New book shows another side of Wally Lamb

Two people had the very same advice on the very same day for Wally Lamb: Write a Christmas story.

When Harper's publisher Jonathan Burnham e-mailed Lamb in January with the idea, the author shrugged it off. His reaction was simply, "Nah, that wouldn't be me. That's too corny."

Then, Barbara Dombrowski - a friend with whom Lamb was carpooling to Coast Guard Academy professor Faye Ringel's retirement party - brought up the same notion. Part of the catalyst for her suggestion was that his novels are so brooding, which is so different from who Lamb really is.

By the next day, the idea was percolating, and Lamb started riffling through a file he keeps of names he likes and might eventually use in a book.

One was Felix. He started playing word games.

"I came up with Felix Funicello, and I was off and running," he says.

The result is a Christmas novella called "Wishin' and Hopin': A Christmas Story," which will be released Tuesday by HarperCollins.

In all actuality, writing a funny and warmhearted book proved to be perfect timing for Lamb, who had just wrapped his novel "The Hour I First Believed," which dealt with, among other very serious subjects, the shootings at Columbine.

"The other book had taken almost 10 years, and the subject matter was sad and disturbing. There was a kind of hangover effect for me with that book," he says.

When he finished writing "The Hour I First Believed," he then headed out on a 26-city book tour. On that tour, he spoke with fans about everything covered in the novel - including in cities like Denver, where the Columbine tragedy still, understandably, strikes such a raw nerve.

"The combination of writing that book and having a long struggle with it and then going out on tour ... when I came back, I was sort of exhausted and, I think, needing to remind myself how funny life can be, that not every family is a dysfunctional family. My own family did pretty well by me.

"It was just nice to remind myself that to every yin, there's a yang," he says.

And, in a change of literal pace from his famously long-in-process novels, Lamb wrote "Wishin' and Hopin'" in four months.

The novella is set in 1964 Three Rivers, Connecticut, Lamb's fictional amalgamation of a few eastern Connecticut municipalities, and fifth grader Felix Funicello is trying to deal with, well, life.

"I'm not a big fan of melodramatic writing, but I am a big fan of nostalgia, and there's a little bit of my characteristic edge in this novel. It's very subtly played," Lamb says. "In Felix's world as a fifth grader in 1964, the world keeps whispering to him in ways he doesn't yet understand.

"I knew I wanted a kid who was both a little bit of a wiseguy and a cutup but who also has a naïveté. But he's sort of been less and less able to be in the world of innocence. Adult sexuality is knocking on the door, and he's confused by it. I kind of wanted the tone to balance innocence with the loss of innocence."

Felix Funicello - who is a distant cousin of '60s television idol Annette Funicello - goes to St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School, alongside the likes of perpetual apple-polisher Rosalie Twerski and mysterious Russian student Zhenya Kabakova.

For various aspects of the novella, Lamb pulled from what he remembers of that era. (Lamb, who nows lives in Mansfield, grew up in Norwich.) But he also called upon some rich anecdotes from friends. Bob Parzych's mother was one of the winners of the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1959, and he had great recall of the specifics of it all. Lamb asked Harry Mantzaris to reminisce about the lunch counter his family ran at the old New London bus station back in the 1950s. (Lamb says, "It was sort of like 'Cheers' without the beer.")

The author spent time watching videos of the time on YouTube and other sites. He's actually put together a collection of a dozen touchstone videos that relate to his book, and HarperCollins will post that on its website.

"Wishin' and Hopin'" is part of a two-book contract Lamb has with HarperCollins - a first for him.

"When the Oprah stuff turned my books into bestsellers, they wanted things like three-book contracts. Nope, that's not what I was interested in," he says.

He hadn't started the new novel while he was writing "Wishin' and Hopin'," but he's now in the research phase of one. One of the ways he constructs his novel is to make collisions happen - taking two disparate things and seeing what kind of electricity bounces back and forth between them.

"I haven't figured it out yet, but I do have two definite storylines that I'm playing with. I feel a little nervous saying too much about them, but they harken back to the East Coast area, certainly, based on real-life things but also things that I remember vividly," he says.

k.dorsey@theday.com