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A review of I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

Dominick Birdsey savors his small triumphs over three generations of family dysfunction and supports his schizophrenic identical twin Thomas.

Reviewed by: A.F. Morrow
About A.F. Morrow

I Know This Much Is True 900 pages about the trials of a divorced, self-employed painter in wintry New England whose identical twin is not only schizophrenic but has staged a shocking public self-mutilation? Yes, believe it or not, yes, and you will enjoy it. You will love every word of Wally Lamb's prose because it is, like New England, spare and profound in its pared-down elegance.

This is not John Updike's New England, in which the bankrupt man has business details to clear up. Imaginary or otherwise, in Dominick Birdsey's New England the business details are hand to mouth. They revolve around the tell-tale status signs among the small-town jobbers: whose last job enabled them to buy a better truck, who's had to sell the ladders to make ends meet, and worst of all, who's been reduced to riding along as part of a crew, after going belly up as a boss?

Dominick's trials are epic, he has the world-weary quality of the good guy: yet the emotional traumas visited upon him by his parents doom him to experience relationships with women at arms length. The closest relationship he has is with his identical twin Thomas, but Thomas is schizophrenic and prone to discontinuing the medications that maintain his slender grasp of reality. Dominick's sorrow comes not only from the acute awareness that his brother and best friend's sharp mind and gentle nature have been swallowed whole by the demons of his illness, but that his face and stature are a constant reminder to others of what Thomas could have been. As in any family, the sick child is not the only child to suffer.

Off his medication and determined to stage an act of anti-war protest, Thomas carries his grandfather's machete into a public library and chops off his own hand. This leads to media frenzy and a series of medical and legal issues to be tackled by Dominick. As an advocate for Thomas, Dominick agonizes over discerning between the 'best' choice and the choices that are preferred within the twisted tangle of logic that Thomas can explain only to his twin. Lamb perfectly captures the dichotomy of simultaneous love and loathing that one feels for a mentally disabled relative who is at once a tender soul in desperate need and an overpowering burden, and therein lays the crux of the story.

At once an anchor and a terrible weight, Thomas fills Dominick's life with the gravity of his situation and the purity of his devotion to his brother. It is fitting too, that Dominick's girlfriend is named Joy; he cannot feel joy but feels that he should try to. As work, lovelife, and father-son relations falter and tumble into disarray the beginnings of maturity seem evident in Dominick, although they are tender buds. After falling, literally and figuratively, almost as far as he can imagine; Dominick the house painter commits an act of hope and redemption. Without drama: he gets up. Given the facts of this narrative, this should be a very dark book, a real 'downer', yet somehow it is quite the opposite.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: I Know This Much Is True

Copyright © by A.F. Morrow, 2003

Reviewed by A.F. Morrow:
-- Fall on Your Knees - by Ann-Marie Macdonald
-- October Sky, originally published as Rocket Boys - by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
-- I Know This Much Is True - by Wally Lamb
-- Mrs. Dalloway - by Virginia Woolf
-- My Dream of You - by Nuala O'Faolain









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