Author: Mette Ivie Harrison
Title: The Bishop’s Wife
Soho Crime, 2014. Novel.
Reviewed by David Harris. Dec. 19, 2018.
I was hoping this would make a good Mother’s Day gift for my mother next month. However, after reading it myself, I’ve decided I wouldn’t feel comfortable giving it to her because the worldview portrayed in it is just too bleak for pleasure reading.
That said, I did enjoy this detailed portrayal of a Mormon family and ward. I grew up in a Mormon family in Provo and I’m now living in Salt Lake City, and it is fun to see how various authors portray the culture I know so well. I identify with the Levi Peterson school of Mormon writing, but I believe Harrison does a good job explaining culture-specific phenomena without letting it get in the way of telling the story. Her prose has an easy conversational style which I like. And I like that she’s not afraid to broach sensitive topics relating to religion which other Mormon authors often shy away from.
One last thought which seems relevant to this novel: In recent decades, we’ve become more and more aware of inherently sexist vocabulary and grammar in our language. For the most part, such biases undermine women or gays or, really, anyone who isn’t a heterosexual male. I support efforts to re-think our language if it can help to alleviate this problem. However, I can think of at least one word pair which would seem to disadvantage males, and that is ‘misogynist’ versus ‘misanthropist’. The former describes an anti-woman bias or behavior whereas the latter has a more generic meaning which applies to human beings across the board. Obviously, no one deliberately set up the language to work this way. However, it seems to me it does make it easier to obscure anti-male behaviors and biases in this age of hyper-awareness surrounding discrimination.