Religion

MINNEAPOLIS — Wally Lamb's new novel, 450,000 copies of which have just arrived in bookstores, is big enough to threaten Thanksgiving and maybe even Christmas, as readers ignore turkey basting and tinsel tossing to turn the 723 wide-ranging, heavily plotted pages of The Hour I First Believed.

Lamb writes big books. And popular ones. Oprah Winfrey famously pulled an all-nighter reading Lamb's first novel, She's Come Undone, the painful, funny coming-of-age saga of Dolores Price. She later included its paperback version and Lamb's 900-page second novel, I Know This Much Is True, in her Book Club, a bestowal that invariably sends the anointed novel on a rocket ride.

Lamb's millions of fans have been on a starvation diet since 1998, when his second novel was published.

"It's not like I've been goofing off or anything," Lamb said with a laugh when asked about the long gestation of his new book, which he delivered to his publisher about four years past deadline. "The story takes as long as it takes. It comes to me very slowly."

In the decade between novels two and three, both of Lamb's parents died after long declines. He and his wife, Christine, had three sons at home, including a special-needs boy they adopted at age 4 to remove him from a perilous family situation. And Lamb became very involved with a volunteer job running a writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, Connecticut's only maximum-security prison for women. Despite a political dustup with the Connecticut attorney general (the subject of an eventual "60 Minutes" report), two anthologies of the women's works, with introductions by Lamb, eventually were published.

The outside world was no less full of big events, from the Columbine High School shootings to the 9/11 terrorist attack to the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, all of which ended up playing a role in "The Hour I First Believed."

Although there are dozens of characters in Lamb's new novel, it has at its center the cranky and disconnected Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen. Their marriage splinters over an infidelity. Seeking a new start, they move from Connecticut to Colorado. Caelum, a teacher, and Maureen, a nurse, each get jobs at Columbine High School. When Caelum is away, Maureen witnesses the 1999 rampage of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that left 15 dead and many more injured.

Beset by post-traumatic stress disorder, Maureen sinks into depression and addiction, and the two move back to the Connecticut farm where Caelum grew up. But Maureen ends up in a women's prison (founded by one of Caelum's ancestors). Caelum takes in two refugees from Katrina, and finds a teaching job where one of his students is a maimed and deeply troubled Iraq war veteran.

Deciding to graft an actual event, including the names of the Columbine victims, into his fictional account, was tricky. But, Lamb said, "I felt that as a high school teacher for 25 years I could put myself in those corridors and empathize."

Then there is the topic, somewhat unfashionable in contemporary literature, of belief. Readers who expect a novel with this title to be centered on religion will be disappointed at how little there is about church and faith.

"I'm certainly not talking about organized religion," Lamb said. "It's more about how Caelum holds out the possibility for hope," even amid the considerable chaos and heartbreak of his life and marriage: "What exactly did he believe?"

Raised in a big Italian Catholic family, Lamb said that while he still goes to church occasionally, he considers himself "a questioning Catholic, more attuned to the social-justice aspects of the church.

"I'm being purposely ambiguous," Lamb added with his trademark modest smile. "All I'm saying at the end is that God may only be in the forward propulsion of life, in the invisible pull of our ancestors, who may be affecting our lives in ways we may never know."