A couple months ago I received an advance copy of David Ebershoff’s latest novel, The 19th Wife, through LibraryThing‘s Early Reviewers program. My first few posts will be reprints of reviews I’ve already written, and here’s the first of them.
The 19th Wife is a novel with the blessing—or curse—of having its subject matter plastered all over the news leading up to its release: in this instance, the recent raids at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas. While potentially stirring interest in a novel about such a polygamist community, the very real significance of those raids put the book in danger of seeming glib or unserious—or, worse, rushed and poorly researched.
The 19th Wife passes through most of these dangers unscathed. The historical narrative, of Brigham Young’s “19th wife” Ann Eliza, is based on her real, published memoirs, which helped lead to the banning of polygamy in Utah and eventually the change in Mormon church teaching on the subject. The story of Ann Eliza’s family, from the childhood of her mother through her own struggle to extricate herself from “Zion,” is excellent historical fiction. Fictional letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles round out the picture to include the stories of Ann Eliza’s family and of Brigham Young himself. The faith of the newly founded Mormon community, from devoted and devout women grappling with the realities of polygamy and the need to get to heaven, to husbands and fathers unable to cope with the size of their families, to Ann Eliza herself who can never accept the lifestyle she was raised in, is portrayed throughout respectfully and with, I think, significant understanding.
The contemporary narrative, however—despite the greater interest and faster pace of a murder mystery—lacks much of that substance. The principle figure is a “lost boy,” kicked out of a remote polygamist community as a young teen and left to fend for himself, with relative success. He returns home when he sees that his mother, also a 19th wife, has been arrested for the murder of his father. But his feelings toward his mother, his father, his (many) other family members, and the polygamist town as a whole are volatile and difficult to understand. In the end he is unable to take a principled stand either for or against the polygamists: He vaguely calls for the rights of adults to decide on their own lifestyle, but waffles about how things are different when children are in the picture. He is a young man and seems generally politically and religiously ambivalent, but the timeliness of the subject matter makes this, I think, a weakness—it seems almost as if Ebershoff is writing an entire book about polygamy and how damaging it can be only to avoid the chance for his protagonist to pass moral judgment on the issue. (A problem that comes up more strongly, I think, in the less prominent storyline of the stereotypically Mormon-perky BYU grad student writing a thesis on Ann Eliza: heavy on hand-wringing, light on substance or controversy.)
Still, that doesn’t stop the contemporary narrative from being enjoyable as a story of a young man trying to deal with his past, a truly messed up family life, and possibly his future, in some pretty trying circumstances. The resolution might have been a bit too easy, and our protagonist’s queeny friend back in LA a bit too silly, but I did find myself more interested in the modern mystery than in the story of many long-suffering Mormon pioneers (since we all know the end of that one, anyway). The biggest flaw, in my opinion, was the jumpiness of the two narratives. Rather than alternating chapters of similar lengths, the transitions between the two main plots were less regular and I found it irritating that sometimes—but not always!—there would be several chapters or documents belonging to one narrative in a row. I believe rearranging some of the organization may have made the novel as a whole flow more smoothly and seem less uneven. The fact that there were many different documents making up the historical thread, while the contemporary thread had a very strong focus on a single first-person narrative, also contributed to the feeling of unevenness. I love this kind of polyphony in novels, but it can be difficult to pull off.
In the ultimate assessment, I raced through the rather long novel in the span of under two days, eager to reach the end, but there was nothing groundbreaking here. Good light reading, and may well spark an interest in further research into the LDS and FLDS ways of life.
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