AN ADVICE YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO LOOSE

 A father runs over his own son in their own driveway, sober enough to remember every second of it and drunk enough that it happened at all, and Wally Lamb spends four hundred and eighty pages asking whether a person can survive knowing both of those things are true about himself at once.

I want to be honest about something before I get into this book, because it's the most divided reception I've seen for a Lamb novel, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Several serious reviewers have called Corby Ledbetter genuinely hard to root for, a man who spends more energy trying to restore his old life than actually reckoning with what he took from someone else's. Some of the prison dialogue leans into familiar territory that Lamb's earlier work generally avoided, and more than one reader has said the ending arrives without giving Corby the authentic epiphany the previous four hundred pages seem to be building toward. I don't think that criticism is unfair. I think it's the most useful lens for actually engaging with this book rather than just praising it on reputation.

What I find myself unable to look away from anyway is how uncomfortable Lamb is willing to make this. Corby is not written to be liked, not really, not even by the end, and I think that discomfort might be intentional rather than a failure of craft. This is a man who was impaired, by his own secret addiction, in the exact moment his son needed him sober, and Lamb refuses to soften that fact into something more forgivable than it actually is. You spend the entire novel wanting Corby to earn some kind of absolution and watching him, again and again, reach first for his own comfort instead. That refusal to give the reader an easy redemption arc might be the most honest choice in the whole book, even if it makes for a genuinely frustrating read.

The prison sections carry real weight because Lamb spent two decades actually teaching writing inside a real correctional facility, and that lived knowledge shows in the texture even when the plot around it leans familiar, the specific cruelty of certain guards, the surprising tenderness of a prison librarian, the small, fragile kinships that form between men with nothing left to lose. Lamb is not imagining incarceration from the outside. He watched it, for years, and that authenticity is the sturdiest thing holding this book up when other elements wobble.

Lamb has said this novel draws partly on the myth of La Llorona, the wailing woman forever haunting the riverbank for the children she drowned herself, and pairing that ancient grief with something as mundane and modern as a driveway backover accident gives Corby's guilt a mythic, inescapable shape. He is not just a man who made a catastrophic mistake. He becomes something closer to a ghost story about himself, doomed to walk past the exact spot where it happened for the rest of his life, whether or not anyone around him is willing to grant him peace.

I don't think this book fully earns the redemption its marketing promises, and I think that's worth saying plainly rather than performing an enthusiasm I didn't completely feel by the final page. What it does earn is a genuinely hard question, whether an unforgivable act can ever actually be forgiven by the people who loved what was lost, and Lamb, to his credit, never once lets Corby, or the reader, off that hook easily.

 #fblifestyle