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 Dolores is shipped off to live with her grandmother in Rhode Island, where she attends parochial school. After being raped at the age of 13 by her grandmother’s tenant, Jack, Dolores goes under and begins to come undone. She internalizes guilt that doesn’t belong to her and blames herself for the death of Jack and his wife’s son. She also feels guilty over the death of her mother, who dies in a car accident shortly after her release from the mental hospital. By the time Dol...