It's a tribute to Lamb's considerable gifts that we wind up feeling sorry for this obnoxious patriarch, even as we loathe him. The bombastic, self-aggrandizing ''History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man From Humble Beginnings'' begins two-thirds of the way through a novel that is already full to bursting with calamitousĪctivity, appearing just when Dominick has hit bottom. The memoir is lost, then found, thenĮventually shared with the reader in its entirety. Also running through the story is Dominick's quest to get a translation of the memoir written by his Sicilian grandfather (and namesake) as a present for his dying mother. Who works at the local health club and whose life is a mess, even by Dominick's liberal standards. Meanwhile, Dominick has been trying to put other parts of his unhappy past to rest - by getting over his divorce from Dessa, the woman he still loves, and sorting things out with Joy, his current live-in girlfriend, a perky, twice-divorced 25-year-old 'Do you think a few stitches are going to keep me fromĭoing what I have to do? I have a pact with the Lord God Almighty' '' - Thomas is transferred from the state hospital to a maximum-security forensic institute that ''houses most of the front-page boys: the vetįrom Mystic who mistook his family for the Vietcong, the kid at Wesleyan who brought his. After Dominick decides on Thomas's behalf not to have his hand reattached - '' 'I'll just rip it off again,' my brother warned. In his struggle to do right by Thomas, the brother he loves, resents and envies in equal measure, he is forced to face not just his own demons but the entire cavalcade of nightmares that have bedeviled What follows is the 40-year-old Dominick's meltdown. God and government conspiracy, Thomas goes into the public library one morning during the early rumblings of Desert Storm and cuts off his hand in a biblically inspired protest against the impending war. A paranoid schizophrenic with the usual obsessive interest in alien life-forms, Communism,

His identical twin brother, the gentle Thomas, has lost his mind.

Lamb's narrator, Dominick Birdsey, has lost his mother, his wife, his infant daughter, his career. Characters have lost love, faith and hope, not to mention hands, legs, thumbs, even lips. N this follow-up novel to Wally Lamb's Oprah- sanctioned best seller, ''She's Come Undone,'' everyone is bereft, in realms both seen and Between them, the twins in Wally Lamb's novel have lost wife, child, hand and mind.

Author of i know this much is true