Wally Lamb
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Dolores Price’s “story of craving ; an unreliable account of lusts and troubles,” (Lamb 17) is the subject of Wally Lamb’s debut novel She’s Come Undone. What concerns Lamb in this Oprah book club selection is summed up best by the sentiment of Mr. Pucci, the friend of Dolores who dies of AIDS: “What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks” (Lamb 456). Lamb does not wrestle with the big questions in life. In fact philosophical catchwords, like existentialism and the name of Descartes, appear in this novel as they might appear at a high school faculty cocktail party: uttered by mouths who want to appear witty and intelligent but know nothing of the topics they make banal. Wally Lamb’s first novel is told from a peculiar point of view, I think, for a man. His narrator and heroine is Dolores. The subject is her tormented life. A terrible life indeed that perhaps is supposed to serve as an excuse for the actions of this often unlikable character. Dolores is the only child of a weak and brittle mother, Bernice and a weak and often abusive father, Tony. Her father leaves Dolores and her mother after the death of their stillborn son. Bernice subsequently goes mad and enters a mental hospital and Dolore
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her mother is the beginning of the long process of learning to forgive herself: “In the wake of my self-disclosure about Ma and Jack. . .Dr. Shaw and I turned over and studied who my mother really had been: a fragile woman, a victim in many ways--of her mother, her husband. Of herself. She’d been wrong to aid and abet me in the way she had after the rape, to feed her own and my guilt, overindulging and tolerating overindulgence. But I came to realize that she’d done what she’d done out of fear and limited understanding. She’d been neither a saint nor a whore, but a fallible, sexual woman” (Lamb 279).
In large part, Dolores’ story is the story about growing up and finding one’s place in the world. That her often pathetic story has been so well received by Oprah and her mob is perhaps symptomatic of a culture whose main interests are rest and relaxation. Part of finding one’s place in the world is shifting through all the lies one is fed from the time of birth. Dolores’ life can be seen as a series of shattered illusions and one of the illusions that is treated rather harshly in the novel is Catholicism. For Dolores, Catholicism is just another crutch for dealing with the painful reality of life. Dolores’ Grandmother
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Approximate Word count = 2328
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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