I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb

From the Publisher

Listen to Wally Lamb discuss and read from "I Know This Much is True".

With his stunning debut novel, "She's Come Undone", Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with "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-- this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world.

When you're the same 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. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper-- if you've promised your dying mother-- then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. 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 (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), 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, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny". 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. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness-- pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it.

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 a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings.

Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale-- in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep-- becomes the old man's confession-- an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico'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 ancestor's 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.

The New York Times Book Review - Karen Karbo

I Know This Much is True never grapples with anything less than life's biggest questions....a modern-day Dostoyevsky with a pop sensibility. In his view, it's not just the present that's the pits...it's also the ghosts of dysfunctional family members and your non-relationship with a mocking, sadistic God, whom you still turn to in times of trouble -- which is all the time.

Salon - Joyce Hackett

Within Wally Lamb's second book, I Know This Much Is True, there's a fine novel shouting to get out. Narrated by an identical twin, the book recounts Dominick Birdsey's hard journey to come to terms with the paranoid schizophrenia of his brother Thomas, and his own helplessness in the face of it. Through the twins' aggressive attempts to wrench themselves into polar opposites, Lamb movingly explores their fears of becoming each other, and of being unable to live without each other. But Dominick's sorrow at the loss of a brother he can't control or save drowns in a wash of resentment and melodrama. It's a novel of too little style and too much substance.

Lamb's strong first novel, She's Come Undone, depicted with comedic force the anger of an overweight woman who also survives myriad slings and arrows to find forgiveness and grace. Dolores Price's voice remained sympathetic because her repulsion toward her world was coupled with strong desire. But Dominick is steeped in resentment, and spews from above. His voice doesn't sparkle, not even with the kind of Beavis-and-Butt-head stupidity that would ironically connect him to the objects of his critique. As a result, there's little sense of scale. The SIDS death of his daughter, his divorce and subsequent breakdown, the violent guards in his brother's mental institution, his 23-year-old aerobics teacher girlfriend's affair with her bisexual stepuncle -- all seem to get the same withering treatment as his girlfriend's refusal to reclose the saltines wrapper.

Like many first-person novels, I Know This Much Is True suffers from the flaws of its narrator, who curates his own museum of misery. Eventually Dominick crashes his car, falls from a 30-foot ladder, gets into therapy and realizes the limits of his power. But by the time his therapist/anthropologist diagnoses Dominick as a typical Repressed-and-Angry American Male, and points out how he's numbing himself with his incessant cataloging of insults and injuries, Lamb has battered the reader with a plot out of Soap Opera Digest. That Thomas saws off his own hand to protest the Gulf War is only the beginning: besides countless episodes of their stepfather's gruesome abuses, Dominick recounts date-raping his future wife and participating in the racist frame-up of a co-worker (who turns out to have been exploited for years by a homosexual child pornographer).

The medley of issues surveyed in I Know This Much Is True includes an AIDS death, incest, suicide, amputation, Native American casino rights and mental illness policies; we even slog through transcripts of Thomas' paranoiac conspiracy theories. And Dominick's paternity search gives Lamb the occasion to saddle us -- incest again looming -- with the lengthy memoirs of his Sicilian grandfather, whose frigid wife and her evil-witch companion turn out to have been adolescent murderers.

Perhaps sweeping male anger is less fresh than its female equivalent. Or perhaps this 912-page tome simply needed an editor bold enough to persuade a talented novelist whose first book sold 3 million copies (thanks in large part to Oprah Winfrey's benediction) to trim the fat from the meat of its melodrama. I Know This Much Is True takes on too much to allow Dominick's losses the terrible specificity of universal tragedy. Nor does Lamb's vision ever expand into the kind of wider Swiftian satire that would have enabled him to take the entire world to task.

Entertainment Weekly

Beguiling family drama...

Denver Post

A can't-put-it-down novel.

Associated Press

Every now and then a book comes along that sets new standards for writers and readers alike. Wally Lamb's latest novel is stunning -- and even that might be an understatement....This is a masterpiece.

People Magazine

Remarkable.

USA Today

Impossible to forget.

Time Magazine

A triumph of simple beauty.

Hartford Advocate

Contemporary fiction just doesn't get much better than this. . .It's the kind of book that makes you stop reading and shake your head, shocked by the insights you've encountered. In short, you'll be undone.

The Tennessean

Wally Lamb can lie down with the literary lions at will: he's that gifted. . .This novel does what good fiction should do -- it informs our hearts as well as our minds of the complexities involved in the 'simple' act of living a human life.

Oakland Press

The saga of the century. Best, most wonderful, most dramatic, most powerful. There are no superlatives impressive enough to describe this, another Lamb masterpiece.

Kirkus Reviews

Both a moving character study and a gripping story of family conflict are hidden somewhere inside the daunting bulk of this annoyingly slick second novel by Lamb. The character (and narrator) is Dominick Birdsey, a 40-year-old housepainter whose subdued life in his hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, is disturbed in 1990 when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic whose condition is complicated by religious mania, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. The story is that of the embattled Birdseys, as recalled in Dominick's elaborate memory-flashbacks and in the 'autobiography' (juxtaposed against the primary narrative) of the twins' maternal grandfather, Italian immigrant (and tyrannical patriarch) Domenico Tempesta. But Lamb combines these promising materials with overattenuated accounts of Dominick's crippled past (the torments inflicted on him and Thomas by an abusive stepfather, a luckless marriage, the crib death of his infant daughter), and with a heavy emphasis on the long-concealed identity of the twins' real father—a mystery eventually solved, not, as Dominick and we expect, in Domenico's self-aggrandizing story, but by a most surprising confession. This novel is derivative (of both Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides and the film Dominick and Eugene), it pushes all the appropriate topical buttons (child abuse, AIDS, New Age psychobabble, Native American dignity, and others), and it works a little too hard at wringing tears. But it's by no means negligible. Lamb writes crisp, tender-tough dialogue, and his portrayal of the decent, conflicted Dominick (who is forced, and blessed, to acknowledge that 'We were all, in a way, each other')is convincing. The pathetic, destroyed figure of Thomas is, by virtue of its very opacity, both haunting and troubling.

What People Are Saying

Susan Larson
More than any pop psychology tome, this novel shows us what has happened to American men in the last half-century--and points the way toward a future. Wally Lamb is a master at creating such stories, scary in their human reality. But more than simply mirroring our fears, they brim with joy and sadness, consolation and hope. Always hope.

Terese Karmel
The high quality of the writing and the sensitivity with which the novel examines important subjects-family relationships, guilt, redemption, how we treat those who are different-are maintained throughout its 900 pages. Most of all, I was struck with its honesty in confronting the demons we all live with and its insistence that to achieve some small, if uneasy peace in a chaotic world, we must come to terms with those demons and enlarge our definitions of understanding of those who can't.

Liesel Litzenburger
This is an extremely long and complicated trip, and it is both a risk and a testament to Lamb's skill as a storyteller that, even at this great length and degree of complexity, the novel never lags. And although its length may scare some readers away, let's just call it a four-black-diamond plot; if you're the type who doesn't mind a long dangerous drop, have at it. It is, in the end, an unflinching look at a family and a history and the way in which those two words are one and the same.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0061097640
  
• ISBN-13: 9780061097645
• Format: Mass Market Paperback, 912pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: November 2003
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 2,747

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences -- and I stray pretty far from mine -- I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously. When I was a kid, like Dolores Price in She's Come Undone, I needed to belong. And perhaps I Know This Much Is True addresses my desire for a brother. But as my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

Q: Is this book also a love story? How?

A: As far as I can figure, this book, reduced to its lowest common denominator, is only a love story. Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write. To me, it's the most breathtakingly ironic things about living: the fact that we are all -- identical twins included -- alone. Singular. And yet what we seek -- what saves us -- is our connection to others. Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course. In the story, Pasquale Tempesta loves his monkeys, and the monkeys seem to love him back. Pasquale's brother Domenico is doomed not by a monsignor's curse, but because he cannot love.

Q: What is the greatest lesson we can learn from I Know This Much Is True?

A: Reading a novel is a highly personal experience, and I think different readers will take different things from it. As for me, the experience of writing the book has reinforced for me the truths that Dominick had to learn: that love grows from forgiveness, that "mongrels" make good dogs, and that the roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.

Reading Group Guide

A Note From the Author
"Reading a novel is a highly personal experience and I think different readers will take different things from it. As for me, the experience of writing the book has reinforced for me the truths that Dominick had to learn: that love grows from forgiveness, that "mongrels" make good dogs, and that the roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves."

Topics for Discussion
As an award-winning teacher of writing, Wally Lamb has been honored for his exceptional ability to communicate the power and majesty of the written word to his students. Hoping to inspire thoughtful discourse on his own novel, Wally has graciously supplied these discussion questions.