The Lamb Roars

Great books are rare events, sometimes not recognized until years after publication. Wally Lamb, a writing professor at the University of Connecticut, has written but two novels. But his second, the magnificent I Know This Much Is True, (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, $27.50) must be ranked as a great book.

Disregard that Oprah Winfrey has chosen this stirring 900-page epic for her book club, a somewhat weird exercise in pushing her reading tastes on the American public. In this instance, she's on the mark. Wally Lamb has written one of the best novels in recent memory.

In outline, I Know This Much Is True will seem outrageously plotted, with its constant barrage of surprises, misery, redemption, and gut-wrenching depictions of people in crisis. Despite its length, the novel carries all the impetus of an oncoming freight train with the reader tied down to the tracks, unable to wrest his binds loose for escape.

Narrated by Domenick Birdsey, whose schizophrenic brother chops off his hand in the opening pages, the narrative follows the sane brother's often ineffective attempts to cope with his brother's enduring and increasingly perplexing illness. Domenick, at age 40, is trying to get over his divorce from Dessa, who remains his one true love. His current girlfriend is 15 years his junior, beautiful, with a life that's a total mess.

Fighting the psychiatrists and social workers who care for his brother, now deemed so ill and such a threat to others that he must remain confined in a prison-like hospital for mental defectives, Domenick faces the seeming destruction of every aspect of his own shattered existence. When a manuscript written by his Sicilian grandfather seems to offer an explanation for family problems, Domenick hands the manuscript to a wacky translator, who disappears along with his grandfather's book.

In a book packed with drama and constant turmoil, Domenick tries to find some way to deal with all his problems. Lamb includes many sessions with the ill brother's doctors, along with others who seek to help Domenick in his evolving assessment of his own tortured emotions amid the breakup of all he ever cherished.

Lamb takes a major risk in alienating his readers by inserting the grandfather's manuscript into latter portions of the novel. It's the stark story of a selfish, arrogant man, whose life was one long disaster. He's not easy to like, and for a while, readers may want to skip over his story. But Lamb, working with the skill of an accomplished architect in full control of his tools, manages to tie up all the loose ends.

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