One of the few fiction books I read regularly...

books:


	• She's Come Undone (Oprah's Book Club) Wally Lamb Pocket, 1998 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 1669 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Undoing the past

She's Come Undone is a novel of disintegration. Dolores's life begins to unravel with the arrival of a free television set, though her life has always been poised to erode.

Like all unhappy families, Dorloros's is unhappy in its own, special way, though I admit that I'm getting tired about reading about unhappy families. It seems like this is yet another my-family-sucks-and-that's-why-I'm-so-messed-up book. It seems like people in America blame their parents for everything. Yes, your parents gave you your problems, but they're YOUR problems now. Deal with them and move on.

Lately, I've been branching out from the so-called chick lit genre into more diverse books just because, although Tolstoy would disagree, it seems like there are only so many variations on the unhappy family, and I think modern literature has run through them all.

Try Rabid: A Novel, for a truly original take on the unhappy family and recovery. It's a much better book.

Minna

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An effortless and effecting read

I find that I can have a bit of an attention defecit with many books, and it usually takes me a week or more to get through a story. Such was not the case with this book. The story of Delores Price takes you from her sometimes difficult childhood through an even more challenging young adulthood, and into her thirties.

Delores endures the divorce of her parents, loss of contact with her father, the trauma of moving to a new state, difficulty making friends, and even rape by a trusted family friend. Later, she deals with the loss of her mother and guilt over their tumultuous relationship. She endures more sexual abuse. She endures a miscarriage. Divorce from a cold, callous husband. Death of a loved one from AIDS. And later, she struggles with infertility.

The events that befall Delores throughout her young life run the gamut from bad to worse. She often finds herself without the provisions to deal with the various traumas that befall her. In the end, it is the tremendous comfort and support that she receives from a smattering of extraordinary people she meets along the way who help pull her through.

This is a touching and truly unique story. It is at once saddening and inspiring. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to get lost in a great book.

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Couldn't put it down

I could NOT put this book down. It's now one of my top recommendations to friends and family. One of my favorite books.

One of the few fiction books I read regularly...

This book manages to be depressing and uplifting at the same time. I read it whenever I start to feel sorry for myself (about once a year for the past ten years) so I can remember that things can always be worse, and if they are worse, they can get better.

Fans of the Book of Job will love it.

A week after finishing this book, I still have conflicting opinions. It's hard to synthesize them into a coherent review, so I'm just going to summarize what I liked and disliked.

On the plus side:

Easy to read: The story is told as a first-person narrative by the main protagonist, Dolores. Though her actions can be exasperating to the point where you want to shake some sense into her, she is always engaging, keeping a sense of (sometimes gallows) humor as she recreates her story. And it's impossible not to admire Lamb's skill in writing from the perspective of an overweight, overwhelmed woman as he tracks her history over the 25-year span of the book.

Growth and development: It's incremental, it's painful, there is backsliding - but there is growth. The ending offers a measure of comfort, but to a degree that seems deliberately subdued - there is no fairy-tale ending here. Lamb is showing us that adversity can be overcome, but doing so is hard work. And don't get too comfortable - any ground that you gain in life could be lost overnight. There is something completely admirable in the way that Dolores doesn't simply buckle, but - against considerable odds - manages to reach a level of self-awareness that affords her a measure of contentment in her own skin

As against that: (WARNING - SOME PLOT DETAILS INCLUDED)

Hard to read: For the same reasons that the book of Job is not your favorite book of the bible. The tribulations just keep coming. Guilt about parents divorcing? Daddy abandonment issues? That's just the baseline. Let's pile on a little molestation, rape, 150 or so excess pounds, several years in a psychiatric facility, peer rejection and gratuitous cruelty, marriage to a philandering narcissist, abortion, and the death of almost everyone dear to you. You can almost hear Satan betting with that dear old-Testament God, as further trials are heaped on. Dolores's failure to conceive is almost a relief - at least we're spared the prospect of a child-immolation scene.

Growth and development: Wait now. Didn't I list this under the `things to like' section? Well, yes I did. So sue me for also disliking it. Because there is that unavoidable Oprah sticker right on the cover of this book. It's completely obvious why - the kind of uplift that is doled out makes this book a shoo-in for Oprah-approval. But it's hard not to feel that one is being emotionally manipulated throughout, on a grand scale. To which my - admittedly irrational - response is "If you're going to play the reader like a cheap violin, then at least have the decency to provide more of a feel-good ending than you do".

Dead whale metaphors: Give me a break! Was this really necessary? Best you could come up with? Why not just club the reader over the head and have done with it?

Also, if I were a lesbian, I think I'd be within my rights to be offended by this book.

You can tell I'm all over the map where this book is concerned. Which means it got under my skin more than I might like to admit. Which is what allows it to keep its third star.

In the end, a book more to admire than to like.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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