Patty Rhule

Special for USA TODAY

Wally Lamb’s new novel, I’ll Take You There (Harper, 272 pp., ** out of four stars), has a hokey plot and a setup that should carry a warning label: Baby boomer nostalgia alert.

It arrives Thanksgiving week with an app version from Metabook for the iPhone and iPad that includes an audio dramatization, soundtrack, film clips and 360-degree gallery.

High-tech enhancements aside, this book is overstuffed with clichéd characters who can’t compare with the heroine of his stunning first novel, She’s Come Undone, or even those of his more recent We Are Water.

Felix Funicello — making a return appearance from Lamb’s 2009 Wishin’ and Hopin' — is a film professor (and cousin to Mouseketeer Annette, see above warning) who hosts a weekly film club at an aging theater in fictional Three Rivers, Conn.

As he's setting up for film club one night, two ghosts appear to Felix, one of them the groundbreaking silent film director Lois Weber, voiced in the app by actress Kathleen Turner. After dropping gossipy innuendoes about the sex lives of classic Hollywood film stars, Lois leaves Felix a stack of film reels of his life to explore because Lois thinks he is “educable.”

This is curious. On the spectrum of men who could use a crash course in sensitivity about women, Felix doesn’t come close to say, the president-elect. Felix is amicably divorced from a fairly humorless women’s study professor (couldn’t the estimable Lamb conjure a funny feminist?) and proud father of Aliza, a Gen Y blogger and writer for New York magazine.

Through Lois’s film reels, Felix relives flashbacks of growing up in the 1950s and ’60s as the youngest and only boy of hardworking Italian-American parents, with his tormenting older sisters Simone and Frances. Felix revisits his life as a Catholic schoolboy and the anguish in his household over his sister Frances’s struggle with her body and psyche. A side plot about the Miss Rheingold beer beauty contest weaves past and present characters together.

Lamb is a writer with heart, passion and skill. I’ll Take You There deals with familiar themes of feminism, eating disorders and family secrets, and winds up with a warmhearted finale. I know this much is true: It’s not one of Lamb’s more memorable journeys.