The Hour I First Believed, By Wally Lamb

In his long-awaited third novel, best-selling American novelist Wally Lamb delivers a whopping doorstopper of a book. Those who love a good plot will not be disappointed. Lamb opens at Blackjack Pizza, where teacher Caelum Quirk is getting a takeaway, served by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold just days before they gun down 13 students and teachers at Columbine High School in Colorado. That's just the beginning.

The massacre triggers a series of unforeseen consequences that will shape the lives of Caelum and his wife Maureen, a nurse at Columbine, who escapes the slaughter but is deeply traumatised. Two days earlier, Caelum is flying back to Connecticut to visit a dying relative when he sits next to Mickey, an expert on chaos theory. Like a prophet from the underworld, Mickey tells him "there's a self-organising principle at the edge of chaos. Order breeds habit, okay? But chaos breeds life."

From this point, Caelum and Maureen's lives are thrown into a maelstrom as the story snakes its way through a maze of plotlines from the Iraq war to infanticide, adultery, sexual abuse, prison and mental illness. There's also a women's studies thesis on Caelum's ancestors, 19th-century Quaker reformers who founded the prison where Maureen serves a sentence.

Lamb obviously adores his characters, and this is one of his strengths as a storyteller. Figures like Caelum the teacher, who has "anger-management issues" and is a wannabe novelist, are engaging and fully-fleshed. He avoids any maudlin sentiment over Maureen's trauma and constantly surprises, so that the chaos does bring transformation in their lives. They often have a wry humour and a jaundiced view of the world that saves them from the excess of detail Lamb lavishes upon them.

But this is an over-egged pudding. The thesis by Caelum's tenant Janis Mick (a refugee from Hurricane Katrina) is just one example. Written from a cache of papers found in Caelum's Connecticut farmhouse, it has no argument but operates simply as a device to deliver the historical background. It's not convincing as an academic piece, nor is it a gripping read.

There is also far too much going on, so that the novel's genuine moments of drama and revelation are rather lost in the swamp of events and characters. Jerry, a local cop, comforts Caelum after discovering a suitcase with two dead infants on his farm, after one of his students has gone on a rampage and shot his estranged wife before committing suicide. "You've had a hell of a couple of days, haven't you?" says Jerry. Indeed.

Lamb's two previous novels were picked for Oprah Winfrey's book club and sold in their millions. In The Hour I First Believed, he delivers on his message of redemption and, when he finally ties up all the threads that lead to Caelum assuming the role of grandfather to a former student, it is genuinely moving. It's a pity, then, that his editor was not more stringent in paring down this bloated manuscript.

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