![]() ![]() You’d think that Dominick would be a sympathetic character, given all that Lamb throws at him, but it turns out that he’s a pretty awful human being. One could almost call I Know This Much Is True an extended remix of that novel-and extended it is, at more than 900 pages in length. This won’t surprise anyone who’s familiar with Lamb’s 1992 debut novel, She’s Come Undone, which also put its players through many, many trials and tribulations it, too, featured mental illness, domestic abuse, divorce, self-harm, and more. Indeed, it’s the grimmest soap opera imaginable-one with no sense of fun, and pretensions toward literary greatness. As Dominick observes, late in the book: “What a fucked-up universe.” Along the way, he reads the autobiography of his Italian immigrant grandfather, who, it turns out, was a horrible, evil person. Later, Dominick’s girlfriend, Joy, gets pregnant by another man, and Dominick himself is terribly injured in a pickup-truck accident and a fall off a roof. ![]() ![]() His saintly mother died of cancer, leaving him to take care of his identical twin brother, Thomas, who struggles with paranoid schizophrenia and self-destructive tendencies. ![]() He doesn’t know who his own father was, and his stepfather, Ray, was an abusive idiot. He lost his infant daughter, years ago, to sudden infant death syndrome his wife, Dessa, left him shortly afterward. The book’s narrator, Dominick Birdsey, has seen all manner of tragedy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |