Psychotic Families & Dark Secrets
Life is not a series of isolated ponds and puddles. It is all connected: Life is a river. It flows from the past through the present on its way to the future. Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother’s womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past—connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially.
I just recently finished reading I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb (New York: Regan Books, 1998) and, pardon me for repeating yet again, but I love it! I will not attempt to write a full review of it here, but I will be providing links to other people’s reviews, for those interested.
So why am I blogging about it? Well, it’s just that I am so blown away by its richness/complexity/beauty/humanity; I have to get it out of my system by writing about it, even if my piece comes off as a hodgepodge.
I like it when literature, psychology and history intertwine. I like it when "personal" problems are tied back in to their social and political contexts. Best of all, I like it when social commentary is beautifully woven in to a richly developed human story. Life is not a series of puddles and ponds. Life is a river; it is all connected….
Pardon me for sounding stuffy (I’m a self-confessed nerd, remember?). Like I said, I just wanted to profess my love for Lamb’s latest novel. It struck me on so many levels: emotional, intellectual, carnal, etc. The humanity of the characters—gawd, it stabbed me so deeply in my heart; the pain of it sent trembles throughout my body. If there's anything like an orgasmic pain, this is it.
SYNOPSIS:
From the book jacket:
...I Know This Much is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal.
When you're the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap.
Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a split-and-polish ex-Navy man, and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control.
Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas. From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery.
But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives.
To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir.
Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confessione--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truths of Domenico's life, of his lonely marriage to the lovely Ignazia and his war against her protector, the murderous monkey-faced Prosperine. Through his grandfather's life, Dominick leans that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin.
Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
MORE REVIEWS:
Images:
* River - source
* Book cover - source
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