Wally Lamb tries again to get at what's true

Author: By Miranda Schwartz

Date: SUNDAY, June 28, 1998

Page: C3

Section: Books

Those who persevere will find themselves in familiar territory. Lamb's novels share striking thematic and schematic similarities: a willful first-person narrator survives a traumatic childhood and finds peace and self-knowledge through therapy. Lamb replays such analogous moments as memories of the moon-mission telecast and the saying of taboo curse words. Iconic objects like a tattered Bible and a beloved pet (a bird, a monkey) appear in both books. Lamb seems to be carving out his own distinctive patch of American literature, complete with tropes and symbols, pop-culture references.

The ground covered in ``I Know This Much Is True'' is fairly littered with issues: schizophrenia, fatherlessness, crib death, abuse, twinness, AIDS -- not to mention suicide, murder, rape, and child pornography. There's also a disfiguring harelip, a gangrenous leg, and a mutilated hand. Lamb's America is dangerous to body and soul.

Dangerous though this America may be, the novel and its hero are firmly rooted in it, a factor that balances the topical frenzy. Forty-year-old Dominick Birdsey is stuck -- for better or worse -- in the working-class town of Three Rivers, Conn. A high school history teacher turned house painter, he has watched his life veer off course: a daughter dead of crib death, a disintegrated marriage, a failing business, a ditzy girlfriend. Most importantly, his identical twin, Thomas, is a paranoid schizophrenic. The extent to which this twist of fate has determined Dominick's life and character is the crux of the novel.

The book opens in October 1990. Distraught at the looming conflict with Iraq, Thomas, out of the hospital on a day pass, has gone to the town library and, in a grandiose attempt to prevent bloodshed, turned St. Matthew's words -- ``If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee'' -- into reality. Thomas's gory sacrifice, instead of bringing peace, lands him in the state's maximum-security psychiatric facility, and the media on his frustrated brother's doorstep.

After this attention-getting opener, the book moves around in time through the twins' childhood, adolescence, and the onset of Thomas's schizophrenia at 19. Although he feels persecuted and has bizarre religious fantasies, Thomas is gentle and noncombative by nature. Dominick, by contrast, is driven by anger: anger at their mother for dying, at their hated stepfather for living; anger at God for burdening Thomas with schizophrenia, and himself with Thomas. Dominick's anger is so consuming, his departing wife claimed, ``I get short of breath when I'm around you. It's like you rob me of oxygen. . . . I have to go because I have to protect myself. I have to breathe.''

As Dominick tries mightily to get Thomas moved to his usual minimum-security facility, intense sessions with Thomas's psychiatrist lead, naturally, to a reexamination of his own youth, especially the oppressive atmosphere their ``spit-and-polish ex-Navy man'' stepfather, Ray, created at home.

Though Dominick hated and feared Ray and his constant ``toughening up'' of him and Thomas, ``Out of self-preservation, I hid my fear. . . . Because Ray was a bully, I showed him as often as possible that Thomas was the weaker brother. Fed him Thomas to save myself.'' An unplanned result of this maneuver is to bring their mild mother closer to Thomas, an intimacy still resented by the adult Dominick. His mother's resolute silence on who their biological father was further fuels his anger.

While Dr. Patel takes Dominick on a journey through the past, his present-day life -- which seemed like one that could hardly get any worse -- falls apart with a noticeable lack of authorial subtlety. Dominick's troubles verge on the ludicrous: He witnesses a suicide, which causes him to fall off a roof, breaking 14 bones in his leg, which lands him in the hospital, which makes him miss testifying at Thomas's hospital hearing . . . and so on.

Yet through his oft-reiterated trials, Dominick -- bullying and peevish -- is real and touchingly vulnerable. Wise Dr. Patel (``But if the orphan endures, then finally, at long last, he stumbles from the wilderness into the light'') helps him see that his anger has burdened and isolated him, kept him from closeness with his mother, driven his frustrated wife away. Once he faces his mother's favoritism, admits that he both loves and hates Thomas, the therapy-mellowed Dominick understands how ``love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness.''

We come to care deeply about this stubborn character; with blood, sweat, and tears -- often literally -- Dominick earns the peace he achieves. Filled with questions of betrayal and responsibility, guilt and sin, his story becomes a modern-day mythical quest for identity.

Dominick's lengthy narrative is broken up by the insertion of his grandfather's autobiographical manuscript, the ironically titled ``A Great Man from Humble Beginnings.'' Domenico Tempesta was not actually all that great, merely arrogant and short-tempered. Dominick reads his namesake's memoir with curiosity and fear, hoping to glean family secrets. Domenico's story does piece together some family history for Dominick but fails to gratify his most urgent need: to know his father's identity. He ultimately learns the truth from the unlikeliest source -- his stepfather.

Initially, it's disconcerting to abandon Dominick and Thomas's story, but Lamb's narrative risk-taking pays off: Domenico's stylized, earthy tale, also dealing with guilt and betrayal, twins and madness, runs parallel to, and becomes as engrossing as, the larger story. In this larger story, however, Lamb drives -- overdrives -- home certain points: Ray beat Thomas more than Dominick; Dominick ached to be ``untwinned''; and so on. Dominick's numerous dreams are also repetitive, straight out of Psych 101: dead babies trapped in ice; him strangling Thomas. Were some of this material cut, the rest would carry more weight.

Lamb's writing is not graceful or lyrical; it is raw and forceful, a match for his frenetic plot and characters. He is not subtle but he is true: This is how people talk, think, behave. Our lives are not so by-the-numbers symbolic as those of Lamb's characters, but we face the same problems -- how to live, how to love and forgive.

As in ``She's Come Undone,'' the key to the hero's psychic rebirth is accepting the past instead of battling it, living in the present instead of avoiding it. Lamb is not the first to advocate this therapeutic message, nor to write about it, but he imbues his characters with a winning tenacity, and writes with such an accessible mix of bluster and sentiment, that he has made it seem new to his devoted audience.