Another Young Lawyer Is Served Up for Breakfast By JANET MASLIN Published: January 25, 2009 John Grisham kick-starts his latest morality fable just as he has kick-started so many others: by introducing the warring forces of good and evil. On the side of the angels: Kyle McAvoy, idealistic editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal. As “The Associate” begins, Kyle is coaching a basketball team for underprivileged kids in New Haven as he waits to graduate and pursue his career of choice. He has accepted a $32,000-a-year legal aid job so he can help migrant workers in Virginia. Brian Stauffer   Maki Galimberti But there is a sinister stranger with a “slick head” and “calm hairy hands” in Kyle’s future. He shows up to broach a different career plan. This vaguely foreign-sounding man, calling himself Bennie Wright and aided by a team of fake F.B.I. agents, announces that he would like Kyle to become a $200,000-a-year associate for a high-powered New York law firm. Translated from the Grisham-ese, what that means is that Bennie — acting on the same kinds of murky but all-powerful motives that used to fuel Hitchcock plots as he sets up a corporate espionage scheme with Kyle as its patsy — would like Kyle to sell his soul to the devil. Kyle is a brash, attractive good guy. (Think back to “The Firm.” Mr. Grisham has.) Why would he agree to an about-face like that? Because he has to. Quicker than you can say, “Duke lacrosse team,” Bennie brings up an ugly college episode that involved Kyle, his Duquesne University fraternity brothers and a woman named Elaine who now claims to have been raped by four of them at a party. Bennie has a cell-phone video record of the incident that is remarkably clear, even though all participants were too drunk to remember whether the sex was consensual. Thus propelled, Kyle goes off to a place where he will suffer mightily so that Mr. Grisham can have a field day. Kyle enters the greedy, brutalizing world of Scully & Pershing, said to be the world’s largest law firm. This place chews up and spits out smart young rookies from America’s top law schools, and Mr. Grisham gives himself yet another chance to deplore that process. With the help of a well-used cookie cutter he delivers one more hard-charging book about the hellish demands of corporate law. “I want to be a partner so I can sleep until 5:00 A.M. every day until I die at 50,” Kyle says bitterly, once he sizes up his new Scully & Pershing career. Must a lawyer’s life be this way? Do you even have to ask? Kyle’s father has a small-town practice in Pennsylvania. “He worked very hard and treated everyone fairly,” the book says of him. “Clients were free to call him at home, and he would meet them on Sunday afternoons if necessary.” As for income, “fees were sometimes delivered in the form of firewood, eggs and poultry, steaks and free labor around the house.” Soapbox fiction can be stupefying. But Mr. Grisham owes a very long winning streak to his stealth gift for making preachiness thrilling. Most recently, in “The Appeal,” he examined the corrupt process of rigging an election and concocted one of his best stories in recent memory. This time, returning to safer and more familiar territory, he dissects an amoral corporate culture, decries blind ambition and manages to use alcoholism, often the laziest aspect of crime stories, as an element of dramatic suspense. Though Kyle has been sober since college, he now finds himself stuck in an expense-account world where the second bottle of wine at a two-person lunch is supposed to be a perk, not a problem. Mr. Grisham so often writes similar books that the same things must be said of them. “The Associate” is true to form: it grabs the reader quickly, becomes impossible to put down, stays that way through most of its story, and then escalates into plotting so crazily far-fetched that it defies resolution. Kyle McAvoy is another of the two-dimensional yet terrifically likeable heroes who come to life on Mr. Grisham’s pages only to evaporate later. It’s easy to predict what choice Kyle will make at the end of the novel. It’s impossible to imagine, let alone care, what his life will be like once the improbably wild furor surrounding this one lone law-firm recruit is over. Every now and then Mr. Grisham comes up with a lemon. “The Broker,” the touristy international thriller that existed primarily an excuse for its author to research the picturesque cafes of Italy, was one of those. “The Associate” is much better, even if it’s something of a retread. Filled with individual episodes that are more memorable than its overall plot, it describes astonishing wastes of Kyle’s $400-an-hour time, for example when he bills $800 for driving a law partner’s car (actually his wife’s car) around blocks in Lower Manhattan because he can’t find a parking space near the Federal Courthouse. It also powerfully captures the cynicism with which Scully & Pershing’s new associates are whipsawed into utter servility while being persuaded that they are poised to become part of New York’s power elite. Mr. Grisham fuses Kyle’s college and job experiences with something more skillful than simple cross-cutting. He brings back the old buddies who were part of an embarrassing past and allows them to nerve-rackingly jeopardize Kyle’s future. And although Mr. Grisham surrounds good-guy Kyle with spies, thugs and other calm hairy-handed menaces, “The Associate” never forgets who is this new lawyer’s worst enemy. It’s his old self. Guilt’s Companion Reviews by MARILYN STASIO Published: December 26, 2008 There’s no end to war in Charles Todd’s unnervingly beautiful historical novels, only the enduring legacy of suffering inherited by those who survive and remember. In A MATTER OF JUSTICE (Morrow, $24.99), Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard, a shell-shocked veteran haunted by his battlefield experiences in France, once again serves as witness to the unsettling social changes sweeping across England in the aftermath of World War I. Skip to next paragraph Illustration by Wes Duvall   When he arrives in the quiet village of Cambury to investigate the bizarre murder of Harold Quarles, a financial adviser who regarded himself as squire of all he surveyed, Rutledge is confronted by resistance from the local constabulary and a wall of silence from almost everyone else. But the detective’s own survivor guilt (“Finding a way back had somehow seemed to be a final betrayal of the dead”) has also made him acutely sensitive to the psychic wounds of others. While Quarles may have been universally loathed, the inspector knows it would take someone with an extraordinary grievance to bash the villain’s head in and string him up from the rafters of his medieval tithe barn. Is this a simple act of vengeance or some disgruntled moralist’s twisted notion of justice? Here the mother and son who write under the name Charles Todd get it all right: a shocking crime in a bucolic setting; secretive characters who act from complex motives; a confounding puzzle elegantly presented and put before a detective with an intuitive understanding of the dark side of human nature. Taken on its own terms, Cambury seems a self-contained community awkwardly adjusting to modern ways. (Todd captures this transitional era with one wonderful metaphor: when a motorcar runs off the road, a team of horses arrives to pull it back.) But under the village’s placid exterior, seething resentment is felt for those who presume to scale class barriers and challenge old ways. A parvenu like Quarles, who overcame his humble beginnings as a coal miner’s son to marry above himself and become the cruel lord of the manor, poses a threat to traditional country values. Even with an inheritance to soften the dismissal, one character chooses to kill herself when she’s no longer required in the big house. Having lost husbands, fathers, sons and brothers to the war, some villagers would rather die — or kill — than give up what’s left of their world. Patricia Cornwell’s new novel, SCARPETTA (Putnam, $27.95), gets off to a great start, with the indomitable Kay Scarpetta, medical examiner extraordinaire, up to her ears in cadavers. (“Stryker saws whined, running water drummed, and bone dust sifted through the air like flour.”) And the case that calls her to New York on New Year’s Day is a doozy — the “Midget Murder,” as the tabloids heartlessly put it, of a female dwarf, possibly by the boyfriend who’s cowering in Bellevue Hospital, convinced sinister for­ces are trying to steal his mind. When it comes to the forensic sciences, nobody can touch Cornwell, who analyzes cyberspace crime as effortlessly as she walks us through cutting-edge lab technology and elucidates clinical obsession. Trouble is, Scarpetta no longer travels without her posse — her husband, who’s a forensic psychologist; her niece, who’s a computer genius; as well as Pete Marino, a former cop who’s in deep disgrace after his vile behavior in “Book of the Dead” — and it takes the first 100 pages of this overlong narrative just to explain (none too convincingly) how they all happen to be in New York at the same time, working on the same case. Malcolm Shuman’s series novels are written in a pedestrian style that isn’t evident in THE LEVEE (Academy Chicago, paper, $16.95), a delicately constructed, teasingly told stand-alone mystery set in Baton Rouge and based on an actual unsolved crime. The stabbing death of a teacher is recounted here in two time frames by the same narrator, Colin Douglas, an author of true-crime stories who was 15 years old when the murder took place — and is a haunted older man when he returns to his hometown to confront his own role in the crime. “I always figured you’d come here and write about what happened,” says a friend, one of a group of boys who stumbled on the murder in the graveyard of a ruined plantation when they were camping on the levee. But even as Douglas reflects on the racial and class prejudices that affected the outcome of the case, he and the reader are aware this is one sad story that will never see daylight. Anticipating Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by more than 20 years, an American physician named John Babbington Williams was scribbling stories extolling the fictional exploits of James Brampton, a New York detective with uncanny gifts of observation and ratiocination. The collected stories were published in 1865 as LEAVES FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF A NEW YORK DETECTIVE (Westholme, paper, $14.95) and promptly lost a bundle for the publisher. Make no mistake: Dr. Williams hardly rivals Conan Doyle’s intellectual brilliance, nor can he match Poe’s felicitous style or Wilkie Collins’s storytelling. But what a treat it is to make the acquaintance of a man who was probably the earliest American sleuth, a quick and cunning fellow who can outwit a gang of counterfeiters or see guilt in the most guileless face — and reads French besides. “Perhaps I have done more towards detecting crime than any other living man,” he allows, with no false modesty. THE HOST By Stephenie Meyer 619 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99. Stephenie Meyer made her name as the author of the “Twilight” series, vampire-romance novels for the young adult market that have sold more than three million books in the United States, according to their publisher. “The Host” is her first book for adults. In it Earth has been occupied by an alien race, known as souls, who take over the bodies of humans. Melanie Snyder, one of the few people still resisting the invaders, is captured, and a soul named Wanderer is given her body. “I’d bound myself securely into the body’s center of thought, twined myself inescapably into its every breath and reflex,” Wanderer says at the book’s beginning, “It was me.” But Melanie — and her love for her fellow holdout, Jared — refuses to fade away. Ms. Meyer was recently selected one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for 2008. Brown’s Anatomy By MATT RUFF Published: January 9, 2009 In the opening scene of “Beat the Reaper,” the former mob hit man Dr. Peter Brown pauses in the act of disabling a mugger to give readers a paragraph-length tutorial on the architecture of the human arm. Halfway through the paragraph he throws in an asterisk, and in a footnote points out that the lower leg is a lot like the forearm, only less fragile. That footnote had me worried. Nothing ruins a story faster than a teller who can’t stay out of the way of his own tale, and for a narrator to interrupt himself in the middle of interrupting himself is usually a very bad sign. Fortunately, Brown’s creator, the novelist (and doctor) Josh Bazell, is an unusually talented writer. Most of the many digressions in “Beat the Reaper,” his first book, are genuinely entertaining, and the few that don’t work — the footnotes are the most common culprit — annoy primarily because the story is so engaging that you don’t want to be yanked out of it even for the time it takes to glance at the bottom of the page. Bazell’s protagonist, né Pietro Brnwa, used to be a contract killer for the Mafia, as mentioned. But eight years ago, following a work-­related dispute that involved throwing his best friend out a window, he had a change of heart, entered a witness-protection program and enrolled in medical school. Now he heals people instead of murdering them — although, as the incident with the mugger shows, he hasn’t entirely given up his old ways. While on his morning rounds, Brown is recognized by a mobster named Eddy Squillante who has been hospitalized with stomach cancer. Squillante’s prognosis is dire, but he’s determined to beat the odds. He offers Brown a simple proposition: keep me alive and I won’t tell your old bosses where you are; let me die (or kill me) and my associates start making phone calls. Brown’s darkly comic struggle to save Squillante — not just from the cancer, but from the ministrations of a quack surgeon named Friendly — is intercut with highlights from his previous career. This blend of criminal and medical drama works well, and the back-and-forth between timelines keeps things moving. Bazell has a knack for breathing new life into the most timeworn genre conventions. We learn, for instance, that Brown first became a killer to avenge the murder of his grandparents. Grandma and Grandpa Brnwa weren’t your typical victims, however. Polish Jews, they were survivors of both Auschwitz and, before that, the Bialowieza Forest: “They and a bunch of other newly feral teenagers were hiding out in the snow and trying to kill off enough of the local Jew-hunting parties that the Poles would leave them alone. What this precisely involved they never told me, but it must have been pretty ferocious, because in 1943 Hermann Goering had a lodge at the southern end of Bialo­wieza where he and his guests dressed as Roman senators, and he must have been aware of the situation. There’s also the question of a straggler platoon of Hitler’s Sixth Army that disappeared in Bialo­wieza that winter en route to Stalingrad.” You can see how a family history like that might incline a guy to take revenge into his own hands. And the unfairness of the deaths — his grandparents survive the ultimate evil, only to be gunned down by a couple of punks from New Jersey — makes it even easier for Brown to make what he later acknowledges is the wrong choice. The killer with a conscience is another genre staple, and Brown is a fine specimen. Having bludgeoned men to death, he isn’t overly concerned with politeness, and he tends to say exactly what he’s thinking, with charming vulgarity. He’s honest about his character flaws and competent in his actions, except when impulsiveness or his special moral code cause him to act like an idiot. And he has, as you’d expect, a unique way of looking at the world. At one point, while visiting the Polish forest where his grandparents played hide-and-seek with the Nazis, he spies a group of ravens in a tree. He starts thinking about the long-lived nature of parrots and asks himself whether ravens might share it, and whether these same birds might have been here during World War II: “I wondered if my grand­parents had ever tried to eat them.” It will not be giving too much away to say that Brown’s old employers eventually do learn where he is. The climax of “Beat the Reaper” finds him locked in a medical freezer, waiting for his arch­nemesis to arrive and finish him off. The plan Brown concocts to save himself is the novel’s most original flourish. It is also completely outrageous, so much so that I had to stop and think about whether I could really suspend my disbelief. In the end I decided that, as with the footnotes, Bazell had more than earned my indulgence as a reader. If there’s a better recommendation for a story than that, I don’t know what it is. Original Sins By DAVID GATES Published: November 28, 2008 The Greeks might have invented the pastoral, the genre in which the rustic life is idealized by writers who don’t have to live it, but it’s found its truest home in America. To Europeans of the so-called Age of Discovery, the whole North American continent seemed a sort of Edenic rod and gun club, and their descendants here still haven’t gotten over their obsession with the pure primal landscapes they despoil with their own presence. A straight line — if only spiritually — runs from Fenimore Cooper’s wild Adirondacks and Hawthorne’s sinister Massachusetts forests to Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” to Cheever’s domesticated locus amoenus of Shady Hill to the theme park in George Saunders’s pointedly titled “Pastoralia” — where slaughtered goats are delivered to employees in Neolithic costume through a slot in the wall of their cave, much as Big Macs appear at a drive-through window. The line even leads to “Naked Lunch,” which pronounces America “old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians” — simply a calculated blasphemy. Apply enough ironic backspin, and almost any American novel this side of “Bright Lights, Big City” could be called “American Pastoral.” Or for that matter, “Paradise Lost.” Illustration by Mk Mabry Toni Morrison has already used the title “Paradise” for the 1998 novel that I think is her weakest. But it would have been a good fit for her new book, “A Mercy,” which reveals her, once more, as a conscious inheritor of America’s pastoral tradition, even as she implicitly criticizes it. Her two greatest novels, “Song of Solomon” and “Beloved,” render the rural countryside so evocatively that you can smell the earth; even in the urban novel “Jazz,” the most memorable images are of the South its characters have left behind. But Morrison, of course, is African-American, and hers is a distinctly postcolonial pastoral: a career-long refutation of Robert Frost’s embarrassing line “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” The plantation called Sweet Home, in “Beloved,” is neither sweet to its slaves nor home to anyone, except the native Miamis, of whom nothing is left but their burial mounds. In “A Mercy,” a 17th-­century American farmer — who lives near a town wink-and-nudgingly called Milton — enriches himself by dabbling in the rum trade and builds an ostentatious, oversize new house, for which he orders up a fancy wrought-iron gate, ornamented with twin copper serpents: when the gate is closed, their heads meet to form a blossom. The farmer, Jacob Vaark, thinks he’s creating an earthly paradise, but Lina, his Native American slave, whose forced exposure to Presbyterianism has conveniently provided her with a Judeo-­Christian metaphor, feels as if she’s “entering the world of the damned.” In this American Eden, you get two original sins for the price of one — the near extermination of the native population and the importation of slaves from Africa — and it’s not hard to spot the real serpents: those creatures Lina calls “Europes,” men whose “whitened” skins make them appear on first sight to be “ill or dead,” and whose great gifts to the heathens seem to be smallpox and a harsh version of Christianity with “a dull, unimaginative god.” Jacob is as close as we get to a benevolent European. Although three bondswomen (one Native American, one African and one “a bit mongrelized”) help run his farm, he refuses to traffic in slaves; the mother of the African girl, in fact, has forced her daughter on him because the girl is in danger of falling into worse hands and he seems “human.” Yet Jacob’s money is no less tainted than if he’d wielded a whip himself: it simply comes from slaves he doesn’t have to see in person, working sugar plantations in the Caribbean. And the preposterous house he builds with this money comes to no good. It costs the lives of 50 trees (cut down, as Lina notes, “without asking their permission”), his own daughter dies in an accident during the construction, and he never lives to finish it. True, some of the white settlers are escapees from hell: Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, whom he imported sight unseen from London, retains too-vivid memories of public hangings and drawings-and-quarterings. “The pile of frisky, still living entrails held before the felon’s eyes then thrown into a bucket and tossed into the Thames; fingers trembling for a lost torso; the hair of a woman guilty of mayhem bright with flame.” America, she figures, can hardly be worse. But even the relatively kindly Rebekka (kindly, that is, until she nearly dies of smallpox herself and gets religion) and the relatively human Jacob have that European brimstone clinging to them, and it’s stinking up the place. One native sachem diagnoses their unique pathology: “Cut loose from the earth’s soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples.” This sounds like P.C. cant, and even Lina doubts that all Europes are Eurotrash. But the sachem’s got a point. Does anybody own the earth we all inhabit as brothers and sisters? From that perspective, property really is theft, and if you don’t think Europeans did the thieving, I’ve got $24 worth of beads I’d like to sell you. Colonial Rondo By LISA FUGARD Published: January 16, 2009 “That’s us, the British colonials, battling against our circum­stances, always,” the formidable Edwina Storch says to Claire Pendleton over tea one sweltering afternoon. Most of the colony’s British residents are cultivating a lifestyle of potted palms and potted duck. But not 28-year-old Claire. While her compatriots wilt and sweat, she glows. Hong Kong suits her. “Something about the tropical clime had ripened her appearance, brought everything into harmony.” Skip to next paragraph Gasper Tringale Janice Y. K. Lee’s first novel, “The Piano Teacher,” opens with the newlywed Claire traveling to Hong Kong in 1951 with her husband, Martin, an engineer. Of their marriage Lee writes, “She was not so attracted to him, but who was she to be picky, she thought, hearing the voice of her mother.” Soon Claire is hired as a piano teacher for the daughter of a wealthy Chinese couple, Victor and Melody Chen. Also in their employ, as a chauffeur, is an enigmatic Englishman, Will Truesdale. In sleek, spare prose, Lee plays with the growing erotic tension between Claire and Will. Here he is approaching her, cutting “the space between them in half, and half again, coming at her with those hooded, sardonic eyes.” “Be good to me,” Claire cautions him. Will’s response is noncommittal. Claire is sexually charged and curious, the affair with Will her rite of passage. She’s also insightful enough to realize that the headier intoxication is with herself, the newly emerging Claire — a woman who indulges in petty thievery and has a lover; a woman more comfortable among the throngs of Chinese at the city’s wet markets than at the teas and cocktail parties on the Peak, where some of the colony’s wealthiest members reside. Lee has made the bold (and successful) decision to write a novel in which none of her characters are particularly endearing. Will can be cruel and self-absorbed; Claire is often prejudiced. And the upper echelons of Hong Kong society, through which they both pass, are rife with pettiness and jealousy. Many of these people have been deeply scarred by the Japanese occupation — just how deeply Claire will eventually discover as she learns more about Will Truesdale’s past. Will’s entree into Hong Kong took place in the summer of 1941 through his relationship with a quixotic Eurasian named Trudy Liang. Driven by deep insecurities, Trudy was part Holly Golightly, part Mata Hari — charming, insulting, scheming and above all captivating. In one of the novel’s retrospective scenes, at a party on the beach, conversation ceases as “they all watch her, rapt, as she plunges into the sea and comes up sleek and dripping — her slim body a vertical rebuke to the flatness of the horizon between the sky and sea.” In December 1941, six months after Will met Trudy, the Japanese invaded Hong Kong. In small but riveting vignettes, Lee evokes the turmoil and fear that seized residents during the occupation, a time when Will and Trudy and the Chens made choices that have rippled through the war years and into Claire’s future. “The Piano Teacher” is laced with intrigue concerning a hoard of Chinese artifacts called the Crown Collection that went missing during the war (like the artworks owned by the real-life Hong Kong businessman Paul Chater). But while the inevitable “who did what and when and why” that dominates the last third of the novel is satisfying because it answers all those questions, readers will be more enthralled by Lee’s depiction of Will’s relationships with his two lovers — “Claire, with her blond and familiar femininity, English rose to Trudy’s exotic scorpion” — and the unsparing way Lee unravels them. After Columbine Shana Sureck for The New York Times By LOUISA THOMAS Published: December 12, 2008 For those who may have forgotten him — it’s been 10 years since his last novel — Wally Lamb has wrapped his new book, “The Hour I First Believed,” in reminders. The dust jacket is filled with praise for the book’s predecessors, “She’s Come Undone” and “I Know This Much Is True,” both selections of Oprah’s Book Club that spent considerable time on the best-seller lists. There’s also an afterword about the writing of the book, a section of “notes from the author,” a detailed list of sources (“I hope I’ve remembered them all”) and information on how to make charitable donations to related nonprofit organizations. Who needs Oprah? Lamb’s publisher has managed to fit an entire segment of her show between hard covers.   And what about the novel itself? Over the course of more than 700 pages, the narrative takes on major events (the Columbine High School shootings, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina) and weighty issues (motherhood, marriage, alienation, psychological trauma, drug addiction, chaos theory, prison reform, grief, the connection between ancestry and identity — to name just a few). The story is narrated in the caustic, breezy voice of Caelum Quirk, a high school English teacher living in Littleton, Colo.,who has an anger management problem and a tender heart. From the start, Caelum is unlucky and unhappy. Before the action even begins, he’s been struggling to hold his third marriage together. (He and his wife, Maureen, separated and nearly divorced after he discovered she was having an affair and went after her lover with a wrench.) Things are at a standstill when Caelum is called back home to Connecticut, where the aunt who helped raise him is ailing; he gets to sit at her bedside just once before she dies. Taking a break from the funeral arrangements, he sees the name of the school where he teaches — Columbine — on the television news. Maureen, a nurse at Columbine, is in the library when the shootings start and survives by hiding in a cabinet. But for her — and for Caelum — the ordeal is just beginning. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt, Maureen becomes addicted to Xanax. A move to Caelum’s childhood home in Three Rivers, Conn. — down the road from the women’s prison founded by Caelum’s great-grandmother — doesn’t help. Meanwhile, Caelum is wrestling with his own demons, including troubling childhood memories and startling revelations about his parents. From there, things only get worse. Yet the novel isn’t all misfortune. There are moments of levity — detours into the history of Rheingold beer, an assessment of rock ’n’ roll hits, a brief doughnut-­making tutorial — and moments of salvation. It’s part picaresque, part Russian novel, part mystery. Mostly, though, it resembles an evangelist’s redemption narrative. And like any evangelist, Lamb is pitching more than a story: he wants to lead his readers to a larger (nondenominational) truth. Readers of “I Know This Much Is True” will find some similarities, including the slangy, vivid voice of the narrator. Both novels feature the town of Three Rivers and include the wise and slightly loopy therapist Dr. Patel; they also touch on some of the same conflicts. But “The Hour I First Believed” is more ambitious (if, remarkably, shorter). Lamb seems determined not only to portray the range of the human condition through the life of Caelum Quirk but also to convey the sum of human experience. Caelum’s trials are like Job’s, and his rewards seem the gift of angels. Caelum is an unusual, provocative character, neither a hero nor an antihero but a regular guy experiencing both the tragic and the absurd. His tone is by turns funny, irritating, depressive and sentimental — which is to say, recognizably human. But he’s only a front for an omniscient power — let’s call him Wally Lamb — who has sought out remedies for life’s uncertainties and is more than willing to share them. He’s on a mission to help us help ourselves. Read this way, the supplementary pages are an integral part of Lamb’s novel, anchoring and explaining the story in an easily digestible fashion. In a preface that was included in pre-publication review copies of the book, Lamb talks about the hope he felt when his son’s praying mantis egg case — which they had thought a dud — hatched.And, sure enough, at several moments in the story, a praying mantis appears like a big flashing sign: “Be hopeful.” Such moralizing is threaded throughout the book. Oprah Winfrey has said of “I Know This Much Is True” that it’s “not just a book, it’s a life experience.” But this new novel does more than simply evoke a life’s experience (including horrifying actual events) and leave the reader to do the hard work of understanding it. Instead, it offers to do the interpretive work for us, suggesting that in the aftermath we’ll be stronger and happier, more deeply engaged with those whose lives touch our own. That’s certainly a noble aim. But Lamb doesn’t trust his storytelling to pull it off, and he’s right not to. Near the end of the novel, during a discussion of the legend of the Minotaur, one of Caelum’s students “summed up what they’d learned”: “Life is messy, violent, confusing and hopeful.” Heartened, Caelum gives all his students A’s. Reading this, I felt the A was being extended to me too. I hadn’t earned it. Fiction can indeed deepen our understanding of trauma; it can expand our capacity for empathy and provide consolation. But its highest achievement is to complicate, not simplify — to leave us better students of our messy lives, not to graduate us with honors and send us blithely on our way.