“The Shining Dream Road Out,” by M. Shayne Bell

Recently, I bought a copy of How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories, a collection of short(ish) fiction by M. Shayne Bell. I’ve been reading at it since, and eventually plan to write and post a review (here or somewhere else). As I was reading along, though, I thought I’d something specifically about the collection’s second story, “The Shining Dream Road Out” (previously published in Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor, an sf&f anthology edited by Shayne and published by Signature Books) — because I think it makes an interesting case study for some of the issues we’ve talked about from time to time, both here and at other sites such as A Motley Vision, about related to Mormon fiction and various ways of being Mormon.

The story’s about Clayton, a Mormon in his late teens who’s working as a pizza delivery boy in Salt Lake County while he waits to go on his mission. Or, maybe, join the Peace Corps — which is really what he wants to do, though his parents don’t know it. And then, while taking a virtual reality test to qualify for a raise, he encounters a lady with three little kids driving crazy fast in a beat-up virtual station wagon, in what he later finds out is a practice run to get away from her abusive husband. With help from his parents, Clayton helps her to make her getaway.

And that’s pretty much the whole story. Except it leaves out everything that made me say “Wow” after putting it down — reminding me that for a little over a decade, from the late 1980s through the 1990s back when Shayne was regularly producing, he was one of the best short fiction writers in the Mormon literary world. This story provides deft craftsmanship, careful worlduilding, superb characterization, and heartwarming emotional impact, as we follow Clayton in discovering that his parents are perhaps not so socially programmed and inflexible as he had thought. It’s a story of connection, reconciliation, growing up — of the heart of a child connecting to his parents, and vice versa.

And very much a science fiction story, though you could be excused for not thinking so at first glance. The virtual reality element represents a “just barely future” that could be real a couple of years from now: hardly speculative at all. There’s nothing that requires this story to be science fiction. But the science fiction element adds to its richness on a thematic level. Early on, Clayton imagines himself as a robot, trapped into his roles. His virtual reality is a practice for the real life he wants to live and is unsure about entering; the future largely impossible to clearly see, like the shining dream road stretching past Point of the Mountain into Utah County that he glimpses at the border of the highway simulation program, absent the urban buildup he knows must be there. The static and unchanging images Clayton has of his parents, the story suggests, are equally unreal: a virtual reality he has created in his own mind that doesn’t match their real complexity and depth. (And who of us hasn’t had that same discovery, right about the time we strike out on our own: that our parents are a little more real, a little less one-dimensional, than we thought they were?) Adolescence, simulations, practice for reality: it all harmonizes in ways I find hard to articulate, but that resonate for me.

It’s also a very Mormon story, though again not uniquely or distinctively. Nothing about it requires you to be Mormon in order to appreciate it, and in fact it was originally published in 1993 for a general audience. But the story is about a Mormon family, and there are elements of their interactions that strike me as particularly Mormon: not just the mention of a mission, but also the way Clayton’s parents are presented, the largely internal (as it turns out) pressure he feels to conform, and even the discovery that his family and culture afford far more room for individual flexibility than he had originally thought. Clayton, one senses, has not completely understood either his parents or his religion. Will he serve a mission? Perhaps not, but by the end of the story it’s more of an open question whether Clayton’s path to discovering who he is must necessarily lead him out of the Church.

I also think there’s space to make a general argument that Mormonism’s take on generational relationships is subtly different from both contemporary and historically predominant views — in way not yet terribly well understood by Mormons ourselves. On the one hand, we don’t really believe that children should remain forever subordinate to their parents, but rather embrace a view that the purpose of children is to become (in some sense at least) their parents’ peers. Even we, as children of God, are under the necessity of reaching a point where we make choices for ourselves. And yet it is in no sense the kind of generational supplanting Harold Bloom describes. Our unique take on the Garden of Eden story (among other elements of Mormon belief) presents, in my view, a tension between choice and obedience that resists easy resolution, and with which we all struggle on a practical as well as theoretical basis. I can’t help but see echoes of that ambivalence in this story.

I suppose that what I’m trying to do here — aside from draw attention to a deserving and (I suspect) relatively little-known story — is make the argument that stories such as this have contributions to make to our understanding of Mormon literature, and that our conversations would be poorer for their exclusion. Perhaps these works are peripheral — but a lot of the most interesting action takes place on the edges.