent on it, it is also a book that I would recommend only with reservation.

If you allow it, this book will effect your mood. The story ties in actual events that took place at Columbine High with the actual people, places and evidence tied into a fictional account of the narrator/author's account of things happining in his life before,during and the most compelling, dark period, after the columbine murders and it's affect it takes on himself and his wife and the world around him. This is truly dark stuff, because you KNOW that someone, somewhere is experiencing exactly what your reading in this book.

If the general story doesn't sound interesting enough for a 750+ page hardcover book, don't worry, the story will not allow you to put the book down as the pages fly by. I have had the book for 3 days and have finished it and didn't once feel like I was reading a (big) book.

Great book, but beware. The author touches on alot of personal subjects that cover depression, anxiety, sexual abuse, murder, adultery, and a host of others that can and will carry with you after you put the book down.

"The Hour I First Believed" was such a treat; at 740 pages I still wasn't ready for it to end. Sure there is stuff that an editor could have cut out and the story wouldn't have suffered....but the NOVEL would have. Lamb is particularly good at the "story within the story" which he also applied in "I Know This Much Is True". (I particularly enjoyed the epic and amusing saga of the origins of Rheingold Beer.) Some critics have found fault with the length of the novel and the round-about way that the plot develops and the story unfolds. They call the diversions "tangents" with a negative connotation, but for me, it was all a wonderful part of the rich tapestry of the novel. My favorite "big books" always contain diverging and merging rivers of side stories, plots and illuminating flashbacks. Wally Lamb is like Charles Dickens, Pat Conroy and Richard Russo in that way. Devote a little time to this novel and you won't be disappointed.

In this book, Wally Lamb has created a wonderful historical novel. Sure it's recent history - the late 20th and early 21st centuries - but no less historical just because we remember it. He's covered the Love Bug, Columbine, Katrina...he even flashes back to mid 20th century and the Cocoanut [sic] Grove fire; all catastrophes of one sort or another, but isn't it by the catastrophes that we divide up our history?

Another thing Lamb is good at is creating credible characters. This novel's protagonist, Caelum Quirk, is a bit of a jerk, and his wife, Maureen, is more than a little irritating...just like real people. Even when we don't agree with the character's actions, we nevertheless understand their motivations, thanks to Lamb's writing talent.

It took Lamb almost 10 years to complete this novel and it is apparent that he lovingly and painstakingly weighed every choice he made here. "The Hour I First Believed" is worth the wait.

Regrettably, I must agree with the other reviewers who were disappointed in this book. I, too, was a fan of Mr. Lamb's other books and was hoping to be as captivated by "The Hour I First Believed". Unfortunately, this book was an ambitious undertaking of a difficult subject in itself - the Columbine shootings - further complicated by the weaving of numerous sub-plots that ultimately eclipse what I thought was going to be the primary one. Like some other reviewers, I lost interest in the book mid-way through. The reasons for this are as varied as the stories attempting to be told: I felt no connection with any characters, with the temporary exception of the wife, Maureen ("Mo"); there were too many stories woven into one prompting me to lose interest in most of them; the chances of one character being the victim of so much mayhem and mystery would defy all odds which made it too far-fetched as to be believable (massacres, killings, death, disasters) and the shared conversational inflection of virtually all the characters...because the characters? In this novel? They all talk exactly like that. I understand people occasionally end their sentences as if they were questions while conversing, but the tendency of all characters to do so became cloying and distracting to me as a reader.

Rather than feeling reflective upon ending this book, I felt relieved. It was interesting to read bits and pieces about Columbine, a little less so about Katrina (primarily because I could not connect with the characters hailing from the region and found their coincidental teaming up with another disaster victim contrived), and progressively less so all the other sub-plots. I would, however, like to re-read "She's Come Undone" and "I Know This Much is True", both of which I own and remain on my office shelves, once I return this one to its place in the library.

I could not wait for The Hour I First Believed to be released on November 11th. My Amazon copy arrived on Wednesday 11-12-08, and I immediately began to read, and read, and read. This book was 752 pages, and for me (8) days of reading.

I have been a huge Wally Lamb fan after reading: She's Come Undone, and I Know This Much Is True: A Novel (P.S.). This new book comes after a 10 year dry spell. One of Lamb's talents has always been the ability to write so beautifully about damaged people. This new novel is no exception.

Caelum Quirk is a forty-seven-year-old high school teacher, married for the third time. His younger wife, Maureen, is a school nurse at the same school-- Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke, but Maureen stays behind. She finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost -- she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily forgotten, and further tragedy ensues.

The Columbine portion of this story reminded me of Nineteen Minutes, however, Lamb, chose to use the actual names of the shooters and the victims in this story. This novel, is not just a story about Columbine, although the aftermaths of the shooting follow Maureen and Caelum throughout the story. This novel is about so much more. In fact, within this book are stories which span five generations. Caelum uncovers secrets of his past, and that of his ancestors after finding old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. Piece by piece, he reconstructs the lives of those who came before him, and along the way as secrets emerge, he is better able to understand his own troubled past.

It is evident that this book was painstakinly researched, and brilliantly written. I really liked this book, but I felt that the book dragged in parts. It is almost like there was way too much going on in this book, and in my opinion, the book might have benefited from a little more editing.

I am a great fan of Wally Lamb's, who I believe writes with such deep feeling for his subjects and with such intensity that it is hard to step away from his stories unaffected. When I first read "She's Come Undone" I was convinced that the author had to be a female -- how else could he so fully understand and write about the female psyche? After several readings, I still find it hard to believe that a man wrote such a deeply personal story about a woman and her struggle to find happiness.

I cannot really do this latest novel justice in a brief review. It is at once beautiful, poetic, sadly tragic, complex and strangely hopeful. The story line is so complex and the telling so replete with wonderful, human characters that it is not easily summarized or encapsulated. It is well worth the commitment required to finish reading it, even though it does contain some lengthy digressions into historical matters that seem unnecessary.

This novel tells an amazing story; what makes it compelling for me is that it draws upon modern day events so strongly. While the story starts with the Columbine killings, it also draws story elements from Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 9/11. The book is about many things, but the theme that comes through most strongly for me is the nature and extent of the collateral damage caused to innocent victims of evil and violence.

I didn't think I would make it through another depressing account of Columbine, and its awful legacy. But this book was less a tale of the specifics of that tragedy, as it was a story of the damage done to one it's victims, Maureen Quirk, a survivor of the carnage in that high school library, and her husband Caelum, who was not even in Colorado that day. We are given a very real description of the nature of post traumatic stress disorder and its impact on those who are unable to overcome it. Maureen and Caelum struggle mightily to overcome her demons, eventually moving out of Colorado to Caelum's recently inherited family farm in Connecticut.

At some point, though, the story moves away from Maureen's struggles to focus more upon those of her husband. I found this turn of events a bit unsettling, but in the end, I realized that the central story had always been about this truly secondary victim. Caelum's journey into his fascinating family's past, including the damage wreaked by the Civil War, is one that is replete with fascinating discoveries. Through all of this narrative, the author continuously reminds us of the unnecessary damage caused by violence, war, evil, hatred and meanness.

In the end, the author leaves us with the lovely ambiguity of knowing that Caelum comes to believe in something, you just cannot be sure what it is. As with many great novels, it almost doesn't matter what happens in the end -- it was the path taken that provides the truly satisfying experience.

Having just finished The Hour I First Believed, I'm exhausted, but I'll try to summon enough strength to urge would-be readers to borrow this one from the library.

My first reaction is, WHEW! Am I glad that's over--quite the opposite reaction I hope for when reading the work of an author whom I have admired in the past.

My second reaction is, wow, do I dislike every character in this book, except maybe Aunt Lolly. Caelum starts out as a jerk and continues to be a jerk, no matter what else happens. He is cold, violent, and a sexist dork (I mean come on, he gets wildly angry when he discovers his poor, traumatized wife owns a vibrator. Does it really take a therapist to make that okay for him???). I am fully cognizant that a protagonist with faults is a more interesting, well-rounded everyman. But Caelum is an unrelenting asshat.

It took Wally Lamb ten years to write the book, and I believe that is EXACTLY what sunk the ship. According to his afterword, he started out with a story of family secrets and intrigue. Good enough. But during the long...loooong course of writing the novel, lots of awful stuff kept happening in the world around us: Columbine, Katrina, 9/11, the Bush administration. Lamb just kept dumping all that stuff into the book.

Any one of his central topics--disaffected teen violence and its aftermath, family secrets, the history of women's correctional facilities--would have made a splendid and engrossing novel. And he almost gets there with the Columbine story. But he throws out so many story lines that the novel unravels as it goes along. I dare say, if this had been Wally Lamb's first novel, the editors would have had a big, blue pencil reality check. Sadly, that did not happen here.

Remember Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys? He had an out-of-control book that just kept getting longer, and longer. Finally, his student Hannah tells him that his book reads as if he didn't make any choices. At all.

Now, I wonder if the used bookstore will take this one in on trade....

I really wanted to love this book. I liked it a great deal, I devoured it in two days, yet I'm still looking for a book to compare with "She's Come Undone," a book that I am literally unable to put down, one that wrenches out my heart every single time, leaving me sobbing with her final self-discovery of happiness. But this is not that and cannot be compared, but must be evaluated as an individual book.

Story wise, I really liked most of it. The recent/current stories of Caelum and Maureen were compelling. The family stories, however, were less fascinating, even distracting. Janis's document, in particular, seemingly had no place in the novel for me. I didn't feel compelled to know every detail of his family's history. A few paragraphs here and there would have been sufficient to shape how he came to the present. The interactions and stories about Cae and Maureen, however, were among the best I have read in years.

Lamb has a definite knack for creating characters I care about and want them to succeed. Minor characters as well (Ulysses) develop major importance for me and I care about them no less than the protagonists. He also has incredible foreshadowing skills - by about page 200 I could sense the eventual end.

Overall a great book that will be reread many times. Bravo, Mr. Lamb!