Book-It 'o14! Book #8
May. 5th, 2014 05:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alivemagdoleneThe Fifty Books Challenge, year five! (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013) This was a library request.
Title: We Are Water: A Novel by Wally Lamb
Details: Copyright 2013, HarperCollins Publishers
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "In middle age, Annie Oh—wife, mother, and outsider artist—has shaken her family to its core. After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Annie has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy, cultured, confident Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.
Annie and Viveca plan to wed in the Oh family's hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, where gay marriage has recently been legalized. But the impending wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora's box of toxic secrets—dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs' lives.
We Are Water is an intricate and layered portrait of marriage, family, and the inexorable need for understanding and connection, told in the alternating voices of the Ohs—nonconformist Annie; her ex-husband, Orion, a psychologist; Ariane, the do-gooder daughter, and her twin, Andrew, the rebellious only son; and free-spirited Marissa, the youngest Oh. Set in New England and New York during the first years of the Obama presidency, it is also a portrait of modern America, exploring issues of class, changing social mores, the legacy of racial violence, and the nature of creativity and art.
With humor and breathtaking compassion, Wally Lamb brilliantly captures the essence of human experience in vivid and unforgettable characters struggling to find hope and redemption in the aftermath of trauma and loss. We Are Water is vintage Wally Lamb—a compulsively readable, generous, and uplifting masterpiece that digs deep into the complexities of the human heart to explore the ways in which we search for love and meaning in our lives."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I have a kind of complex relationship with Wally Lamb's writing. I first read She's Come Undone at possibly the most pivotal period in my life thus far and it's still one of my favorite books, although with passing years I've come to acknowledge the problematic/lazy writing aspects of the book. Hey, I was only sixteen when I read it.
A few years after that, I tried another "Oprah's Selection" book of his, I Know This Much is True. I liked it as well (although not as much, but that can be attributed to the period as much as the differences in the works) and for awhile, wasn't really aware that Lamb had written other books (as the "Oprah's Selection" brand died off along with my interest therein). I heard about his being an editor of writings from a women's prison, but as they were not his original works, I wasn't that interested.
So recently I hear again about Wally Lamb, this time promoting new original works he's done (since I Know This Much is True but not the prison writings collections he's edited). One's on request, one's advertised as a Christmas story and it's really hard for me to collect interest (but don't rule it out), and then there's this one which is also his most recent.
How I Liked It: I went into this fully aware of the fact I might fully loathe this book, despite how much his other books (particularly the first) have meant to me. I'm aware of the fact you can read another book by an author whose other work you revere and have it flop and still have your love of the other work intact. I know from personal experience (White Oleander was a book that also falls within the same devotion and same timeline as She's Come Undone).
I also knew that Lamb's style had changed and branched out a bit from She's Come Undone to I Know This Much is True.
The former is a rather straightforward memoir-style of a woman puzzling out her life from childhood to her forties. The latter is partially that same straightforward memoir-style, save for with a man with an identical twin suffering from schizophrenia, but also interspersed with the man's dead-before-he-was-born grandfather's sort-of autobiography, the story of an Italian immigrant and his troubles with his two brothers, his arranged marriage which includes his wife's best friend with whom she may or may not have committed a murder in the old country, all events largely taking place in the 1910s.
So it's clear from those two books alone that Lamb was branching out in his narrative style and trying new challenges. I can't trace a trajectory when I'm going from fifteen years and omitting the works in between as I've not yet read them, but from this book alone, I'm guessing Lamb continued to challenge himself with narratives.
The book is told in no less than eight different voices, focusing on the five members of the Oh family, father Orion, mother Annie, twins Ariane and Andrew, and youngest Marissa. Of those five, we hear from Orion and Annie the most.
The book attempts to uncover slowly to the reader the story of a flood that drastically changed the town almost fifty years earlier. An artist "arguably" murdered for his supposed affair with a white woman and whose works have been hidden since his death, the uncovering of a tragic history of Annie's family that reveals her motivations that further reveal motivations within other characters.
Sound exhausting?
While it's a compelling read, albeit difficult at times to keep characters straight (and one narrative is told at the time of the flood), it's clear that Lamb is overreaching and it's disappointing. He's almost scrambling to create the connections with characters that flowed more easily in his first two books. The characters are more character studies and while potentially fascinating and engaging ones, they never evolve past that stage. They really can't, not without making the book even longer than it already is, and even then, given the fact his way of establishing connection with a character is having us "walk with" them for awhile in first person narration, it'd still be likely to be fruitless.
The characters aren't the only problem. Lamb struggles with themes and I assumed from the copy that he was going to make a connection between a racially motivated murder and the "we have overcome" sentiment that rang through Obama's first year in office. I also figured some "forbidden love" angle might exist by way of the fact a same-sex marriage is taking place. There are certainly suggestions that Lamb intended to express and connect those themes, but rather than occasionally stating them outright, he doesn't actually do much with them.
Towards about the three-quarter mark, the book takes a sudden (and I feel unnecessarily) dark turn and is suddenly written by Stephen King (I don't use that reference lightly; I've read an enormous amount of King's work). While a story can certainly take a turn, this comes off as lazy, particularly since it essentially plants a gigantic new place in the plot so late in the book, and something from which an editor should've better coaxed Lamb away, or at least muted it. The shaky connections we made with the characters and their stories are just about severed as this bizarre drop lands in the story. In its final few chapters (Part V, with the caution "Three Years Later"), the author seems to more or less have returned from his King bender and seems to frantically attempt to tie together all loose ends and loose stories of the book, with little success. The three chapters have a single narrator who rather awkwardly attempts to give a casual report on almost all other characters we've heard mentioned throughout the book.
Some part of me that made connections and found bits of Lamb's style that I know in the book insists that if it had been a little longer, just a few more chapters, another section, Lamb could've pulled it off. He could've cemented the characters, he could've even probably made up for the bizarre detour and the plot-bomb for which we didn't get a conclusion (whether he gave us the conclusion or not, he could've at least tried to atone for its existence and the detour from which it came).
Throughout this project (five years now!) I've maintained that books that allow you to imagine how better they could've been actually do have merit as you're wishing in the first place they could've been better (rather than just be happy to see them end). An obvious part of my continued stance, including this book, is the fact I'm fully aware of how good this author can be. Therefore, to see fragments at all of the book this could've been suggests that this is something of a kinda good, not good, definitely not great, but not necessarily bad book. But my history with this author also tells me how excellent this book could've been had those fragments not been tantalizing fragments, but the style of the book.
I can't speak for Lamb's work other than his first two novels and for what fans of his work might be looking as far as a recommendation regarding this latest work. I will say that for fans of his old stuff such as myself, this is a pass, since it's only a tease at what it could've been. For those looking to get into Lamb's work, I wouldn't recommend this book. Reach instead for one or the other of his first two (or for all I know, his other two, non-editor works) and save this for later or pass it by altogether.
Notable: A few stray observations (which is kinda what my "notable" sections are, but these feel more stray than others, I suppose.
• Throughout the book, much is made of the fact that the mother has left the father after nearly thirty years of marriage for a woman. The book discusses her sexual encounters before she met the man who would become her husband, including lovers both male and female. So the mother is bisexual. The "straight to gay" the children (even the so-called enlightened one) keep alleging you keep waiting for someone, anyone to correct. The father corrects the born-again conservative Christian (except maybe not really) son that no, homosexuality is not a disease, it was taken off the DSM back in the early 'seventies. The closest we get is the youngest daughter, the aspiring actress and designer clothing devotee that's supposedly a sophisticated Manhattanite vaguely offering a theory she heard that we're all bisexual, deep down.
Given the book reveals plenty of Lamb's other social and political beliefs (by way of their being treated with sympathy... or not), it's extremely frustrating that no one, not even the so-called enlightened characters, bother to offer that bisexuality is a legitimate and separate orientation.
•
That would be the born-again son with his Evangelical girlfriend making plans.
I don't know; with The Colbert Report coming to an end, it's just nice to see reminders of what a cultural force it was and is.
• Revealing when the book went to publisher, Lamb offers a solemn note after his "gratitude" page where he offers his acknowledgements:
Title: We Are Water: A Novel by Wally Lamb
Details: Copyright 2013, HarperCollins Publishers
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "In middle age, Annie Oh—wife, mother, and outsider artist—has shaken her family to its core. After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Annie has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy, cultured, confident Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.
Annie and Viveca plan to wed in the Oh family's hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, where gay marriage has recently been legalized. But the impending wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora's box of toxic secrets—dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs' lives.
We Are Water is an intricate and layered portrait of marriage, family, and the inexorable need for understanding and connection, told in the alternating voices of the Ohs—nonconformist Annie; her ex-husband, Orion, a psychologist; Ariane, the do-gooder daughter, and her twin, Andrew, the rebellious only son; and free-spirited Marissa, the youngest Oh. Set in New England and New York during the first years of the Obama presidency, it is also a portrait of modern America, exploring issues of class, changing social mores, the legacy of racial violence, and the nature of creativity and art.
With humor and breathtaking compassion, Wally Lamb brilliantly captures the essence of human experience in vivid and unforgettable characters struggling to find hope and redemption in the aftermath of trauma and loss. We Are Water is vintage Wally Lamb—a compulsively readable, generous, and uplifting masterpiece that digs deep into the complexities of the human heart to explore the ways in which we search for love and meaning in our lives."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I have a kind of complex relationship with Wally Lamb's writing. I first read She's Come Undone at possibly the most pivotal period in my life thus far and it's still one of my favorite books, although with passing years I've come to acknowledge the problematic/lazy writing aspects of the book. Hey, I was only sixteen when I read it.
A few years after that, I tried another "Oprah's Selection" book of his, I Know This Much is True. I liked it as well (although not as much, but that can be attributed to the period as much as the differences in the works) and for awhile, wasn't really aware that Lamb had written other books (as the "Oprah's Selection" brand died off along with my interest therein). I heard about his being an editor of writings from a women's prison, but as they were not his original works, I wasn't that interested.
So recently I hear again about Wally Lamb, this time promoting new original works he's done (since I Know This Much is True but not the prison writings collections he's edited). One's on request, one's advertised as a Christmas story and it's really hard for me to collect interest (but don't rule it out), and then there's this one which is also his most recent.
How I Liked It: I went into this fully aware of the fact I might fully loathe this book, despite how much his other books (particularly the first) have meant to me. I'm aware of the fact you can read another book by an author whose other work you revere and have it flop and still have your love of the other work intact. I know from personal experience (White Oleander was a book that also falls within the same devotion and same timeline as She's Come Undone).
I also knew that Lamb's style had changed and branched out a bit from She's Come Undone to I Know This Much is True.
The former is a rather straightforward memoir-style of a woman puzzling out her life from childhood to her forties. The latter is partially that same straightforward memoir-style, save for with a man with an identical twin suffering from schizophrenia, but also interspersed with the man's dead-before-he-was-born grandfather's sort-of autobiography, the story of an Italian immigrant and his troubles with his two brothers, his arranged marriage which includes his wife's best friend with whom she may or may not have committed a murder in the old country, all events largely taking place in the 1910s.
So it's clear from those two books alone that Lamb was branching out in his narrative style and trying new challenges. I can't trace a trajectory when I'm going from fifteen years and omitting the works in between as I've not yet read them, but from this book alone, I'm guessing Lamb continued to challenge himself with narratives.
The book is told in no less than eight different voices, focusing on the five members of the Oh family, father Orion, mother Annie, twins Ariane and Andrew, and youngest Marissa. Of those five, we hear from Orion and Annie the most.
The book attempts to uncover slowly to the reader the story of a flood that drastically changed the town almost fifty years earlier. An artist "arguably" murdered for his supposed affair with a white woman and whose works have been hidden since his death, the uncovering of a tragic history of Annie's family that reveals her motivations that further reveal motivations within other characters.
Sound exhausting?
While it's a compelling read, albeit difficult at times to keep characters straight (and one narrative is told at the time of the flood), it's clear that Lamb is overreaching and it's disappointing. He's almost scrambling to create the connections with characters that flowed more easily in his first two books. The characters are more character studies and while potentially fascinating and engaging ones, they never evolve past that stage. They really can't, not without making the book even longer than it already is, and even then, given the fact his way of establishing connection with a character is having us "walk with" them for awhile in first person narration, it'd still be likely to be fruitless.
The characters aren't the only problem. Lamb struggles with themes and I assumed from the copy that he was going to make a connection between a racially motivated murder and the "we have overcome" sentiment that rang through Obama's first year in office. I also figured some "forbidden love" angle might exist by way of the fact a same-sex marriage is taking place. There are certainly suggestions that Lamb intended to express and connect those themes, but rather than occasionally stating them outright, he doesn't actually do much with them.
Towards about the three-quarter mark, the book takes a sudden (and I feel unnecessarily) dark turn and is suddenly written by Stephen King (I don't use that reference lightly; I've read an enormous amount of King's work). While a story can certainly take a turn, this comes off as lazy, particularly since it essentially plants a gigantic new place in the plot so late in the book, and something from which an editor should've better coaxed Lamb away, or at least muted it. The shaky connections we made with the characters and their stories are just about severed as this bizarre drop lands in the story. In its final few chapters (Part V, with the caution "Three Years Later"), the author seems to more or less have returned from his King bender and seems to frantically attempt to tie together all loose ends and loose stories of the book, with little success. The three chapters have a single narrator who rather awkwardly attempts to give a casual report on almost all other characters we've heard mentioned throughout the book.
Some part of me that made connections and found bits of Lamb's style that I know in the book insists that if it had been a little longer, just a few more chapters, another section, Lamb could've pulled it off. He could've cemented the characters, he could've even probably made up for the bizarre detour and the plot-bomb for which we didn't get a conclusion (whether he gave us the conclusion or not, he could've at least tried to atone for its existence and the detour from which it came).
Throughout this project (five years now!) I've maintained that books that allow you to imagine how better they could've been actually do have merit as you're wishing in the first place they could've been better (rather than just be happy to see them end). An obvious part of my continued stance, including this book, is the fact I'm fully aware of how good this author can be. Therefore, to see fragments at all of the book this could've been suggests that this is something of a kinda good, not good, definitely not great, but not necessarily bad book. But my history with this author also tells me how excellent this book could've been had those fragments not been tantalizing fragments, but the style of the book.
I can't speak for Lamb's work other than his first two novels and for what fans of his work might be looking as far as a recommendation regarding this latest work. I will say that for fans of his old stuff such as myself, this is a pass, since it's only a tease at what it could've been. For those looking to get into Lamb's work, I wouldn't recommend this book. Reach instead for one or the other of his first two (or for all I know, his other two, non-editor works) and save this for later or pass it by altogether.
Notable: A few stray observations (which is kinda what my "notable" sections are, but these feel more stray than others, I suppose.
• Throughout the book, much is made of the fact that the mother has left the father after nearly thirty years of marriage for a woman. The book discusses her sexual encounters before she met the man who would become her husband, including lovers both male and female. So the mother is bisexual. The "straight to gay" the children (even the so-called enlightened one) keep alleging you keep waiting for someone, anyone to correct. The father corrects the born-again conservative Christian (except maybe not really) son that no, homosexuality is not a disease, it was taken off the DSM back in the early 'seventies. The closest we get is the youngest daughter, the aspiring actress and designer clothing devotee that's supposedly a sophisticated Manhattanite vaguely offering a theory she heard that we're all bisexual, deep down.
Given the book reveals plenty of Lamb's other social and political beliefs (by way of their being treated with sympathy... or not), it's extremely frustrating that no one, not even the so-called enlightened characters, bother to offer that bisexuality is a legitimate and separate orientation.
•
“"I've giving the opening greeting. Remember? Which is why I don't want to see you walking in late. By the way, you know who's sitting at our table? Mayor DuPuy and her husband. And did I mention that John Ashcroft and his wife will be there? Traveling down from Missouri? My mother says the Ashcrofts are big in the Assemblies of God Church. They're sitting just one table over from us, so I'm sure we'll get to meet them. You should wear your uniform, not your civvvies, okay? What was Ashcroft again? Secretary of state?"
"Attorney general." Gee, maybe he'll sing that song of his at the breakfast-- the one they're always making fun of on The Daily Show. Jon Stewart, Colbert: they go over the top about the conservatives sometimes, but they can be pretty funny.” (pg 301)
That would be the born-again son with his Evangelical girlfriend making plans.
I don't know; with The Colbert Report coming to an end, it's just nice to see reminders of what a cultural force it was and is.
• Revealing when the book went to publisher, Lamb offers a solemn note after his "gratitude" page where he offers his acknowledgements:
“A Note from Wally Lamb
The deaths by gunfire of children and their teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, occurred as I was readying this book for publication. I invite readers who are so inclined to join me in my response to this unfathomable tragedy by contributing to one or both of the following. Thank you.
Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence: www.bradycampaign.org
National Alliance on Mental Illness: www.nami.org
