Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wally Lamb At PAL 9.24.09
This year's season opener at Portland Arts and Lectures with Wally Lamb turned out to be a fine evening with someone who has accomplished something very rare in this high speed pop culture world of ours. He is both a popular and literary fiction writer. His first three novels She's Come Undone, I Know This Much is True, and The Hour I First Believed are big books with wide scope and ambition which have sold probably as many books as such novels could be expected to, in part thanks to being Oprah Book Club selections in the late 1990s. But the fact that these books can be found at Target and in that big flat open zone in the middle of a Costco where gross amounts of pop culture are sold for many months should not be held as a pejorative of their quality and value.
Lamb had decades of experience as a high school English teacher before he became a published novelist. And that experience was evident in his presentation. I worried early on that the crowd was going to correct this Connecticut native pronunciation of "Oragon" I have seen PDX crowds be merciless to such offenders upon occasion. But no such fate occurred to Lamb who was engaging, entertaining and shared his story and work in a lecture that could have easily gone on for quite longer than his allowed time. In fact, time limitations prevented him from reading the last of the voices he "throws" for a living, Caelum Quirk, the protagonist of The Hour I First Believed We from the audience vocalized our disappointment of that circumstance so he read his sample of Quirk's voice.
This end to the formal part of his presentation created an interesting parallel to the story Lamb told earlier about when he first read his fiction in a timed open mike reading that was part of the Writer's workshop at Mountpelier Vermont lead by Gladys Swan . At the end of his time, someone from the audience told him to go on. The next scheduled reader yielded his time for Lamb. Lamb said this was one of the pivotal moment in gaining confidence to continue his writing pursuits.
He began the evening with some anecdotes of what it is like for a now somewhat celebrity writer to go on book tour. There was the bride who showed up in a wedding dress to get her book signed somewhere between her reception and the honeymoon. And there was the book signing line where one elderly lady admonished him for his use of swearing and another said he was the greatest writer to s--t behind a pair of shoes. At another time he turned on a hotel television when Jeopardy's Alex Trebeck gave his the answer of "He's the Author of She's Come Undone" only to watch the three contestants stare back at him dumbfounded.
He did not read and write stories much as a young boy, but he attributed three elements of his early years as clues and preparations to the life of a writer: he drew a lot, he lied a lot, and he was the only boy among older girl sisters and cousins who were into imaginative role games.
Lamb maintains the literary tradition of writing is a journey and discovery and a reader working through one of his tomes gets opportunity to the aha moments of surprise and connectivity. And that world has scape larger when one considers and finds connectivity in the three novels as a whole, works that show both a micro world of Connecticut folk and a macroscape of the world at large, our pop history fairly current but sometimes finding linkage with centrury 19 as well. But that discussion and more on Wally at PAL will have to wait for later.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:18 PM
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