The River Is Waiting
The River Is Waiting
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Wally Lamb on The River Is Waiting
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A folktale, a news story, and a borrowed HondaEvery Lamb novel begins with ancient stories, and this one anchored itself in a Mexican folktale about a mother who drowns her own children. The folktale gave him a mythic spine for a contemporary tragedy: a father who causes his toddler son’s death in a backover accident and must find a way to go on living.
In 2018, I discovered a Mexican folktale called ‘The Weeping Woman.’ It’s about a ghost who wanders near bodies of water, mourning the loss of her children whom she has drowned. The River Is Waiting goes far afield from that story but it, too, is about a parent who mourns a child for whose death he is responsible and who goes to the river to seek his truths.
The folktale gave Lamb his theme; a newspaper article made it personal. When he read about backover accidents, his son Jared was living in New Orleans with a toddler and a newborn, driving an older car without a backup camera. Lamb flew Jared to Connecticut, gave him his own six-month-old Honda, then drove to the dealership and bought a replacement for himself. He has said he often writes about what frightens him most. [paraphrased from audio]
I wrestled with my own drinking, which had become alcoholic, when I was in my 50s. Some of [Corby’s patterns], I’m sorry to say, some of those were my own patterns. I drank, usually at night, quietly. I didn’t go to bars or anything. And so, as my problem increased, some of that sneakiness, that was part of my behavior, too.
The accident fear and the addiction fear were separate triggers that converged in the same character. Corby’s drinking is not a symbol of grief; it predates the tragedy, which is part of what makes his culpability so hard to sort out.
The political anger driving the prison storyline did not arrive with this book. Lamb traces it to his undergraduate years, and the novel became a place to act on it rather than simply carry it.
I think this goes way back to my coming of age in the 1960s... That lit fire in me, and the fire has never gone out.
How he wrote it
No outline, a borrowed calendar system, and one editor’s hard callLamb spent his early drafting not on plot but on biography, writing Corby and Emily’s backstory from 2005 through 2013 before the novel’s structure existed. That unpublished material never reached readers, but it changed what he knew about his protagonist.
I wasn’t thinking about a readership during this process; I was writing for myself so that I could understand Corby on a deeper level.
The chapter-by-chapter day count of Corby’s sentence came from something Lamb observed over two decades in the women’s prison where he ran a writing workshop: incarcerated women tracked their sentences on wall calendars fixed with toothpaste because scotch tape is not sold in the commissary. About halfway through his first draft, he realized he had grown vague about elapsed time, and that detail solved the problem. [paraphrased from audio]
Marysue urged me to tell the story from a single viewpoint, Corby’s, and let us know Emily through his eyes. That went a long way toward focusing and improving what I had drafted. Throughout our work together, Marysue’s feedback was rigorous and invaluable. She helped me to write a much better book.
The title came not from a structural decision but from a song he couldn’t stop hearing. Irma Thomas’s version of the John Fogerty song ‘The River Is Waiting’ kept returning to him until he understood it as the novel’s name. That recognition left two questions he had not yet answered.
‘The River Is Waiting’ is a song I first heard sung by New Orleans’s soul queen, Irma Thomas. I later learned it was written and recorded by John Fogerty. The song kept playing in my head until I realized on a conscious level that that would be the title of my then story in progress. That left me with two questions I needed to answer: who or what was the river waiting for and why?
Making Corby a commercial artist who rediscovers his instincts through a prison mural was not simply a narrative device. Lamb himself entered college planning to major in art before literature redirected him, and the mural gave him a way to write about a creative life interrupted.
When I was a kid, I loved to draw. I wrote and illustrated my own comic books... In high school I was voted ‘Class Artist’ and entered college planning to major in art. Then I fell in love with literature and swerved in a different direction... Drawing and fiction writing drink from the same well.
The personal thread
Visiting his son, recognizing himself in CorbyLamb’s twenty years facilitating a writing workshop at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut gave him the institutional detail for the novel’s prison scenes. What it could not give him was the experience of sitting in a waiting room as a visitor. That came from something closer.
I don’t want to say too much because he should have his privacy too, but I will say that he followed in his birth parents’ pattern in terms of drug addiction, and he began to find illegal ways to get the money to fuel that. He ended up in prison, and I used to visit him.
On those visits, Lamb noticed that the waiting rooms were almost entirely women: grandmothers, girlfriends, mothers. That observation moved directly into the novel as one of Corby’s own realizations about who carries the weight of incarceration on the outside.
Getting sober did more than stop the drinking. Lamb had spent years paralyzed between two Oprah Book Club successes, caring for aging parents, and absorbing the fallout from his adopted son’s troubles. Sobriety changed his relationship to the writing itself.
I stopped being so scared to write. I was able to open my office door and shoo out everyone else’s expectations and reconnect to the joy of writing.
Corby’s fear of being seen, his inability to name what is happening inside him, is not simply a character flaw Lamb invented. It points to something Lamb sees as a pattern with a specific shape.
So many of men’s problems come down to fear. It’s not that women don’t live with fear, but that they can more easily voice that fear.
On what’s at stake
Power, powerlessness, and what prison hidesWriting the book converted Lamb’s politics from a general discomfort with injustice into something more purposeful. He describes the change as learning to invest his anger rather than stand apart from it. [paraphrased from audio]
He said he learned to invest his anger in social injustice rather than merely disapproving of it, and described the novel’s central concern as being about power and powerlessness, specifically the abuse of power. [paraphrased from audio]
For readers who have never been inside a prison or known someone who has, the novel is partly an act of reportage. Lamb has spent more time in correctional facilities than most novelists, and he wrote Corby’s experience with that accumulated knowledge in mind.
Perhaps Corby’s story lends some transparency to life behind the prison walls, particularly for those unfamiliar with the challenges of this existence.
Forgiveness is the novel’s emotional center, but Lamb refuses to make it feel available or easy. He distinguishes between sincere amends and the performance of remorse.
It has to be something that’s deep within you – that when you seek forgiveness and when you make amends – you better be sincere about it, or else, it’s just, you know, empty verbiage.
What he wants us to sit with
Anger, light through cracks, and a hand on a painted wallLamb is specific about what he wants from readers who have been watching injustice from a comfortable distance. He is not asking for sympathy or understanding in the abstract.
If I had to hope for one thing, it would be that readers might get angry, too, if they’ve been complacent, but they might get angry at the abuse of power against the powerless.
Corby does not arrive at redemption cleanly. Lamb frames the arc with a line from Leonard Cohen that he has returned to repeatedly in interviews, and its weight depends on the word ‘slow.’
It’s credited to the singer and poet Leonard Cohen, but I love that quote, ‘We’re all cracked. That’s how the light comes in.’ And that’s kind of what I see is happening with Corby. It’s a slow process.
The novel’s final scene, in which surviving twin Maisie reaches up to touch the painted image of her dead brother in Corby’s prison mural and says ‘Hello, boy,’ arrived unplanned. Lamb has said it came to him fully formed and moved him to tears. It is the crack the light enters through, and he did not engineer it.
Once the book was published, Lamb released his hold on its meaning. That is not false modesty. He sees the transfer of ownership as built into what fiction is for.
When I’m writing the book, it’s mine, and then when it’s published, and it goes out into the world, it’s not mine anymore. It becomes the readers’ book. And they’re entitled to feel about the book, or about the meaning or about the ending, whatever they choose to.