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It has been 10 years since Wally Lamb, an author whom one critic has called a “modern-day Dostoyevsky,” published his last book, and just popped is The Hour I First Believed, a novel set partly in Littleton, Colo., in April, 1999, that is already gathering a storm of excitement.
It will be 10 years, this coming April, since the massacre at Columbine High School, just outside Littleton, which left 23 injured and 15 dead, including the shooters, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, who committed suicide at the end of their rampage.
At the time of this event, the mass murder was the subject of seemingly interminable media scrutiny, yet to date, no one has written a true crime account of merit or produced a work of art that's directly about what transpired that April afternoon.
Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin stands as a way of talking about Harris and Klebold: The eponymous Kevin is a school shooter who mentions Columbine in passing, as in the manner of the roman à clef (in these novels, the author always mentions the true subject of their semi-fictional characters to attract and deflect comparisons). And Shriver's Kevin, who is exhaustively analyzed from birth and found to be a miserable, evil creature, never can say why he brought a bow and arrow to school and killed his classmates. Older, at the book's end, he says, “I used to think I knew. Now I'm not so sure.”
Is it the lack of motive, the randomness of the crime that staggers artists and theorists?
There has also been no definitive motion picture made about the shootings, not even a tawdry movie-of-the-week. What have appeared are Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) and Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002): the former an allusive film based on the story; the latter a screed about gun violence that is, by turn, moving and mawkish.
As with 9/11, tragedies of a certain magnitude can only be remembered, or reconstructed in fragments, or by faint, gestural reference: Consider Art Spiegelman's chaotic In the Shadow of No Towers (2004); Jonathan Safran Foer's achingly oblique Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) or Jay McInerney's fin-de-siècle-styled The Good Life (2007.) In 2007, Don DeLillo also published The Falling Man, a starker look at 9/11, but one that still deploys a single horrible image (the title's) to suggest the unimaginable whole.
Lamb's The Hour I First Believed, appearing shortly before Columbine, a large study of the killers by investigative journalist David Cullen that is scheduled for publication in April, 2009, is a book about Columbine, in a manner of speaking.
Likely destined, as were his two previous books, to be selected for Oprah Winfrey's gilded literary candy box, this novel, the title of which references the hymn Amazing Grace, is, as Winfrey loves, a story of hope and redemption and all of that which defines contemporary commercial fiction.
Parenthetically, how would contemporary critics and book clubs and taste makers like Winfrey or Heather Reisman have managed to contend with postwar literature (choose your war) by anyone from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sylvia Plath to Michael Herr? By writers, that is, who never did find hope in a world that offended them, as the sepulchral Plath noted, “as the world offends God”?
Lamb's protagonists, in a weird gesture to both Vladimir Nabokov and any hokey American writer enamoured of Dickensian naming, are the “Quirks” (echoes of the Quilty character in Lolita, “quirky” and quarks intended.) “Mo” Quirk, the narrator's wife, is written, with some alterations, as one of the school staff who hid in the library during the shootings and in the aftermath of the tragedy is unable to psychologically recover.
This alone drags Lamb's heroic efforts (the book is 752 pages long) into narrative tedium. Focusing on a collateral victim, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder? After so many years, regardless of our motives, we are anxious for insight and feel it's time to show us the money.
Yet Lamb cannot: To write about an actual victim would be to work in the non-fiction-novel genre, and while he may be the new Dostoyevsky, he is not Truman Capote.
That is, he is unable, or unwilling to fully evoke Columbine, poetically, insightfully or otherwise.
In an interview on his book tour, Lamb said he hoped he had “done it” (the book) “responsibly so it doesn't cause more suffering.” Kind words, but words that a writer should never consider, as it is the art, not the audience, he or she must serve.
On one level, The Hour I First Believed, a frustrating hodgepodge of the epistolary, the picaresque and the theoretically abstruse (the now dreary notions of butterfly and chaos theory figure prominently), is a great failure. Great because in its fumbling, in its own chaos, it speaks definitively to the inability of all of us to articulate trauma, to speak clearly about what is, essentially, inchoate and unstable.
Lamb notes that the killings were executed on Hitler's birthday, and uses the Holocaust as a macrocosm for his story, in that both events are, in spite of so many efforts, almost untellable outside of dry, historical accounts.
Yet, significantly, Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, was able to tell us directly, in Night, what the Holocaust meant to him and what it was. While Spiegelman, again, in his masterpiece, Maus, must still disguise his characters as cats and mice because of the horror, Wiesel wrote plainly of Auschwitz.
Lamb fails and almost anyone except the impossible pairing of Clockwork Orange's Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick (who would create a language that consisted of screaming that never stops) will always fail us, for looking into the abyss that is Harris and Klebold is like looking into the impassive, Arctic face of a furious teenager who has nothing to tell you except “I hate you.”
Lamb's attempt to remind us what happened almost 10 years ago may pave the way for more coherent, unflinching narratives, urgently needed, as school shootings have not abated.
Narratives like Wiesel's: He wrote his memoir Night in 1954, and Americans deemed it too “morbid,” too “depressing” until 1960, when it was published and took three years to sell 3,000 copies. It took 37 years for that number to reach 300,000 a year, possibly because we began to understand this was not so much a memoir of horror as a memoir about the importance of remembering.
What does Wiesel ask us to remember? “There was nothing left,” Wiesel writes (which could also be seen as Lamb's artistic premise).
“And yet,” he continues (as Lamb does, bravely, anxiously), “we begin again with night.”
