Satisfying and engrossing

Wally Lamb, author of the blockbuster novel She's Come Undone, returns after an 11-year hiatus with We Are Water.

Ann Marie McQueen

It’s been a long time since Wally Lamb’s blockbuster novel She’s Come Undone shot him to the top of the bestseller lists and into Oprah’s Book Club territory (1992 to be exact). If he needed to take that kind of time to produce his latest meaty work, the sprawling We Are Water, well, it was worth the wait.

Lamb’s exploration of the troubled Oh and O’Day clans – intersected with subplots tackling 1960s-era racism and the fickle art world – is both satisfying and engrossing. When Annie Oh discovers she is a sought-after artist, not just a mother of three dabbling at a hobby, the result is a family split wide open – revealing the hideous nature of long-held deception masking deep-seated pain.

There are issues with the book: Lamb tries a little too hard to seem modern by injecting real-life happenings into the story where they don’t always fit; there is a slight problem with his dialogue, which at times simply does not ring true and some fairly graphic passages in the voice of a paedophile character are hard to take.

But for anyone who first fell in love with Lamb’s prose more than 20 years ago and wonders if he has still got it, the answer is a resounding yes.