Too Much...

Okay, let's start with the warnings. BIG WARNINGS. I'm going to talk in some detail about The River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb. If you are planning on ever reading it you should back out now. I will be spoiling almost everything in the book while I talk about it, so this is your BACK OUT NOW final warning.

Ready?

I'm not kidding. The spoilers are starting soon.

Like right now:

I read before bed every night. It's part of my wind down routine. Now, I knew that I was playing it a little dangerously when I started this book. Wally Lamb books are always really good, but really heavy. Like have the tissues nearby and expect him to manipulate your emotions the whole way through. But this one? I read that first chapter and then couldn't get to sleep for a long long time.

The whole book is from the point of view of Corby so you are watching him as he takes benzos and drinks all while taking care of his twin toddlers. When he gets distracted and burns the French toast you are worried. When he talks about how he always buckles in his son before his daughter but today his son is watching some ants in the driveway the worry shifts completely to dread...and yeah. The inciting event of the book is him backing over his son because he's fucked up and driving.

I texted Dana about it in the morning...told her I thought I was prepared, but I was not prepared. And I really thought about not finishing the book. Just wasn't sure that I had the mental capacity for it. And I kept that "might not finish" for probably a third of the book. But I did the thing that drives people and especially authors like Stephen King crazy and went to the last page of the book to see how this journey was going to run.

Normally that's a thing I will only do in a really scary horror book. I don't want to know everything that happens or how it happens, but I want to see if this character I am investing in is still alive at the end. I want to prepare myself. So I look for that character's name in the last page or two. Well the end of this book he is dead. And because I knew he was going to die and not get his happy ending where his wife forgives him and he moves on I could keep reading.

Not at all charitable of me, I know.

Now, Lamb covers A LOT in this one. He talks about addiction, the broken justice system in America (our lead got three years for running over his son while he was driving impaired while another inmate in the same prison was serving life for a woman losing her arm in an accident he was involved in, the protagonist is a white man, the other inmate Black), the fact that we are not interested in rehabilitation but just revenge in our prisons, family trauma and generational reverberations, toxic masculinity, daddy issues, and just to add one more layer Native American erasure.

And to add to all of that you bring what you bring to a book. I bring family trauma around addiction and the generational reverberations of that. So I could not find the compassion in myself that would be needed to be supportive of Corby's journey. His realizations about himself and his relationship with his own father, when he would talk about the guilt he felt, or that he wasn't sure his wife would stay with him when he was released, or how mad he was that she wouldn't bring their daughter to visit him, I was not moved.

When Lamb had backed up the story and talked about Corby and Emily's meeting and how they ended up married I did not see Corby's grand romantic gesture as a good thing, but as an early warning sign that he is an addict and this is not good. He leaves college during the last semester of his senior year, drives across country to where Emily is going to school, shows up at her door and proposes. Because she had told him that maybe they should slow down (they had just met the summer before their senior years) and not try for a long distance relationship during this year. Graduate and then see what happens. But he is so panicked that she is seeing someone else he leaves everything behind to go to her and basically force her hand.

She thinks it's a sign they should be together. I saw it as a sign she needed to move and change her phone number. But you know, I have my own baggage, like I said.

The end of the book he is going to get out of prison early, staffing issues mean that they are releasing people early. Before you get out they do one last drug test on you to make sure you are clean. His comes back dirty so he doesn't get out. This was February 2020. So you, as the reader in the future, know what's coming. And yeah, he ended up being one of the first prisoners in his prison to die from COVID. If only he had gotten out when he thought he would. And the reason his urine isn't clean is because he was taking a low dose of klonopin to ease the after affects of a rape by a prison guard. He was tapering off to be clean by the time he got out, but hadn't quite managed to do it soon enough.

His reasoning was that he could handle the benzos, even though they were what he was abusing before, because it was a low dose, under strict supervision, and he was going to be off them before he ever got out. But he didn't tell the psychiatrist that he was an addict (there is a point earlier in the book where another counselor suggestions them for anxiety and he tells her he can't have them so you know he knows), he also didn't stop when he told himself he was going to stop. He only cut back, and then took a few more when he was stressing about getting out, but it was over a week before his release date so he thought it would be fine.

Addict gonna addict. That's what I thought as he walked down that path. And then his reaction when the results popped positive showed he was still not ready to take responsibility for what he did. He did. He took the pills. He didn't tell the doctor that he needed something else that wasn't in the benzo family. He was the one who was going to quit but then didn't quite do it. But he blamed everyone else. Eventually sort of coming around. But...

Like I said, we come with our own baggage. When I read Matthew Perry's book I told Brent that he wouldn't stay clean. I said I would be surprised if he had actually been clean when he wrote it, but I wouldn't be surprised at all when the news of his relapse came out. Nothing was his fault. Not really. Even when he would say he was taking the responsibility it was more like when you tell a kid to say sorry. They might say it, but they don't feel it. And growing up with an addict I'm pretty good at seeing who feels it and who just says it. So yeah, it was sad when Perry overdosed, but I was absolutely not surprised, and it's been interesting to see his dealers all get punished, but it was his choice to use again.

And yes, I know, I'm supposed to say that addiction strips you of choice. Eh. To a point. It's harder to say no to your drug/drink of choice. It's a drive and a desire most people don't understand. But it is still a choice. A hard choice. Sometimes what feels like an impossible choice, but a choice.

So reading this book, and all of the things Wally Lamb crammed into it I never could find any compassion for Corby. Mediocre white guy discovers racism while dealing with an addiction that is totally his father's fault. That's my end review.

Not at all what most people are probably going to take from the book.

All of that being said, it's beautifully written. Wally Lamb is a super talented, emotionally manipulative in all the best ways, writer. There is a flow to his stories that is almost poetic. But I have a really hard time finding compassion for addicts who continue to use. Sometimes I can. But most of the time I pull back and cut ties. And if you continue to blame everyone and everything else for why you use? Forget it.

And even when you get clean, and stay clean, and do all the right things, I'm not ever going to trust you. I might love you deeply. I might be a super supportive friend. But I'm not ever going to trust you. But to be fair, I don't trust easily, or much at all with anyone.

Generational trauma from being raised with and partially by an addict.

You bring your own baggage with you wherever you go.

Since I finished the book yesterday and I still can't stand Corby today, and I think I'll never recover from that first chapter, I'd have to say it's a really brilliant book, but his books usually are. Just know what you are getting in to. They are all a firehose of trauma, usually with a hopeful ending.

Which I guess this one had one as well, or what was supposed to be one, I'm just not sure that the disasters that were left in Corby's wake will be neatly cleaned up the way Lamb wants me to think it will.

My own baggage says no.