We Are Water by Wally Lamb (review)

Wally Lamb combines complex characters and an intricate plot with an array of contemporary topics and timeless issues to produce this engrossing novel.  A wife and mother leaves her family to pursue an artistic career and an unconventional relationship.  A husband and father abruptly abandons his longtime profession as a psychologist.  Their children wonder at these transformations but hide secrets of their own.  As the plot develops and the narrative shifts among characters, secrets are revealed and motives become clear to the reader.  But even as the individual characters reach out to each other and achieve ostensible connections, secrets linger.  In the end, each remains an enigma, known only incompletely by the others.  Essentially, Lamb has addressed the longstanding question of whether anyone can really know the truth of another person, and the answer is a resounding “no.”