The River Is Waiting

Wally Lamb’s most recent novel, the first in almost ten years, was the first of my holiday reads. I loved Lamb’s She’s Come Undone; choosing another novel of Mr. Lamb’s was an easy choice. It was not until I listened to an interview with Wally Lamb, an hour ago, that I realized this novel was, in part, autobiographical. 

 

The opening chapter was heart-wrenching and captivating. For the next two chapters, the reader is thrust back into the past, which I found a little jarring, given how gripped I was by the present-timeline chapter. 

 

I think the novel intends to tell a redemption story. Does this protagonist atone? Does he deserve sympathy? (absolutely!) Is forgiveness even possible when one is responsible for a death such as this?  Can his wife possibly forgive? Can his marriage survive? From the get-go, my answers to the latter two questions were an emphatic ‘no’. I was in with protagonist Ledbetter for the first five or six chapters, but then I fell away. 

 

I was accepting a wild ride and character arc, like She Comes Undone, and the book's premise promised another one. I was gutted after the inciting event. I love this novel’s symbolism. I liked many of the layers and the contractions of Corby Ledbetter. Any parent can sympathize with and even align with Corby Ledbetter. Oddly, I even loved his name. I was rooting for him and this story, but unfortunately, I did not love the book. 

 

The family’s emotional journey is not the epicentre of the book’s duration, nor often is Corby’s. The latter half of the book reads like a non-fiction piece about what happens in prisons and a warning about the challenges prisons face. I would have preferred a non-fiction or documentary about the prison system during COVID. I would have preferred Wally Lamb to continue the emotional journey and relationships we were promised at the novel’s beginning. Obviously, this is just one take, but I also did not like the many political shoutouts, which felt stiff and flat; the COVID scenarios; the characters in prison who felt like caricatures; and the ending, and I struggled to keep reading. Not my fave. Now onto another holiday read: Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. 

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