Hour I First Believed (Lamb)

The Hour I First Believed
Wally Lamb, 2008
HarperCollins
768 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060988432

Summary
In The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.

When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen 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 put right, and further tragedy ensues.

While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface.

As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary — and American. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 17, 1950
• Where—Norwich, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., University of Connecticut;
   M.F.A., University of Vermont
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Connecticut


Wally Lamb is an American author of several novels, including She's Come Undone (1992) and I Know This Much Is True (1998), The Hour I First Believed (2008), and We Are Water (2013). The first two books were Oprah Book Club selections. Lamb was the director of the Writing Center at Norwich Free Academy in Norwich from 1989 to 1998 and has taught Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Connecticut.

Early life
Lamb was born to a working-class family in Norwich, Connecticut. Three Rivers, the fictional town where several of his novels are set, is based on Norwich and the nearby towns of New London, Willimantic, Connecticut, and Westerly, Rhode Island. As a child, Lamb loved to draw and create his own comic books—activities which, he says, gave him "a leg up" on the imagery and colloquial dialogue that characterize his stories. He credits his ability to write in female voices, as well as male, with having grown up with older sisters in a neighborhood largely populated by girls.

After graduating from high school, Lamb studied at the University of Connecticut during the turbulent early 1970s era of anti-war and civil-rights protests and student strikes. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Education from the University of Connecticut and an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College.

Writing
Lamb began writing in 1981, the year he became a first-time father. Lamb's first published stories were short fictions that appeared in Northeast, a Sunday magazine of the Hartford Courant. "Astronauts," published in the Missouri Review in 1989, won the Missouri Review William Penden Prize and became widely anthologize

d. His first novel, She's Come Undone, was followed six years later by I Know This Much Is True, a story about identical twin brothers, one of whom develops paranoid schizophrenia. Both novels became number one bestsellers after Oprah Winfrey selected them for her popular Book Club. Lamb's third novel, The Hour I First Believed, published in 2008, interfaces fiction with such non-fictional events as the Columbine High School shooting, the Iraq War, and, in a story within the story, events of nineteenth-century America. Published the following year, Wishin' and Hopin' was a departure for Lamb: a short, comically nostalgic novel about a parochial school fifth grader, set in 1964. In We Are Water, Lamb returns to his familiar setting of Three Rivers. The novel focuses on art, 1950s-era racial strife, and the impact of a devastating flood on a Connecticut family.

Teaching
Lamb taught English and writing for 25 years at the Norwich Free Academy, a regional high school that was his alma mater. In his last years at the school, Lamb designed and implemented the school's Writing Center, where he instructed students in writing across the disciplines. As a result of his work for this program, he was chosen the Norwich Free Academy's first Teacher of the Year and later was named a finalist for the honor of Connecticut Teacher of the Year (1989). From 1997 to 1999, he was an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Connecticut. As the school's Director of Creative Writing, he originated a student-staffed literary and arts magazine, The Long River Review.

Prison work
From 1999 to the present, Lamb has facilitated a writing program for incarcerated women at the York Correctional Institute, Connecticut's only women's prison in Niantic, Connecticut. The program has produced two collections of his inmate students' autobiographical writing, Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters and I'll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison, both of which Lamb edited.

The publication of the first book became a source of controversy and media attention when, a week before its release, the State of Connecticut unexpectedly sued its incarcerated contributors—not for the six thousand dollars each writer would collect after her release from prison but for the entire cost of her incarceration, calculated at $117 per day times the number of days in her prison sentence. When one of the writers won a PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, given to a writer whose freedom of speech is under attack, the prison destroyed the women's writing and moved to close down Lamb's program. These actions caught the interest of the CBS 60 Minute; the State of Connecticut settled the lawsuit and reinstated the program shortly before the show was aired.

Influences
Lamb says he draws influence from masters of long- and short-form fiction, among them John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Raymond Carver, and Andre Dubus.

He credits his perennial teaching of certain novels to high school students with teaching him about "the scaffolding" of longer stories. Among these, Lamb lists Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. He says Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other anthropological analyses of the commonalities of ancient myths from diverse world cultures helped him to figure out the ways in which stories, ancient and modern, can illuminate the human condition. Lamb has also stated that he is influenced by pop culture and artists who work in other media. Among these he mentions painters Edward Hopper and René Magritte.

Honors and awards
Lamb's writing awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Connecticut Center for the Book's Lifetime Achievement Award, selections by Oprah's Book Club and Germany's Bertelsmann Book Club, the Pushcart Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, and New York Times Notable Books of the Year listings.

She's Come Undone was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times's Best First Novel Award and one of People magazine's Top Ten Books of the Year. I Know This Much Is True won the Friends of the Library USA Readers' Choice Award for best novel of 1998 and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill's Kenneth Johnson Award for its anti-stigmatizing of mental illness.

Teaching awards for Lamb include a national Apple Computers "Thanks to Teachers" Excellence Award and the Barnes and Noble "Writers Helping Writers" Award for his work with incarcerated women. Lamb has received Honorary Doctoral Degrees from several colleges and universities and was awarded Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College of Fine Arts and the University of Connecticut. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/14/13.)

Book Reviews
A great story is buried in Wally Lamb's avalanche of a novel, The Hour I First Believed, but only the most determined readers will manage to dig it out.... The author can be a captivating storyteller, and he has built this story on one of the most shocking acts of violence in modern history. Sadly, though, his new novel becomes so burdened by diversions, delays, tangents and side plots that the whole rambling enterprise grows maddening....Lamb doesn't provide the sort of psychological insight into the perpetrators that we got from Richard Russo's and Lionel Shriver's novels about school shootings, but he knows just how to let the details of a tragedy unfold without decoration or commentary. He's a master at the kind of direct, unadorned narrative that brings these events alive in all their visceral power. The most terrifying section of The Hour I First Believed is essentially a docudrama of the Columbine massacre, describing the actual events, naming the real victims and heroes and providing chilling excerpts from Klebold's and Harris's journals and videotapes.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

A novel of this length, filled with one troubled soul after another, could take an eternity to get through. And there are times when Lamb's tale could have benefited from a more ruthless editor. But to use an age-old cliché, it's a page-turner — at times a depressing page-turner, but a page-turner nonetheless. Lamb remains a storyteller at the top of his game. For some reason, you care about these people."
USA Today

Reading Wally Lamb's new novel, his first in 10 years, is akin to putting on flannel pajamas during the first cold snap of the season. Nothing fancy here. But what a comfort to get lost in Lamb's characters.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

Lamb is exceptional in his exploration of the direct and indirect impacts of survivor guilt. And he makes it clear that, no matter how much the hearts of the community went out to those who lost loved ones and to those scarred by the killers, we still weren't capable of walking in their shoes.
Denver Post

But although the book is the long, luxurious and enjoyable read that Lamb fans have come to love, The Hour I First Believed ultimately fails to tie these events together into a coherent statement on the contemporary American experience. Instead, Lamb has crafted another affecting, engrossing tome about complicated, interesting characters.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

The beauty of The Hour I First Believed, a soaring novel as amazingly graceful as the classic hymn that provides the title, is that Lamb never loses sight of the spark of human resilience. Faced with tragedy, we stagger on. Or at least we try to, and Lamb's dexterity at reflecting this wonder is the lifeblood of his book.
Miami Herald

(Audio version.) Lamb’s third novel tackles the Columbine high school shooting head on as he places his fictional protagonists into the horrific events of April 1999. Caelum and his wife, Maureen, move to Colorado for teaching jobs at Columbine not long before the shootings. As the events unfold, Maureen finds herself in harms way but luckily survives, only to be haunted by the occurrence. Narrator George Guidall reads with an earnest, familiar voice. He draws listeners into this fascinating tale with nothing more than raw emotion and honesty; rarely does such a straightforward performance tap into the human psyche so effectively.
Publishers Weekly


In a sprawling narrative that contains enough tragedy for three novels, Lamb tells the story of 47-year-old English teacher Caelum Quirk and his third wife, Maureen, a nurse. After almost breaking up over Maureen’s infidelity, the two move to Littleton, Colorado, hoping for a fresh start.... Lamb’s overlong narrative and endless recitation of tragedy dilute the power of his story. Still, his particular brand of hope-and-despair fiction holds a powerful allure for his fans, who will be lining up for this long-awaited novel. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist

Book Club Discussion Questions
1. The Hour I First Believed deals with many themes: violence, family, the quest for meaning and connection, faith, and the power of chaos to change our lives. These themes are stitched together by two opposing emotional states—despair and hope. How are these two oppositional states intertwined in the story? How are they demonstrated in the story? Use any of the character's lives as an example.

2. Do you believe that out of chaos—tragedy—comes understanding and hope? Is this always the case?

3. Can perpetrators of chaos be victims themselves? Which, if any of the characters, demonstrate this? If you answer no, why not?

4. One of the major themes of the book is violence. Can violence ever be justified? Is it sometimes necessary? Think about the sacrifices of Caelum's ancestors who gave their lives to free the slaves and save the Union. Or those who have lost their lives in other conflicts. Is war always immoral?

5. Scientists say we all have the capability of violence. What stops some from hurting others? What might propel the unassuming to commit a tragic act? How is this evident in the novel?

6. Discuss the main characters. What were your impressions of Caelum and Maureen? Of Velvet? What about the real-life perpetrators of Columbine, Eric and Dylan? Did your impressions of these characters change over the course of the novel? If so, why?

7. How does Caelum and Maureen's relationship evolve from the beginning of the story to its conclusion? Why did they stay together? Would either have been justified in divorcing the other? If they had separated, what might have happened to them?

8. Why does Velvet call Maureen Mom? What is their relationship? Why do you think they were able to form such a powerful bond? What did each give to the other? What is Velvet's relationship to Caelum? Why does he find it so difficult to sympathize with the girl when she is his student?

9. How does the arrival of Katrina survivors Janis and Moze affect Caelum's life? What does their appearance add to the story?

10. Velvet tells Caelum that she Googled his name and discovered it was a constellation. According to Webster's Dictionary, a constellation is "a group of stars forming a recognizable pattern that is traditionally named after its apparent form or identified with a mythological figure; a group or cluster of related things." Does the novel's main character embody this definition? How so?

11. Do you think Caelum could have found his hour of belief without the events he experienced? Do you think he could have learned to believe without discovering the stories of his parents, his aunt, and other family members who went before him?

12. What does the title The Hour I First Believed mean to you? Have you had a moment of belief or witnessed it in another's life?

13. In the "Afterword" Wally Lamb writes, "I placed my fictional protagonist inside a confounding nonfictional maze and challenged him to locate, at its center, the monsters he would need to confront and the means by which he might save himself and others. Along the way to discovering Caelum Quirk's story, I, too, wandered down corridors baffling and unfamiliar." Did reading the novel take you to unexpected places or raise unfamiliar feelings? Explain.

14. Caelum's aunt, Lolly, lived by the philosophy of the sign that hung behind her desk at the prison: "A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity." What did that mean to Lolly? What does that mean to you? Did Maureen find freedom in her imprisonment?

15. The novel recalls the debate of nature versus nurture. How much are we the sum of our families? How much can we change?

16. Fate and free will also play a role throughout the novel. How are the two connected? How are fate and free will related to nature and nurture?

17. In his community college class, Caelum asks his students to relate the Greek myths to their own lives. In reading their responses to his question, which, if any resonate with your own life?

18. Throughout the novel, Wally Lamb interweaves numerous calamities that have befallen our country, from school violence to Hurricane Katrina to the Iraq War, that have touched all of us to some degree. Can you find hope in any of these dramas? If so, what?

19. We live in a society that believes more in punishment and retribution than in rehabilitation when it comes to the incarcerated—a far different view than that held by Caelum's aunt, Lolly, a correctional officer at a successful women's prison before she was forced into retirement. Do you believe in rehabilitation? Do you think kindness is important even when it comes to criminals? Why or why not?

20. Wally Lamb has worked within the prison system, using his gifts to reach out and help inmates. Have your views of crime, prison, and criminals changed in any way from your reading of the novel?

21. One critic called Wally Lamb a "modern-day Dostoyevsky," whose characters struggle not only with their respective pasts, but with a "mocking, sadistic God" in whom they don't believe but to whom they turn, nevertheless, in times of trouble (New York Times). Do you think this describes The Hour I First Believed?

22. If you've read Wally Lamb's previous novels, compare and contrast them with The Hour I First Believed.

23. If you've read the autobiographical essays written by the women in Wally Lamb's York Prison workshop (Couldn't Keep It To Myself, I'll Fly Away), would you say that Lamb's work with these students informed the plot of The Hour I First Believed? If so, in what ways?

24. The Hour I First Believed interfaces fictional characters with actual people who are alive today and people from the historical past. Did you enjoy this technique or not? Is it fair or unfair to blend fiction and nonfiction? Was it fair of Lamb to draw on the actual Columbine tragedy, or should he have created a fictional school shooting incident?

25. Caelum makes note of the irony of a maze: how that which seems illogical and confounding on the ground looks logical and ordered from above. Explain how these two perspectives apply to Caelum's life story as well.

26. The novel's final two sentences are: Yes, that was when at last it happened. That was The Hour I First Believed. Identify the hour to which Caelum refers? That which Caelum came to believe is open to interpretation. How do you interpret what the character finally believed?

27. Play the casting game. If a movie were to be made of this novel, which actors would you cast in the key roles?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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