I Know This Much Is True

Both a moving character study and a gripping story of family conflict are hidden somewhere inside the daunting bulk of this annoyingly slick second novel...Lamb writes crisp, tender-tough dialogue, and his portrayal of the decent, conflicted Dominick...is convincing.

As we learn more about the twins’ tormented childhood...the novel quite deliberately assumes a darkly fated dimension that transforms an unhappy working-class New England family into mythic world archetypes. You may wish that its structure were sleeker and its resolution less tidy, but you couldn’t ask for a more beguiling summer read.

The length, combined with the vast sweep of the book's plot, voices, time-periods, locations, and themes...was meant to be an epic in the classic sense. But the uneven writing - which ranges from the hilarious to the horrific to the hopelessly banal - guarantees this won't be one for posterity.

This is a book weighted heavily with the travails and dangers of love, of family, of friendship...Lamb is a master, a teller of dark tales, but more importantly, a speaker of the truth. His nine-hundred page narrative reads like a short story and will make you cry and snarl and blush with the wonder in the world.

But thanks to well-sustained dramatic tension, funky gallows humor and some shocking surprises, this sinuous story of one family's dark secrets and recurring patterns of behavior largely succeeds in its ambitious reach...Lamb creates a nuanced picture of a flawed but decent man.