The Hour I First Believed

The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb is the best book I've read this year. It's a big book, covering a family's history over several generations and a good chunk of American history along the way. But the central event of the book is the Columbine shooting. Lamb must have done painstaking research, and it shows in the haunting scenes of the shooting itself and the aftermath. The narrator of the book is Caelum Quirk, a high school English and creative writing teacher at Columbine. His wife, Maureen, is a school nurse at the same school. Caelum is actually on the east coast following a family death when the attack comes, but he learns of it through his wife's experience hiding in a cabinet in the library, the main site of the violence. The rest of the book is about how this event changed their lives and how they attempted to recover. One chapter, a little more than halfway through that ends with a life-altering accident, is so poignant it could stand alone as a short story.

Woven in through Caelum's family history is the fictionalized story of the first jail specifically for women built in the United States. Quirk Correctional Institute, named for Caelum's great-grandmother, who founded the institution, sits in the middle of the family farm where Caelum and Maureen return after the shooting. Lamb deftly combines the political aspects of the fight for such an institution with the personal events of the characters' lives. Descriptions of life in a modern-day prison contrast with the ideals held by Caelum's great-grandmother for a telling picture of today's society. It all combines in a rich, layered story with many parallels.

About two-thirds of the way in, I was afraid it was spinning out of control, however. After the accident in that chapter that is so beautifully written, new characters are introduced who have just fled Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. It gets to be a little much with Columbine and then Katrina--why not throw in 9/11 and the SARS outbreak? (Don't worry, the former gets a couple of passing mentions.) But it comes together again in the last 200 pages, and Lamb's thoughtful afterword gives some context to all the current events in the book. And it really does fit with the book's theme of overcoming evil and destruction. Overall, I highly recommend this book!