T A B L E+T A L K What books have you simply found -- left behind at the beach, in hotel rooms, on park benches by someone else? Share your discoveries in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing By Ved Mehta Nonfiction (05/22/98) A Monk Swimming By Malachy McCourt Nonfiction (05/21/98) Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea By Gary Kinder Nonfiction (05/20/98) The Unfinished Presidency By Douglas Brinkley Nonfiction (05/19/98) Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton By Diane Wood Middlebrook Nonfiction (05/18/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer F E A T U R E Sentimental journey By Vince Passaro Shakespeare of the American West		_________i KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE BY WALLY LAMB REGANBOOKS FICTION 912 PAGES BY JOYCE HACKETT | Within Wally Lamb's second book, "I Know This Much Is True," there's a fine novel shouting to get out. Narrated by an identical twin, the book recounts Dominick Birdsey's hard journey to come to terms with the paranoid schizophrenia of his brother Thomas, and his own helplessness in the face of it. Through the twins' aggressive attempts to wrench themselves into polar opposites, Lamb movingly explores their fears of becoming each other, and of being unable to live without each other. But Dominick's sorrow at the loss of a brother he can't control or save drowns in a wash of resentment and melodrama. It's a novel of too little style and too much substance. Lamb's strong first novel, "She's Come Undone," depicted with comedic force the anger of an overweight woman who also survives myriad slings and arrows to find forgiveness and grace. Dolores Price's voice remained sympathetic because her repulsion toward her world was coupled with strong desire. But Dominick is steeped in resentment, and spews from above. His voice doesn't sparkle, not even with the kind of Beavis-and-Butt-head stupidity that would ironically connect him to the objects of his critique. As a result, there's little sense of scale. The SIDS death of his daughter, his divorce and subsequent breakdown, the violent guards in his brother's mental institution, his 23-year-old aerobics teacher girlfriend's affair with her bisexual stepuncle -- all seem to get the same withering treatment as his girlfriend's refusal to reclose the saltines wrapper. Like many first-person novels, "I Know This Much Is True" suffers from the flaws of its narrator, who curates his own museum of misery. Eventually Dominick crashes his car, falls from a 30-foot ladder, gets into therapy and realizes the limits of his power. But by the time his therapist/anthropologist diagnoses Dominick as a typical Repressed-and-Angry American Male, and points out how he's numbing himself with his incessant cataloging of insults and injuries, Lamb has battered the reader with a plot out of Soap Opera Digest. That Thomas saws off his own hand to protest the Gulf War is only the beginning: besides countless episodes of their stepfather's gruesome abuses, Dominick recounts date-raping his future wife and participating in the racist frame-up of a co-worker (who turns out to have been exploited for years by a homosexual child pornographer). The medley of issues surveyed in "I Know This Much Is True" includes an AIDS death, incest, suicide, amputation, Native American casino rights and mental illness policies; we even slog through transcripts of Thomas' paranoiac conspiracy theories. And Dominick's paternity search gives Lamb the occasion to saddle us -- incest again looming -- with the lengthy memoirs of his Sicilian grandfather, whose frigid wife and her evil-witch companion turn out to have been adolescent murderers. Perhaps sweeping male anger is less fresh than its female equivalent. Or perhaps this 912-page tome simply needed an editor bold enough to persuade a talented novelist whose first book sold 3 million copies (thanks in large part to Oprah Winfrey's benediction) to trim the fat from the meat of its melodrama. "I Know This Much Is True" takes on too much to allow Dominick's losses the terrible specificity of universal tragedy. Nor does Lamb's vision ever expand into the kind of wider Swiftian satire that would have enabled him to take the entire world to task. SALON | May 26, 1998 Joyce Hackett is a novelist and book editor. She teaches literature and creative writing at New York University.