In his introduction to this book, Eugene England describes Joregensen’s fiction as “meticulously-crafted.” This seems like  a good spot to begin discussing ”Born of the Water.”

The story is loaded. It would take us months to tap it of all its symbolic potential. It’s structure is surprisingly complicated without ever seeming at all disjointed or forced or confused. The way it connects generations and deaths and baptisms and resurrections is frankly stunning, but—as I realize I’ve just scheduled this post to go live on my father’s birthday—I think I’ll focus on the father-son relationships.

There are several. The primary one is between the protagonist and his father, but there are relationships between other sons and that father, that father and his own father; that father’s father makes a brief appearance; add to that the relationship of a Father Heavenly to any of the other characters, and potential surrogate fathers, and we have a complicated web of nurturing male relationships.

But, at least on the surface, the primary relationship never ceases to be the protagonist and his father.

The protagonist son was traumatized in a swimming pool at a young age by . . . someone . . . only to be rescued by his father. ““It’s all right, Carlie, I’m here. He’s gone. It’s all right.” That experience led to a fear of water, which prevents him from being baptized at age eight. His father, who, from his own age of eight has been refusing to be baptized and who declares a greater affinity for earth than water, gradually teaches his son to swim and not to fear the water. Which leads to Carlie’s baptism at age ten. A move his father inadvertently prepared him for, and, ultimately, serves as a symbolic separation between them.

Yet as the son experiences the sublimity of his new relationship with a different Father, his earthly father interrupts his musings to take him to the mountains to check on his hired sheepherder and his sheep.

(Herding sheep, of course, is socially less in the West than herding cattle, but Carlie’s father “wasn’t a cowboy but a sheepherder” (as was his father before him). And, after all, wasn’t that other shepherd despised and rejected of men as well?)

At the camp, waiting for the sheepherder and the dogs to return, father invites son to help kill and clean a sheep—a task he’d always been able to avoid before—and, having finished,

What surprised him was his father’s face, that it was without revulsion yet without pleasure too, except the satisfaction of having done the thing neatly, the same as when he oiled some kid’s squeaky tricycle or got the water regulated in all the furrows of the garden. What surprised him more was himself, that he too felt this a matter of fact, a kind of work, new, but after the first startling slash of the knife just something to see and do. But it was death and it would feed them.

They eat the yearling lamb and are filled.

The story does not end there, and the two grow closer and closer till they stand together on the edge of the world, take it all in, and declare it good.

The story has much more to offer. Go, return, report.

I must admit I would find it difficult to talk badly about this story if it deserved it (it doesn’t) as Karen is a friend of mine and, arguably, a large part of the reason life has resulted in me doing story-by-story reviews of a two-decade-old Mormon-short-story collection.

After graduating from BYU I joined the AML-List and took a menial job. With my brain untaxed at work, I aimed my thinking at the AML-List. Which ignored me. Sometimes the email I rewrote three times couldn’t get past the moderators because the day’s volume had already been capped off with a pair of three-sentence witticisms from Richard Dutcher; but I kept trying to get attention, jumping and waving my arms from the back of the room.

Anyway, fastforward a couple years and Karen Rosenbaum, then fiction editor at Dialogue, picked up my short story “The Widower,” and edited it to a new level of excellence. This was an important learning experience for me; plus, it let me feel that maybe the world of Mormon letters had a place for me after all.

Karen was friends with Eugene England and he approached her to write fiction for Dialogue in its early days. The second piece of fiction Dialogue published was one of Karen’s stories and she’s been a staple on the scene ever since. This particular story was published by Dialogue in 1978 and received an honorable mention in short fiction at the AML Awards that year.

The voice is extremely conversational—to the point many details are utterly lost as the speaker clearly assumes you can see what she sees and that you know what she knows. I was worried about this at first, but in the end it proved a sensible choice. The story is very meta (the protagonist is grading creative-writing assignments throughout, to say nothing of the final paragraph or the early discussion of cliches reflected in the title), signaling which tropes could have filled in the gaps had such filling been necessary.

The story might also be somewhat autobiographical (Karen’s husband is named Ben, though I don’t know if they were married in 1978; Karen taught college-level creative writing, though I don’t know if was doing so in 1978), but this too just serves to suggest ways to fill in gaps that don’t need to be filled.

But I was not certain what was going on in those gaps until the story ended unexpectedly and all that was left was for me to smile and say aloud, in genuine surprise, that was just right.

It’s short. Check it out.

1. Relatively spoiler-free backcopy.

“To Jordan Fairchild, the dark-haired girl renting his basement apartment seems somewhat quiet and reclusive. Just a business arrangement, he thinks, as he watches her sign the name ‘Nattie Hand’ on the contract. Though two thousand miles away, Celeste Betancourt, an attractive Georgetown graduate student he met through a mutual friend, has captured his attention. A budding friendship with Nattie soon begins to bloom. Little does Jordan know his girl-next-door renter is none other than the world-famous pop star, a.k.a. Natalia Antonali, who recently disappeared from the public eye; little does he know how much his friendship will come to mean to her, how, for the first time a love begins to grow, untainted by ‘Natalia,’ and how she hopes Jordan never discovers the truth.”

2. Why there aren’t really any spoilers up there

Across a Harvested Field is told from Jordan’s p-o-v—mostly. In fact, although the book never egregiously violated his point of view, the selection of details does not always match what he would focus on. Result? The fact that Natalia and Nattie are the same person is evident to the reader almost immediately—yet Jordan doesn’t figure it out for . . . well, a long time. At first, you might want to call him what romance fans label TSTL. But that thought is always followed by the simple fact that a real person with an incognito celebrity living in his basement is unlikely to assume that the face on the tabloid is the same one downstairs.

Ever met someone famous? Ever noticed how, IRL, they are surprisingly lifesized?

They don’t live in my basement.

They wouldn’t fit in my basement.

3. So does it obey any rules of romance?

Or, better question, is it a romance?

Yes. Clearly. (Slight but utterly unsurprising spoiler in next paragraph.)

It has a happy ending, as is necessary, but which happy ending it will provide is unclear for a long time and, for a while, whether it will provide a happy ending (in terms of a satisfying romantic relationship) at all is unclear.

And in the end, I’m not sure the “happy ending” is really what Across a Harvested Field is about anyway. I realized this when I read the Marilyn Brown Novel Award citation by Jen Wahlquist; she describes the book as being about ”the multi-layered process of grieving.”

And that’s exactly right.

4. So Jordan’s sad?

Heck yes he’s sad! His wife and two kids were killed in a car crash last year! He’s 28 and living alone in the house he planned to entertain grandkids in! How could he not be sad?

Writing about sadness is tough though. And it takes a while for Goble to find his feet. But again, like the TSTL issue, when I stopped to figure out what was “wrong” with his telling, nothing was. Life doesn’t stop when your family dies. What’s the right way to depict this liminal space between living and utter grief? I don’t know. And if I did, who’s to say Jordan’s grief observance should match mine?

That said, I think Goble didn’t quite pull off that transitional grief during the first half of the book. He gets better as the novel proceeds, however, and the “the multi-layered process of grieving” he displays is, in the final analysis, very well done.

5. Favorite moments

Although it can’t really count as enjoyable, I was impressed with how much Goble could make me hate—with a painful immediacy—the paparazzi.

But unquestionably my favorite part—the part that nearly brought me to tears with how lovely it is—is Jordan’s wrestling match with his brother. You doubt me? Read the book. You’ll see what I mean. That is a beautiful, cathartic scene. And one of the best two pages of brotherly love I can cite.

Also, one kiss in the book is so exactly what an honest kiss between two affection-starved humans should be. It certainly sped my heartrate up.

The high school stuff. Sure, in part that’s because I work at a high school, and, admittedly, some details were off (how Ashleigh and Diego arrived in the same Spanish class is beyond me), but that’s basically what working at a high school is like. It’s a lot of good, a lot of bad, a certain amount of politically keeping certain girls on one side of your desk.

6. Final notes

This book has an unnecessarily large number of developed characters. The most obvious example is the high school’s astonishingly well educated janitor. His character never really goes anywhere (is he a monomythic wise-old-man? some other useful symbol?) yet he is complicated and opaque. I appreciate notes like that in my fiction.

And, finally, it is a romance. Don’t let the plot’s coulds and couldn’ts get in the way of enjoying a great human story of love and creation.

Well worth a read.

.

read wm’s interview with goble

Title: The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version
Editors: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Scripture
Year Published: 2011
Number of Pages: 637
Binding: Hardbound in signatures
ISBN13: 978-0-19-529770-6
Price: $35

In II Nephi 29 Nephi pauses in the midst of an apostrophe to future readers who will reject his words to remind them of their debt to the Jews.

4 But thus saith the Lord God: O fools, they shall have a Bible; and it shall proceed forth from the Jews, mine ancient covenant people. And what thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them? Yea, what do the Gentiles mean? Do they remember the travails, and the labors, and the pains of the Jews, and their diligence unto me, in bringing forth salvation unto the Gentiles?
5 O ye Gentiles, have ye remembered the Jews, mine ancient covenant people? Nay; but ye have cursed them, and have hated them, and have not sought to recover them. But behold, I will return all these things upon your own heads; for I the Lord have not forgotten my people.
6 Thou fool, that shall say: A Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need no more Bible. Have ye obtained a Bible save it were by the Jews?

(2 Nephi 29:4 – 6)

Nephi’s connection between hating the Jews and closing the canon is deeply intriguing, especially since Nephi speaks harshly of the Jews, of their refusal to accept his father’s revelations, of their attempts to kill his father, so harshly that he refuses to teach his people “many things concerning the manner of the Jews; for their works were works of darkness, and their doings were doings of abominations” (II Nephi 25:2).

Perhaps Nephi wrote his words to the gentiles partly to remind himself–and maybe to remind Jacob, who had said the Savior would come to the Jews because he had to die and there was “none other nation on earth [so wicked] that [they] would crucify their God” (2 Nephi 10:3)–to tone down his rhetoric, to remind his people of the Lord’s covenant with the House of Israel, which is one thing Nephi means when he uses the term Jew: “I say Jew, because I mean them from whence I came” (2 Nephi 33:8).

(Taken together with I Nephi 5:14, where Lehi tells the family he has examined the brass plates and learned they are descendants of Joseph, this passage suggests Nephi came from a culture that didn’t distinguish between the tribes. Everyone is called Judah, the largest tribe that came back from Babylon. (Not every member of the 10 tribes was lost. See Philippians 3:5, Romans 11:1, and Acts 13:21). So when Nephi uses the term Jew he means the whole House of of Israel, everyone at Jerusalem.)

Browsing the remainder table at the BYU Bookstore one day I came across a book that helped fill in the picture of how developing and setting boundaries to the Christian canon was related to forgetting who preserved the word of God in the first place. The footnotes and commentary for Willis Barnstone’s translation The New Covenant, Vol I, The Gospels and Apocalypse, read like a guided tour of the rift that developed between Jews who accepted Yeshua as Mashiach and those who didn’t, a tour of how Christians forgot their Jewish roots as Yeshua ha maschiach became Iesous the Christos.

Barnstone is very careful to identify what he calls “the voice of Rome,” passages he believes came from a desire to de-emphasize Rome’s part in Yeshua’s execution. You can see clues of the threat the Romans felt from Yeshua in passages like Loukas 23:12, where Pilate and Herod find a common enemy in Yeshua, “Herod and Pilatus became friends on that same day, though earlier they had been enemies.” Maybe the clues are vestiges of things cut from the text, but Barnstone focuses more on things like the phrase “the Jews,” which along with the Greek _Iesous_ imply that Yeshua was not a Jew.

The Prushim and all the Jews will not eat unless they wash, hand against fist, so keeping the tradition of the elders, and eat nothing from the markets unless they wash. And they keep many other traditions about washing cups and pots and copper cauldrons.
(Markos 7:3)

His parents said these things because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed that Yeshua was the mashiah would be barred from the synagogue.
(Yohanan 9:22)

Or at least the passages distance us from Yeshua’s Jewishness. In the first passage the Jews are _they_, and in the second people to be afraid of. One of Barnstone’s projects with the translation is to restore Yeshua’s Jewish/Aramaic voice by using the Hebrew character and place names rather than Greek transl(iter)ations. That’s a valuable service, maybe as valuable as recovering the poetry. He says at one point that Yeshua as recorded by Mattai is one of the great world poets.

I think he overstates his argument at times. Consider this comment on Yohanan 9:28, the Prushim’s words to the man born blind:

And they reviled him and said, “You are his student, but we are Mosheh’s students.

“A reference to the superiority of Yeshua’s teaching over that of Moses and, by extension, of the New Covenant over the Jewish Bible” (340).

Or his comment on Apocalypse 3:9:

I know the blasphemy
of those who say they are Jews and are not
but come out of a synagogue of Satan.

“The demonization of the Jews in the gospels persists in Apocalypse” (317).

To me the passage is about hypocrisy, just as if you said, “those who say they are Mormons and are not, but do their sealings in the temple of Satan.” But the three words synagogue of Satan are so powerful that perhaps they overshadow the rest of the verse, which may be why the editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament address it in their preface, saying the notes propose that the phrase “is not against Jews at all, but is against Gentile followers of Jesus who promote Jewish practices” (xii).

Their note for John 9:28 reads:

This passage sets up a contrast between the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of Moses. There is no evidence, however, that Jews referred to themselves as disciples of Moses (178).

Generally, from what I’ve read so far, the commentary in The Jewish Annotated New Testament is milder than Barnstone’s, and perhaps a bit more cautious. I particularly like the editor’s comments about how the commentators contextualize some of the more volatile statements “by showing how they are part of the exaggerated language of debate during the first century” (xi). There are a lot of passages like Yohanan 9:28 where Barnstone attributes an intent to the text that I don’t see there. And that’s the value of Barnstone’s commentary, not in giving us insight into the original intent of the gospel writers, but as a guide to how the early Christians, the people who didn’t think of themselves as Jews, reinterpreted the incidents in Iesous-nee-Yeshua’s life to blame and villify the tradition the early Christians had sprang from, far from.

One of my projects during the next few years will be to trace the passages I think were reinterpreted, and it looks like The Jewish Annotated New Testament will be invaluable in giving a sense of what the text might have meant to those first messianic Jews before or maybe after they were first called Christians at Antioch (see Acts 11:26).

The two books are valuable correctives to each other. Barnstone works a lot with the idea that the texts of the New Covenant were altered to amplify “the voice of Rome.” He seeks to diminish that voice. His work with resonate with Latter-day Saints who want to think about what Joseph Smith might have meant with his comment about corrupt and designing priests altering the scriptures.

The Jewish Annotated New Testament approaches the matter somewhat differently. My oldest son said, “Oh, giving cultural context?” when I mentioned the book to him, but others have given a puzzled or apprehensive look that says, ‘Jews don’t believe in Jesus. Is this a book that challenges our belief in his divinity and miracles?’

One can imagine the editors getting the same kinds of quizzical looks. “Many Jews are unfamiliar with, or even afraid of reading, the New Testament” (xii).

When I introduced the book to my Gospel Doctrine class at the nursing home I told the story of Chaim Potok coming to BYU in the early 1980s. Someone asked him the ritual question, “Have you read the Book of Mormon?” (He had been discussing his concept of the core-to-core culture confrontation, and the Book of Mormon is the core of our culture.)

He said he had a copy but hadn’t read it, because Jews read with a commentary and there wasn’t a commentary to guide his reading. The editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament confirm that practice. The next sentence after the one I quoted above says, “Its content and genres are foreign, and they need notes to guide their reading.”

So the book gives Jews the tools to understand the New Testament and Christians the tools to understand the care and scholarship Jews bring to their study of scripture, including maps, charts, sidebar essays, diagrams, tables, glossary, cross references to Talmudic and other sources, index and nearly 200 pages of essays, starting with “Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made About Early Judaism,” and including “Paul and Judaism,” “Food and Fellowship,” and “Josephus.”

The editors assure us they are not trying to convert Christians to Judaism, or Jews to Christianity–”It is very possible for the non-Christian to respect a great deal of the (very Jewish) message of much of the New Testament, without worshipping the messenger.”

That word respect is important to the editors: “As professional scholars, the authors of the annotations and essays approach the text with the respect that all religious texts deserve” (xii).

I’ll close with just two insights here. We all realize that John quotes the opening of Genesis in his gospel, but listen to the comment about Matthew’s opening: “Genealogy, Gk ‘geneseos,’ perhaps an allusion to the book of Genesis” (3).

And Luke 2:7 (since I got the book just before Christmas): “_Manger_ feeding trough; the symbolism anticipates the Last Supper (22.19). _Inn_, Luke gives no indication residents rejected the family; there may have been no room for the privacy needed for the birth” (101).

If Barnstone’s translation is the work of a scholar/poet thinking to thank the Jews, to calculate the debt we gentiles owe in gratitude, Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler and their editors’ work is thinking to thank the Jews for.

Zarahemla Books is, in my opinion, the most valuable brand in Mormon letters today. I can’t think of another publisher (of any type) whose books I’m as likely to pick up just because of who them. And while I may never finish Hooligan (even though I have recently repented of my Douglas Thayer skepticism), Zarahemla keeps proving my faith in them well placed.

They’re the Pixar of MoLit!

David Clark’s The Death of a Disco Dancer is a brilliant book. I was lucky that I started reading it the same day my classes had to take a mandated test, freeing me from teaching responsibilities. Before I was a quarter of the way through, I had disturbed my students with merry snorts—and had had to hide my teary eyes—as I tore through the pages in utter glee, trying to read as much as I could before I had to collect their work. In the end, I finished the book in two calendar days. Which is just not something I do anymore. (Of the novels I read last year, the only ones that can compete in terms of my reading speed are Dan Wells’s and Robison Wells’s*—it’s been a good year for Mormon fun, it would seem.) But Disco Dancer was unlike those propulsive books in that, well, for one thing, it’s not a thriller. It’s just a regular old story about a family.

Which gets to why I’ll be buying a copy for my mother (even though it says “nuts” and “balls” far too often for her taste): This book made me recognize my love for my mother in a way I too rarely do. Now, several days after finishing it, I’m still riding that buzz.

I want to say less about the story in this review than the backcover does (I didn’t read it and I’m glad I didn’t), but suffice it to say that the book is about more than one summer  in the early ’80s. It’s about life and the passing of time and it manages to hit that passage through several generations with a simplicity and artistic integrity I admire. Because the book plays games with time (both flashbacks and flashforwards) that most books fail at. That Clark played and won speaks to his skill as a stylist.

Speaking of style, how about that title? How about disco in general? Now, disco doesn’t have a big role to play in the text of the book (though adolescence and disco? what a metaphor!) except on a symbolic level, one layer of which Clark spoke to Wm about. And the book’s “Playlist” (read: table of contents) is all disco songs.

(Aside: I made a Spotify playlist of all the songs on the Playlist—or nearly all of them. A couple are missing from the Spotify library and a in a couple couple other cases I may have picked the wrong song. I think Phil Collins is probably the wrong guy, for instance.)

But what are this book’s strengths? Let’s start at the end, shall we? Clark has the fortitude to end the story where he should and not ten steps later when all the reader’s question could have reached a more tidy resolution. He has captured a time and place so perfectly it feels like documentary footage of 1981 Scarsdale, Arizona. He’s funny. He drew tears without being the least sentimental. Both the laffs and the tears are fully earned by real characters engaging in real life. He knows the power and the value of a good tangent (with the exception of the bear story, every digression is just the right length and helps us understand Who What and Why with elegance). He engages with the ambiguity of all things stereotypically good (religion) and bad (darn teenagers!). He never drives a joke into the ground until it is no longer funny yet still rising from the grave. He deals with topics heavy (with lightness but not undue lightness—for instance the pathos of dementia with its uncomfortable humor) and light (without ignoring their own little gravities).

Which brings me back to disco. We often dismiss it now, but let’s remember: those were real musicians playing real instruments and playing music so fun the world danced despite itself . . . until it realized how ridiculous it looked and slunk back into a dark corner. Like a budding teenager.

What I’m most curious about is what a 2012 teenager reading this book will think. Because in some ways I feel unfairly primed for this book. My mother is currently caring for her mother, just as the protagonist’s mother is caring for her mother. I work with teenagers and I’m old enough to have children that resemble those in this novel. And I was once a boy myself.

And so I can’t say for sure that the book would work as well aimed at a YA audience as it does on me as an adult. But no question: it does work on me as an adult.

Highly recommended.

Or newish, rather. Harrell’s collection (A Sense of Order and Other Stories) came out in 2010 and Townsend’s (Mormon Fairy Tales) in 2011.

(Obligatory notes: Harrell’s book was originally given by his publisher to Karen Rosenbaum who wrote about it in Dialogue and then passed it on to me; Townsend’s was given to me with the idea that I might eventually review it.)

I finished reading A Sense of Order (skip to review) in April and stopped reading Mormon Fairy Tales shortly thereafter. Since then I’ve been meaning to take my (copious) notes and write about them.

But I’m not writing this post because I’ve figured out how to write about these books together, but because I will never figure out how unless I do.

First I should address the obvious point I’ve already made: I did not like Townsend’s book enough to finish it. And I must be clear that this has nothing to do with his role as The Gay Gadfly of Mormon Letters. As decent reviews of his fiction show, Townsend is not without skill. In fact, there were stories in Mormon Fairy Tales which, in conceit, were pretty terrific. It’s the execution that is lacking.

Perhaps that’s because, unlike some of his previous collections, Mormon Fairy Tales consists of stories not previously published? Perhaps without the help of a magazine editor, Townsend cannot sculpt them into an excellent final form? If so, I see no shame in this. Frankly, anyone who thinks their best work is done without aid of an editor is, in a word, wrong. On the other hand, having a score of stories and the modern publishing scene being what it is, why not just put out a book?

“The Three Nephites Get Syphilis” is a good example of what I’m talking about. Here’s the foundational conceit: Tired of marrying women who then grow old and die, the Three Nephites turn to each other to meet their “needs.” But now they’re getting on each other’s nerves and go to see an LDS therapist (who, being LDS, doesn’t like gay people). Solid enough idea. But not a story.

(It does, however, have one genuinely funny line which I will quote now so I don’t seem like a total hater:

“Oh, he [Alma the Younger, who married the Three] was resurrected by then. We met him at a brunch shortly after Jesus showed up.”

“Nephites had brunches?”

“We were a very advanced people.” [41])

Essentially, every story in the book (I did read most of them) has the same two-part moral—some emphasize one half, some the other:

1. the proper attitude toward Mormonism is the breaking free of its shackles
2. Mormons aren’t as good as they’ld have us believe (often evidenced by the fact that they would have us believe they are good)

Mormonism is a weight and Mormon characters either suffer from a horrible guilt or they try to inflict it on everyone else. I don’t doubt that this is part of Townsend’s history with the faith, but this is fiction right? Shouldn’t fiction have some nuance?

Anyway, everything I liked about this book devolved into making me annoyed.

The first story, “Spirit Prison Blues,” sets the theme; it starts off “balanced” between being silly and thoughtful, then ends up pretending not to moralize. “The Black Sea” (a heavy-handed abortion story, sample line: “Abortion was next to murder on the list of sins.”) introduces the collection’s repeating image of oil spills (interesting, but not much was ever done with it.) “The Suicide Police” was probably the best story in the collection, but, in the end, is about just another crazy person.

As I read, I started rooting for the author, hoping he would pull off a really great why-Mormonism-sucks story, but he just kept falling short. (This was a weird situation to find myself in, to say the least.)

In conclusion, let me talk about the collection’s final story.

“Death at the Temple of Inscriptions” is another great starting point. Sad-to-be-estranged-from-the-faith-of-his-fathers, respectable gay man is marrying the love of his life (someone not at all sad to have left Mormonism behind) atop a Mezoamerican Temple as that location would make their nuptials seem “a step between civil and celestial marriage, a substitute that would do until the real thing became available” ().

The primary sin this story commits is this: Fiction shall be more believable than nonfiction. For instance, our protagonist once received a postcard that reads, “I hope all the lesbians swim back to Africa with a faggot under each arm” (276). While such a postcard may indeed have been written sometime somewhere (read comments on newspaper websites lately?), fiction must be more believable than reality. And this just feels like a great line that popped into a writer’s head one fine afternoon. Also, attending this wedding in Mexico will be Susan Sarandon, Elijah Wood, Amy Adams, etc. Also, a boy baptized by our protag on his mission, now a bishop, feels

willing to make his own political stand by telling the Church he endorsed our marriage. I hoped it wouldn’t get him in trouble, but of course the strict authoritarian nature of the Church allowed no dissension whatever, so that hope was probably in vain. (279)

Sigh.

I suppose it’s handy for Townsend to turn the Church into nothing more than a boogeyman, but it’s cheap and dishonest shortcut-storytelling. But in case things aren’t obvious enough already, “Death at the Temple of Inscriptions” also includes terrorists taking over an airplane, Prop 8, Deepwater Horizon, flat characters who hate gay men, flat characters who love gay men, etc etc etc.

The real problem (besides everything listed above) is that these stories allow no room for ambiguity. Townsend never lets the reader escape a story without being told exactly what to think. I hate that at the best of times. Doesn’t everyone? Isn’t that the complaint people are always throwing at Jack Weyland?

And that’s all you need to know. Mormon Fairy Tales is like a weaker Weyland collection only with a generous seasoning of sex and different politics.

Ambiguity is, however, practically an article of faith in Jack Harrell’s Sense of Order, which you’ll know if you, like me, have drooled over “Calling and Election” which I’ve told so many people to read that I ought to be collecting a paycheck. So the highest praise I can give this volume is to say that “Calling and Election” is not its best story. It also, I’m afraid, falls a bit short at times, but over all it’s a pretty great book and, by my judgment, the second best book of Mormon fiction I read in 2011.

Not all the stories in Sense of Order are explicitly Mormon. “The Trestle,” for instance, contains a matter-of-fact supernaturalism that I associate with much Mormon fiction (including Townsend’s) without ever being so much Mormon. (Pretty sly story though.)

Like some of Townsend’s stories that I was complaining about, “The Trestle” could very easily have descended into mere gimmickry. But I can’t assign an agenda to this story—I have to work through it’s layers of meaning on my own. Which is the difference, I think, between literature and didacticism.

To consider “Calling and Election” again, it’s not clear whether it’s protagonist is sane or not, whether Brother Lucy is sent from the Church or if he is the devil (or both simultaneously). And the moral of the story? Welllll. Let’s just say that some people think the story is a beautiful meditation on faith and sacrifice while others think it attacks faith.

I think my favorite story in the collection is its first story, “Tregan’s Mettle” (originally “A Visit for Tregan“) in which the least actively Mormon kid in an overwhelmingly Mormon town is joined by Jesus at a Megadeth concert.

Again: this could be a gimmick. This story could have very easily been nothing more than a dozen-page gag of the type I wrote of above. But it isn’t. First of all, it’s thirty pages long (winkwink), but more importantly, it asks some serious questions about the relationship between God and his people. First, for all the talk we Mormons make about “other people” telling God he can’t have prophets anymore, we like to keep God all boxed up ourselves. While the reaction of this town to Tregan’s experience is overly harsh, it never quite pushes past the believability line. Because, seriously, Jesus? at a Megadeth concert? really?

But Tregan, let’s be honest, has much more in common with Samuel or Mary or Joseph Smith than, say, Thomas S. Monson. He’s a good kid thrown by [God?] into a situation that makes people—often good people—lift their eyebrows at him.

Then Tregan makes a move that’s totally and utterly unexpected to anyone who knows how Mormon stories are supposed to play out. And Jesus reacts in a way I didn’t expect but, upon further reflection, probably should have.

Really, my only complaint is the final sentence. (”. . . from this moment nothing would ever be the same,” Harrell? Really?)

But then, I’m not sure endings are Harrell’s strength. “A Prophet’s Story” (excerpted in Sunstone) gives us a prophet in the Monson mold (actually, he seems more Hinckleyesque, but I suppose that’s irrelevant) slightly trapped in his role who meets a friend. Kind of like The Prince and the Pauper perhaps, only without proper switching of places. Terrific story. Rather anticlimactic ending.

The other odd bit to the collection is its short-shorts, which often are just that: short.

But that doesn’t get in the way of what he’s done successfully. The way the stories overlap and refer to each other (the Adam and Eve imagery, for instance) is notable, and a story like “Godsight”—which I could easily describe to you in language that would make you certain it must be a vile antiMormon tract, is in fact a beautiful meditation on Gethsemene. I kid you not.

And that’s what fiction can do. It can be something other than what it seems to be.

I don’t care what side of which line you’re on. If your fiction tells me what to think and leaves no room for ambiguity, no thank you. But if your fiction leads me see the world as more beautiful because more complex, then you’re doing something right.

A Sense of Order provides just such an effect.

Stephen Carter’s 2010 essay collection, as you might expect, provides plenty stellar examples of the form, what with the personal essay being The Great Mormon Form (or so I hear) and Stephen Carter being Stephen @#(*&$^ Carter.

Before taking the helm at Sunstone, Carter racked up a few Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Competition notations, had been cited in Best American Spiritual Writing, and scattered his work through the major Mormon literary rags. He’s Stephen Carter, folks!

(Obligatory note: Although I paid for my copy, I still may be biased as Stephen is a friend of mine. Who knows.) (In similar news, see Wm’s earlier review.)

First, as an object (this is not relevant if you’re planning on saving money and buying the ebook). The cover has really grown on me since the book was first released. The type is huge making this 168-page book an even quicker read.

But the words, the words. What about the actual words?

I’m going to begin by focusing on the final essay (which I do not feel badly about as it’s available online) which provides a useful metaphor for the entire book. Frankly, I rather wish it had been first as it provides an intellectual framework—something of a shortcut to understanding the book as a whole. (Then again, perhaps that’s a good enough reason to make it last.)

In essence, as with his aunt May Swenson in the essay”Winter Light” (which, yes, I just spoke of yesterday), Stephen feels pulled in two directions. To quote him quoting Terry Pratchett in another of the book’s essays, stories etch grooves “deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a moutainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper” (118).

The final essay, “Writing as Repentance,” provides a different metaphor for understanding this idea. Rather than an ever-deepening groove, stories are mountains whose massive presence and gravity drag us towards and up. In Stephen’s case, he has two stories threatening to crush him, that of the Correlated Mormon and that of the Virulent antiMormon. Not that Stephen is anxious to join the latter camp or hateful toward the former, but both of those are stories and nothing more. To go back to Pratchett, “stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.” And if we are to work out our own salvations with fear and trembling, we can’t rely on the simplicity of one story or the other—we must write our own stories.

As Stephen writes in “Writing as Repentance,” “In order to really finish any of my essays, I had to forgo the satisfaction of an answer, promised at the top of either mountain. Instead, I had to forge into the canyon, filled though it was with mist and darkness. Because that was the only place not already built. It was the only place I could create myself without the dominance of one mountain or the other” (166-7).

This is a good time to quote Joseph Smith: ”By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.”

Often we would rather be safe, repeating rote stories rather than making Truth manifest. Stephen instead is plumbing the shadowy depths of the canyon between stories, and I wish him godspeed, with a note of thanks for sending us these postcards from his travels.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

= = = = = = = = = = = =

= = = = = = = = = = = =

A few notes for the curious:

• Not all the essays are such heady stuff (though, to a diligent reader, even the hilarious story of the cocky missionary who swallows a habanero will deal in contraries), nor do they all stay firmly entrenched in ambiguity. For instance, the penultimate story, “The Calling” (my favorite?), is about the lurking sense of failure that is an inherent part of being a missionary while, at the same time, ending with something that tastes a great deal like a miracle and teaches a lesson many of us would do well to incorporate into our home and visiting teaching.

• Much is written about family here, from the strayed brother to the beloved grandmother.

• Thanks to one essay, Eugene England will now be on my list when people ask which three people, past or present, would I invite to dinner.

• “There is only one way of knowing an essay is finished, and that is when I have wrought something new from the contradictions of my life” (167).

And so begins The Year of the Boar, a lovely and comforting offering in the genre-blending “autobiographical novel” style of Coke Newell’s On the Road to Heaven.

Primarily a missionary tale that follows the author’s own mission in Japan, this novel-in-stories swirls in and out of time–even jumping to the future in a final section– but finds its anchor in the Chinese Zodiac and the soulful Sister Majors, who seems to be the very embodiment of the traits of the zodiac Boar. She is diligent (when it comes to persevering through bad weather she beats the US Postal service) and compassionate (when stuck with a negative companion she tries to love that companion by always finding positives and doing the emotional lifting). She is extremely likable and everything a sister missionary should be.

However, the story seems to shine most in the small moments of transitory characters. My personal favorite was Tetsuo, a man who survived World War II in Japan, helped translate the democratic constitution and later serves a public servant. Tetsuo’s defining moment comes when he finds a crucifix (”the European god nailed to the character for ten like they always depicted him”) in a bombed out Christian church. Majors writes,

“[Tetsuo] thought for a moment about taking it home, showing it to his mother, keeping it as a curio. But as he went to slip it into his sack, he felt a pang of guilt. It wasn’t his to keep, and it should be with someone who would know how to take better care of their god than he. The statue’s face was pitiful, contorted with pain. For so long he had resented this big European church up on the hill, staring down at them all like it deserved to be above them. He had had no regard for the Europeans or their little god, but now, holding it in his hands that way, it looked so frail. He hesitated, wanting to make the right choice. But was leaving it on the ground in the rubble the right choice either? He decided to hold onto it, but only for safekeeping. He would come back when there was someone back to rebuild or take care of the church in some way, and he would return their god to his house, hopefully a house that would be strong and beautiful again.”

Moments like this one, small moments where the characters must negotiate between the ever-shifting political and spiritual forces around them, are what give this book its heart.

Occasionally, the book stumbles. Some characters appear and are lost too quickly in the revolutions of the zodiac calendar, making their backstories hard to hold on to (although a family tree would have been helpful in alleviating some of that). Other times bits of Mormon phraseology creep in where they shouldn’t (at one point a Baptist minister offers to pray over a man’s dying wife and asks, “would you like me to be the voice” in a way that seems a bit too home-teachery). Sisters Majors tends to think in run-on sentences that often take up paragraphs at a time and give the book a rushed feeling. There are even odd moments of over-explaining, like when a fictional Chinese stake is being formed in 2013 and the author stops to explain what a stake means to Mormons.

But overall the book is ambitious and heartfelt. Sister Majors’ love for Asian cultures and peoples, her love for the gospel, and her own personal optimism make The Year of the Boar an enjoyable read. Full of interesting historical tidbits about Japan and China, and small period vignettes in Texas and France and even Algeria, this is an ideal book for book clubs and summer reading. It is, as the author insists, very real. And very good.

*This is the first book review I have written after reading the work on my Kindle. Since there are no page numbers and the “high-light location” numbers are not reliable I have zero idea how to cite quotations. The best source I could find for how to cite a Kindle ebook was this website which said to reference sections. I’m still figuring out how to figure out what section things are in. So for more details about the quotations and references above you’ll just have to read the book yourself!

This move ends one of the more consistent and long-term sources of information about Mormon literature, which makes up a significant portion of Cracroft’s coverage. The columns mention as many as a dozen titles, meaning that over 20 years Cracroft has covered something approaching a thousand books. His column was especially valuable for the first decade of its existence, before the AML review archive was started and reviews of LDS books became much more common.

Most of the columns are available online in the BYU Magazine archives, which go back to 1996. For the first 5 years of Cracroft’s Book Nook column, you’ll have to find them in a library or private collection.

If I get a chance, I’ll call BYU Magazine later today and ask if the column will be continued by someone else. [I called -- see comment #11 below.]

Title: Mr. Monster
Author: Dan Wells
Publisher: Tor
Genre: YA suspense/horror
Year Published: 2010
Number of Pages: 287
Binding: Trade Paperback (also available in hardback and as an ebook)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2790-1
Price: $11.99

Title: I Don’t Want to Kill You
Author: Dan Wells
Publisher: Tor
Genre: YA suspense/horror
Year Published: 2011
Number of Pages: 320
Binding: Trade Paperback (also available in hardback and as an ebook)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2844-1
Price: $11.99

Reviewed by Jonathan Langford.

Includes spoilers for Book 3 in a very general sense, but no specifics.

John Wayne Cleaver, the main character of I Am Not a Serial Killer, is kind of a weird kid. 15 years old. Helps out in his family mortuary. Obsessed with serial killers.

And then a real-life serial killer comes to his small town. Only it turns out to be a demon. And it becomes Cleaver’s job to kill it. And then the same thing happens again (Mr. Monster). And again (I Don’t Want to Kill You, released just last month).

It sounds like a clever premise for an ongoing series, one that combines a half-cockeyed look at teen life with a ration of suspense, violence, and gruesomeness. And that’s the way it starts out. But it’s also a lot more, as I Don’t Want to Kill You brilliantly (and I don’t use that word lightly) demonstrates. All credit due to the genre of teen horror, but this series transcends the genre. Really. I say this as someone who doesn’t usually like horror as a genre, because I find real life terrifying enough, so take my comment as you will…

*****

Perhaps the best part of the books is Cleaver himself, a sympathetic teenage boy whom it’s surprisingly easy to like. In a lot of ways, he’s a fairly normal teenager: socially awkward, more than a bit geeky when it comes to his areas of interest (serial killers), at least a touch neurotic, beset by bullies in school, attracted to girls and unsure how to deal with that, saddled with a dysfunctional family past and a mother who loves him but whose attempts to help often drive him up the wall. To a great degree, what he wants are normal things, and what he wants to be is a normal person.

Alas, the latter seems unlikely to be achieved. I’m no psychologist, but I have to say that Cleaver’s recitation of symptoms displayed by serial killers and how well he matches them is all too convincing. Normal boys who are attracted to a pretty girl don’t automatically start thinking, with loving possessiveness, about unspecified acts of torture. Cleaver’s behavior is genuinely over the top, though much of it represents potential that hasn’t yet been acted on, as in the following quote from Mr. Monster:

Brooke Watson was the most beautiful girl in school, and she was my age, and she lived two houses down from me, and I could pick out her scent in a massive crowd. She had long blond hair, and braces, and a smile so bright it made me wonder why other girls bothered smiling at all. I knew her class schedule, her birthday, her Gmail password, and her social security number — none of which I had any business knowing. (p. 25)

But the critical defining element of Cleaver’s character isn’t his sociopathic personality type (diagnosed as antisocial personality disorder by the counselor in his first book, a sympathetic figure who, alas, doesn’t survive to book two), but rather his strong desire not to be a serial killer and the vast self-discipline he applies to that effort. Cleaver is both a strong and a moral character — all the more so since for him, acting morally is so clearly an act of will, as opposed to natural inclination.

Wells does a good job at depicting teenage dialect, as in the second book when Cleaver’s  best friend takes to starting every conversation with the words “Shut up,” for no terribly clear reason except that he’s a teenage boy. The fact that Cleaver himself doesn’t sound much like a typical teenager is part of Wells’s characterization of him as both brighter and less socially clued in than other kids his age. It also is part of what makes him appealing as a character. Cleaver is in some ways not that far removed from the tradition of bright adolescent misfits so well exemplified by Orson Scott Card’s Ender Wiggin. The atypical teenager, despised for his differences but with hidden worth and a secret power to save others, is a powerful trope and one I daresay is particularly likely to resonate with adolescents and adults who read for pleasure. Not to mention that a full book, let alone a series, that presented teenagers acting entirely like regular teenagers would get tedious pretty quickly, and not just I suspect for adult readers.

Having said that, and acknowledging that most teenage boys really aren’t budding sociopaths, I have to add that this is a series that says a lot about what it feels like to be a teenage boy, especially the second and third book. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. John Wayne Cleaver is memorable, and he’s real, and he’s someone I wouldn’t mind getting to know and spend time with, though I have to admit I’d be a little nervous if he were dating my daughter.

The stories are helped along by frequent touches of humor, many of them arising out of the juxtaposition between the normal realities of teenage life and Cleaver’s specific challenges. Here’s an example of a paragraph (from early in the second book) which I as a reader can’t stop snickering over, though it may be that you have to have spent some time with Cleaver as a character before it will seem funny. Cleaver has just baked a cake for Mother’s Day, and they’re waiting for his sister to show up:

The cake was already done and cooling on the counter, so I was browsing through the paper. I noted with pleasure that Karla Soder had been admitted to the hospital for extended care; she was one of the oldest people in Clayton, and I’d been waiting for her to die for a while now. We hadn’t embalmed anybody in more than a month. (p. 47)

To some degree, this is funny because we’ve been pulled into Cleaver’s world, where a death means more business and a chance for Cleaver to satisfy his desire to cut up bodies in a harmless and even socially acceptable way. Unlike many stories that feature violence as a dominant theme, however, Wells’s books don’t invite us to put our conscience on hold for a while and just accept the blood and gore. Even when Cleaver is forced to kill — because how else are you going to deal with a demon who’s killing people to perpetuate its own existence? — we’re all too aware of the cost.

Which brings me to the supernatural element, which at first seems like an almost unnecessary gesture toward the current market reality that books about teenagers fighting demons seem to do better than books where the teenage protagonists face more mundane opponents. But there’s more to it than that. Many years ago, J. R. R. Tolkien, writing about the supernatural monsters in Beowulf, declared: “It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it . . . put the monsters in the centre, gave them Victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage.” Cleaver isn’t a doomed northern hero. But there are elements of his situation that work better, both thematically and from a plot perspective, with demons who must be fought if innocents are to survive, who cannot be countered by regular law enforcement.

Some might argue that this makes things too easy by giving Cleaver a clear moral justification for his actions. But that’s not the point. This isn’t a story about some Hamlet who must decide whether or not violent action is justified. Rather, it’s the story of a warrior like David who must somehow learn how to fight without staining his soul with the blood he’s spilled. Or something like that. A moody teenage David, who has to worry about whether he’s becoming a psychopath. (And wouldn’t that make an interesting historical novel? Or maybe not.)

*****

On reading I Am Not a Serial Killer (and knowing there were two more to come), I worried whether the basic idea was going to get stale. Let’s face it: part of the attractiveness of the first book is its novelty. This is a premise which mostly hasn’t been done before (although some reviewers have compared the book to the TV series Dexter, which I have never watched). More of the same could get old very fast.

For me that doesn’t happen, not because Wells comes up with clever new twists and variations (though there are some of those) but primarily because of the changes in Cleaver — and because of the successively broader lenses each story occupies. The first book is largely private, focusing on what happens when the imaginings of Cleaver’s inner life start to confront him outside the confines of his own mind. The second book shows us where Cleaver comes from, his family and his intense desire to protect and strike back against those who threaten what is precious to him. The third book shows him coming to understand what love and sacrifice for others really mean, ultimately at a great cost.

It’s a devastating progression. Wells has said in no uncertain terms that this is the last in the series, and I for one am glad, because I honestly don’t know where he could go from here that wouldn’t diminish the story he’s told so far. The first book is clever and fun; the second well-written and thought-provoking; the third . . . astonishing, and sad, and deeply moving. Well worth it, in my view — undoubtedly the best of the three — but also undoubtedly the hardest to read. You’ve got to be willing to face some really tough stuff to get through this book.

*****

John Wayne Cleaver isn’t Mormon. On the whole, I think that’s a good thing. Not only does it avoid possible stupidities from publishers about Wells limiting his audience, it also avoids the need to spend a lot of time and space on Mormon beliefs about the supernatural, which would I suspect have been boring to most non-Mormon readers (and many Mormons as well) and probably couldn’t have been handled to anyone’s satisfaction. Put another way: the book is chock-full of issues and plot twists and life realities as it is. Working Mormon issues into top of that would have been like adding chocolate syrup and butterscotch sauce on top of a piece of baklava. It would be overkill, if you’ll pardon the expression.

A critical question that the books persistently raise is whether Cleaver’s small acts of propitiation toward his own inner demon — his research on serial killers, helping out in the family mortuary, minor acts of controlled arson in an abandoned warehouse — represent necessary compromises or a fascinated dalliance with evil that makes it all the more likely that he’ll eventually be sucked in fully. His white-knuckled adherence to rules that are intended to keep him away from the more dangerous behaviors typical of serial killers — for example, complimenting someone when he desires to strike out violently against them — seems ultimately doomed to failure. Certainly the circumstances that keep forcing him into violent confrontations with demons do nothing for his self-control.

Part of the problem is that some of his rules seem like such disastrously bad ones. Don’t look at a pretty girl more than three times in the day, even if she comes up to you and starts talking? That’s a strategy that seems doomed to make Cleaver’s social isolation even worse. At the same time, we as readers understand why he does it. And even though his specific issues aren’t ours, the whole thing reminds us of the hell that is adolescence, when self-control often seems like an elusive holy grail and half or more of the time what you do seems to wind up accomplishing the opposite of what you had hoped, for reasons that don’t even make sense.

Below is a brief selection that I think captures Wells’s skills in depicting Cleaver’s character and the knife edge he walks. It’s the night after Mother’s Day, and Cleaver has decided he has to go out and burn something in order to relieve stress following a disastrous family dinner.

The fire was calling to me.

The warehouse reflect bright gray moonlight from its cinder block walls, shining dully in the clearing. I was grinning now. This was the time when the lines inside me blured, and Mr. Monster became simply John Cleaver: not a killer but a boy; not a monster but a human being. Fire was my great catharsis, but this prelude moment was my purest freedom — the one brief respite when I didn’t have to worry about what Mr. Monster wanted to do, because he and I wanted the same thing. Once I’d made my decision to light a fire, I wasn’t at war with myself anymore; I was just me, and everything made sense. (Mr. Monster, p. 61)

What Wells gives us, here and elsewhere in the books, is an unflinching look into the darkness that threatens all of us. Cleaver fights the good fight, but in the end we sense that he doesn’t really have it in him to escape his own nature. Not, at least, without help from others — help that for most of the books, no one seems capable of giving him.

For much of the books, Cleaver is sympathetic enough that we don’t take his dilemma with full seriousness. That’s our mistake as readers. Wells doesn’t make the same mistake, which I suppose is why the series has to end, instead of just continuing on indefinitely. Ultimately, Cleaver is redeemed, or at least we sense that he can be, and in a way that doesn’t feel forced or allegorical because it makes sense in terms of characters we have come to know and believe in.

So should you read these books? Yes, if you can stand to do so. If you can put up with a little teen humor, embarrassment, and gruesomeness, with an undertone of genuine feeling leading up to some real emotional gut punches in the final book — then yes, it’s well worth the ride. And if you care about Mormon literature and want to know what an LDS writer can do with Mormon themes in a series without a single LDS character, then you should probably read these books too. Taken together, they are, quite honestly, some of the best books I’ve read in a long time.