MaidMerry reviewed We are water by Wally Lamb
Review of 'We are water' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Oh, dear. I just have not lucked out with the books lately, even though many of them are by my favourite authors.
I have been a huge Wally Lamb fan, but I have not cared for his last two novels, which are filled with disaster upon disaster, to the point where it all seems gratuitous instead of deep.
In We Are Water, the characters are unsympathetic, the dialogue forced and fake, and the details petty and pedantic. Sometimes I wanted to scream, "Who cares?" or "Who would say that?" "Get on with it!"
Lamb explores the intergenerational effects of abuse, and perhaps he should have limited himself to that and done it more effectively and believably. However, he also tosses in racism, homophobia, same-sex marriage (between two people who seem completely incompatible), post traumatic stress syndrome in war vets, the consequences of a sexual relationship between someone in a …
Oh, dear. I just have not lucked out with the books lately, even though many of them are by my favourite authors.
I have been a huge Wally Lamb fan, but I have not cared for his last two novels, which are filled with disaster upon disaster, to the point where it all seems gratuitous instead of deep.
In We Are Water, the characters are unsympathetic, the dialogue forced and fake, and the details petty and pedantic. Sometimes I wanted to scream, "Who cares?" or "Who would say that?" "Get on with it!"
Lamb explores the intergenerational effects of abuse, and perhaps he should have limited himself to that and done it more effectively and believably. However, he also tosses in racism, homophobia, same-sex marriage (between two people who seem completely incompatible), post traumatic stress syndrome in war vets, the consequences of a sexual relationship between someone in a position of trust and another person (who initiates the contact and then lies about it), artificial insemination, and paraplegia, among other things. It feels more like reading a soap opera than literature, and yet, there is such a dispassionate narrative voice--a result of too much telling and not enough showing, I think--that it left me far too unmoved, given the horrific nature of the events.
