Shumway, “Bountiful” (Reviewed by Liz Busby)

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Title: Bountiful
Author: Charity Shumway
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Year Published: 2020
Pages: 392
Binding: Paper
Isbn13:  978-1948218313
Price: $9.95

Reviewed by Liz Busby

Sometimes a book is hard to read not because its characters are unbelievable, but because they are too believable, too close to home. You feel like someone has been spying on your family and friends, an undeniable sense of being watched as you read.

That’s how I felt as I read Charity Shumway’s Bountiful. The stories felt supernaturally accurate, almost painful to read because they reminded me of the pain and anxiety of so many of my friends and ward members. Bountiful is a heartbreakingly accurate portrayal of Mormon life in the late 2010’s. Though the book includes explanations of Mormonism to make the story comprehensible for outsiders, it is written primarily for those already invested in the community who want to understand how to heal it.

Bountiful is a novel about Heather, a single Mormon woman who recently lost a hundred pounds, and her mother Nedra, an empty nester who reinvents herself by running for office. In the beginning of the book, Heather quickly picks up a new boyfriend in the singles’ ward (who will be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever attended a singles’ ward). She also struggles with insecurity over how differently people treat her because of her new weight. Her sounding board is her carpool buddy, a non-member neighbor who quickly turns into something more and makes her question what she wants in a relationship. Meanwhile, Nedra navigates the issues of running for office against her former stake president (a Democrat!) and a challenger from the extreme right, while struggling to assert her own power in a society used to women being more passive. Nedra recruits Heather to help with her campaign, leading to clashes over generational political differences.

The strength of the novel lies in the relationship between Heather and Nedra. Shumway did an excellent job of showing both characters in a sympathetic light despite the tension between their worldviews. As an elder millennial, I felt Heather really captured the experiences I’ve seen in many of my friends, who struggle with church doctrine and culture yet love their faith and want to remain in the church in spite of it all.

In my experience, most novels that capture this younger experience struggle to portray the older generation sympathetically, but this wasn’t the case in Bountiful. Nedra is not portrayed as an ignorant, docile housewife, but someone who has seen the same issues as Heather but made her peace with them in a different way. Through these two characters, the author presents contrasting views of many of the current hot topics of Mormon culture, patriarchy, gender relations, LGBT members, and the place of singles in a family-oriented faith.

For me, it’s Nedra who steals the show. She won my heart with her rebellion against the patriarchy through piano lessons (of all things!). And her experience in the temple with her miscarried child felt very authentically Mormon. Bountiful manages to make the single-party politics of Utah fascinating as we root for Nedra to stand up to people who assume her policy positions instead of asking about them. After gaining my sympathy, I was nervous when Nedra finally put together that her newly divorced son might have been gay his whole life and afraid to tell her. I was unsure how she was going to react to this realization and felt really invested in her getting it “right.” I won’t spoil the eventual fall-out, except to say I think Shumway struck just the right balance.

On the other hand, I sometimes struggled to like Heather as a character. Watching her plot line was like watching an impending train wreck. From early in the novel, it was apparent Heather was going to end up entangled with her married, non-member neighbor, and yet I couldn’t believe she couldn’t see it coming at all and worse, did nothing to stop it. The married neighbor was otherwise portrayed as a nice guy, so his motivations really confused me as well.

I couldn’t quite see what motivated Heather to stay in the church either. All of her complaints, cultural and doctrinal, felt realistic, but what was missing was the other side. We never see Heather having a spiritual experience or explaining why the church is more than a cultural obligation. In the end, Heather grows into a decision, but for most of the book, I was left frustrated at this character who seemed content to complain but not to do anything about it. Perhaps this indecision was the point of her character, that she had to come to the point where her faith meant something to her before she could commit, but I found it hard to like her.

The other issue I had was the portrayal of Heather’s dramatic weight loss. Her mental anguish about her weight was spot on: the nagging worry that people would not have treated her the same way when she was fat, the terror that she might become that person again. Where I have a problem is that Heather’s weight-maintenance behaviors are absolutely an eating disorder. She is constantly thinking about avoiding eating, carrying around full glasses or pushing around food to make people think she’s consuming calories when she isn’t. These aren’t the normal techniques of someone who’s keeping off weight; they are the tactics of someone who is not eating at all and doesn’t want anyone to discover it. I kept waiting for Heather’s eating disorder to come up as a plot point, but it doesn’t. It’s not clear to me if this is an intentional loose end by the author, or if the author just did some unfortunate research about how to dramatically lose weight. Either way, it felt unsettling.

Overall, Bountiful is a novel thoroughly grounded in this particular moment in Mormonism, where the divide between the old guard and the new blood seems like a canyon. Though this novel begins by portraying the combativeness that exists between these two extremes, its ending is ultimately optimistic. I loved the careful, sympathetic portrayals of all sides of Mormonism with nary a strawman in sight. I can’t wait to pass the novel along to my family and book club because of the discussions it will spark about Mormonism’s present and our hopes for its future.