Book Review: She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

Warning: this review contains spoilers

Nineteen years after its release, and fourteen years since Oprah chose it as one of her book club titles, I finally read She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb.

I read Lamb's novel I Know This Much Is True years ago and have always considered it among my all time favorites.  Thus, my expectations for She's Come Undone were very high.  I'm glad to say I was not disappointed.

I read She's Come Undone in a week.  It's a fairly sizable book, clocking in at 465 pages in the trade paperback edition.  I never lost interest and found myself grabbing the book to read during spare moments, like the five minutes between packing my lunch and leaving for work.

She's Come Undone is told in the first person, from the point of view of Dolores Price.  We follow her from the age of four, when she believes her life started with the delivery of her family's television set, to the age of forty, when she finally attains some semblance of a "normal," contented life.  Along the way, she undergoes one tragedy after another, including her parents' divorce, her mother's nervous breakdown and hospitalization, and a horrific rape when she is only thirteen years old.  These events cause her to eat herself into oblivion, and when she finally leaves home for college, she weighs more than 250 pounds.

If you think She's Come Undone sounds a bit like a soap opera, well, I can't say that it doesn't play out like one.  And the soaps are actually mentioned numerous times, because Dolores watches many of them over the years, from "Love Of Life" and "Search For Tomorrow" right up through "As The World Turns" and "Days Of Our Lives."  Much like food, television is her addiction, and she wastes away hours of her life in front of the tube.

Two things save this novel from dissolving into melodramatic histrionics: Lamb's effortless and appealing writing style, and Dolores Price herself.  She is a self-effacing, observant, world-weary, and often hilarious character, and you'll probably never forget her.  At least, most of the people I know who read the book during its 1997 heyday seem to remember her fondly all these years later.

Dolores absolutely deserves our pity, because all of the tragedies leading up to her obesity and unhealthy lifestyle are completely out of her hands.  Later in life, she briefly contemplates the existence of God and the cruel tricks of the universe.  She justifies most of her actions by reflecting on the blows she suffered, but she never panders for our sympathy.  It's a testament to Lamb's skills as a writer that we feel for her and root for her in spite of the soap opera plot.

In the early chapters of the book, when Dolores's parents are having their marital troubles, we watch her fawn over her father while often seeming exasperated by her mother.  She is disrespectful and outright rude to her mother.  This bothered me at times, because her mother didn't deserve the treatment she received from her cheating husband.  However, Dolores's worshiping of her father does seem very realistic, as does the fury she brings down on him after he abandons them.  She turns on him completely, and years later at her mother's funeral, she blows up at her dad in one of the most emotional passages of the book.

Bernice Price, Dolores's mother, emerges as a likable, strong character who tries to do right by her daughter in spite of not having an easy time of things herself.  She dies fairly early in the book, and this lays the groundwork for Dolores's emotional growth throughout the rest of the novel.  In the years following Ma's death, Dolores realizes that her father wasn't as great as she thought he was, and that her mother wasn't as bad as she made her out to be.  During her therapy sessions with Dr. Shaw (she suffers a breakdown and is hospitalized for years), Dolores addresses her residual feelings of anger and abandonment toward her deceased mother, but she is also able to forgive her and to finally express her love for her.  During the final stretch of the book, Dolores regularly reflects on Ma, and it's poignant in a very real way, mainly because we've taken an emotional journey with her.

I've hardly scratched the surface of the plot points in this book.  There is a tumultuous marriage, an abortion, an odd encounter with a whale, and a cast of memorable supporting characters.  Among the best of these are Dolores's religious grandmother; Larry the wallpaper guy and his wife Ruth (who resurface in a clever way at the end of the book); and Roberta, the neighbor who owns a tattoo parlor and comes back in to Dolores's life years later.  Also, Mr. Pucci, her high school guidance counselor and "pal," to whom she repays kindness in a very big way in the last chapters of the book.

Because She's Come Undone charts the course of forty years in one woman's life, we see a lot of American history unfold.  Lamb does a great job painting distinct eras, mentioning songs and television shows and fashion styles that were popular at any given point in Dolores's life, weaving them in to the fabric of the story so that we watch a country change along with the protagonist living in it.  During the final stretch of the novel, which takes place in the mid-80s, Lamb addresses the AIDS epidemic via the character of Mr. Pucci.  This segment works well and manages never to seem heavy handed, at least not to this reader.

I liked a lot of things about She's Come Undone, including the setting, the passage of time, the plot, and the supporting characters.  I really enjoy Wally Lamb's writing style.  He walks that line between commercial and literary fiction, and I think he walks it very well.  Most of all, though, I loved the character of Dolores Price, surely one of the most memorable heroines in this great era of modern fiction.