Oscar winner Melissa Leo, as Dominick and Thomas’ mother, is truly wasted in a tiny part. It wouldn’t be undeserved, but one wishes that the miniseries focused less on his characters and gave the other actors a bit more to do.

Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo does a fine job in the challenging dual role of Dominick and Thomas-helped along by impressive special effects-and one can easily imagine the actor seeing an Emmy (or Emmys?) in his future when he signed onto the project. The HBO adaptation, ably directed by The Place Beyond the Pines’ Derek Cianfrance, gives the novel a prestige-TV treatment, and it’s largely faithful to Lamb’s vision, such as it is. But many readers won’t, and, frankly, they shouldn’t. The book gives all kinds of disgusting behavior a pass for example, Dominick rapes Dessa when they’re still dating-a detail that’s notably missing from the miniseries version-and Lamb has Dessa forgive him. As a child, he accuses a Native American classmate of theft, knowing full well that it’s a lie, and faces absolutely no repercussions as a young man, he treats his mentally ill brother horribly and sees him as nothing but a burden in middle age, he effectively forgives his loathsome stepfather-a man who once broke Dominick’s mother’s arm. You’d think that Dominick would be a sympathetic character, given all that Lamb throws at him, but it turns out that he’s a pretty awful human being. One could almost call I Know This Much Is True an extended remix of that novel-and extended it is, at more than 900 pages in length. This won’t surprise anyone who’s familiar with Lamb’s 1992 debut novel, She’s Come Undone, which also put its players through many, many trials and tribulations it, too, featured mental illness, domestic abuse, divorce, self-harm, and more.

Indeed, it’s the grimmest soap opera imaginable-one with no sense of fun, and pretensions toward literary greatness. As Dominick observes, late in the book: “What a fucked-up universe.” Along the way, he reads the autobiography of his Italian immigrant grandfather, who, it turns out, was a horrible, evil person. Later, Dominick’s girlfriend, Joy, gets pregnant by another man, and Dominick himself is terribly injured in a pickup-truck accident and a fall off a roof. His saintly mother died of cancer, leaving him to take care of his identical twin brother, Thomas, who struggles with paranoid schizophrenia and self-destructive tendencies. He doesn’t know who his own father was, and his stepfather, Ray, was an abusive idiot. He lost his infant daughter, years ago, to sudden infant death syndrome his wife, Dessa, left him shortly afterward. The book’s narrator, Dominick Birdsey, has seen all manner of tragedy.

Author of i know this much is true