The River Is Waiting is the highly anticipated new novel from bestselling author Wally Lamb, whose emotionally powerful novels She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True were both Oprah’s Book Club selections back in the 1990s. 

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Between the loss of his job, the demands of being a stay-at-home father to toddler twins, and the slow erosion of his marriage, Corby Ledbetter sees nothing wrong with fueling his days with a little help from Captain Morgan and a secret benzo addiction – until a terrible decision shatters his family and sends him to prison. While incarcerated, Corby explores mercy, redemption, and forgiveness through the people meets on the inside.

The premise of The River Is Waiting is truly devastating, so I expected Corby to spend vast amounts of the book mired in grief, guilt, and self-recrimination. Instead, he seems more preoccupied with how he’ll endure his prison term and whether his relationship with his family will survive. While he has moments of heartwrenching remorse, these surface only briefly before he redirects his thoughts to the practicalities of his sentence or the drama around a younger inmate he’s tasked with looking out for. He witnesses and experiences brutal violence and expends a lot of energy trying to fight the powers that be. I kept wishing he would expend that energy on his own rehabilitation and emotional journey. Despite his own terrible choices, Corby maintains a sense of moral superiority, and I found him hard to root for.

Wally Lamb wrote this book from experience, not just with his own addiction but from exposure to prison settings. He was a writing teacher at a women’s prison for many years, and had a son in prison who was also an addict. Still, the prison environment seems a bit cliched; there are all the cruel guards, racial tension, and bad food that you’d see in a prison show on TV. Even the commentary on racial justice and mass incarceration, while well-intentioned, comes across a bit preachy and performative.

Interestingly, while The River Is Waiting has rave reader reviews on GoodReads and Amazon, it wasn’t a hit with the critics. The book has some lovely touches of humanity, complex themes, an excruciatingly tense opening chapter, and a doozy of an ending. It could have been great if the author had gone deep into the abyss of grief, guilt, and redemption, but instead I felt that he peered at it from a safe distance, so it never really landed emotionally for me. 

Want to explore the book’s themes of grief, forgiveness, and redemption? Watch Oprah’s interview with Wally Lamb below or directly on YouTube.