Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that's before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees his light and some of his fellow offenders, including a tender-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen desperate for a role model. Buoyed by them and by his mother's enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible. Can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves?
Pivots sharply from the domestic sphere — where it’s initially so dramatic — to prison, with all the limits that a penitentiary setting imposes ... amb doesn’t push very hard against the bars of what we already know from various movies and TV shows, and the plot sometimes stalls in the slough of Corby’s years-long sentence until orange is the new slack. Indeed, when Corby is denied early parole, I think I felt even more disappointed than he did ... We’re trapped in his mind. And he’s no King Lear. He simply doesn’t have — and never attains — the agonizing self-knowledge that would enable him to respond sufficiently to the existential quandary of this catastrophe ... To offer us catharsis, we need a narrator capable of drawing us beyond the limited prison palette of a grieving father’s sentimental mural into a truly astonishing vista of his sorrow and atonement.
All of this should make for a compelling saga, but the fly in the ointment is that Corby is a narcissistic character less concerned with the enormity of his transgression than with how he can return everything to normal ... I have no doubt that Lamb worked hard to faithfully reflect what he’s gleaned about prison life, and has great sympathy for his character’s plights. Yet much of what occurs feels cliched, as does much of the language and dialogue ... Is more than 400 pages long, yet the ending feels like an afterthought, wrapping up loose ends without satisfying the reader. To reveal Corby’s fate would be a spoiler, but what disappointed me was the absence of an authentic epiphany; I was left feeling I’d spent years with a man who never truly reckoned with his regrets or learned from his mistakes.
Back-and-forthing makes Corby tiresome and unlikable. I feel little sympathy for him, nor do I particularly root for him. Other characters are more intriguing ... What I haven’t decided is whether Corby is unlikable by design ... But if Corby’s unlikability is by design, and certainly Lamb is a writer who has earned the benefit of the doubt, then what to make of The River Is Waiting? ... What Lamb seems to have done is written the equivalent of one of those optical illusion drawings: Look at it one way and it’s a vase; another way, it’s two faces. In other words, you get to be the judge. For me, the jury is still out.
