The Conduct of Mormon Literary Criticism at the Present Time

by B. W. Jorgensen

I do feel slightly apologetic for a long, cumbered, stumblefooted title; but I mean to signal as strongly as I can the overriding concern of this essay.¹ It was the almost-sole concern of my 1991 Association for Mormon Letters presidential swansong, and Sunstone misrepresented that by publishing my address in 1993, in tandem with Richard Cracroft’s 1992 AML address, under the cover rubric “What Is Mormon Literature? Bruce Jorgensen vs. Richard Cracroft.”² I meant, and I thought I had tried with some clarity and force, to step away from that “essentialist” question “What Is?” to ask instead, more pragmatically, “How Should We Do Mormon³ Literary Criticism?” I ask this question again, three decades on and counting, in response — in rejoinder — to Melissa Leilani Larson’s Dialogue review of Levi Peterson’s story collection Losing a Bit of Eden, because that review (which I regard as honest but mistaken) demonstrates that the “How Should We?” question has stayed with us, and stays open.⁴

I use the word rejoinder mainly in its “now historical” legal sense: “a defendant’s answer to a claimant’s reply” (OED s.v. rejoinder, n.). The review “replied” to Peterson’s stories with certain claims, and I “rejoin” the review and those claims, not as defendant but as something sort of like counsel for the defense. The wider “general” sense of rejoinder of course mostly also fits: “A reply or response, esp. one which involves disagreement with the original statement, or which is intended as sharp or witty.” I do disagree on some minor and major points in, and aspects of, the review; but I mean to be “sharp” mainly in the sense of trying to keep a close eye and ear on the language of Peterson’s stories, of the review, and of this essay; and I mean to be witty mainly in the sense of trying to keep my wits about me.

But then again — and more importantly — this is not only a rejoinder to one review but also a sort of amicus brief in the court of Mormon/LDS literary judgments, since it responds in an ongoing conversation that the review itself has joined. I think this conversation — about one story collection here, but more broadly about Mormon literature and literary criticism in general and thus about the culture and experiences that generate that literature and criticism — matters and should go on. For all we’ve said and written over the past half-century, we’ve barely begun. I also think the voices of the writers, in their poems, plays, novels, short stories, essays, whatever, should be heard clearly, listened to attentively, patiently, before reviewers and critics reply and rejoin. A lot works against this, and it makes a reviewer’s or critic’s charge all the heavier.

Reviewing is a mostly thankless task (in academe its rewards can be small to nil).⁵ More to the point here, limited time and space hasten and cramp what should be patient and generous attention to the work in hand, and tend to preclude accurate and precise general or particular claims well-supported with sound logic and evidence, as well as attention to contrary evidence. In haste a reviewer can overlook or misstate cardinal facts. A tight deadline may push a reviewer, peer-reviewers (if any), and editors to cut corners and fail to check claims for factual accuracy and valid support. (After all, a review is just one reader’s opinion, offered in guidance to other possible readers.) Any or all of this may apply to this review, where smaller and larger errors of insufficient attention to the text accumulate toward distorted interpretations of individual stories and damaging judgments of the collection as a whole.

Were I to review Losing a Bit of Eden, I’d feel obliged to mention that its text is marred by far too many typos and other errata (some rather substantive) that good editing should have emended. Samples: Bryce National Monument has been Bryce Canyon National Park for nearly a century; San Pete has been Sanpete even longer; “night gown” was “nyght gowne” c 1475 but has been mostly fused as “nightgown” since the 17^th century; “straight forward” (in its pertinent sense) also fused long ago, as did “fish mongers” in the 15^th century; “hay loft” fused as early as the 18^th century but may still wobble between hyphenation and fusion, while “soft spoken” stays hyphenated; “where” is not “were,” as “forebear” is not “forbear” (but spell-checkers seem too illiterate to discern such differences); “laid” (not “lay”) is the past tense of transitive “lay”; “going to up” lacks “go”; “beside” doesn’t mean “besides”; “lightening” isn’t “lightning,” though lightning lightens for a second or so. Ah: “buckeroo” with an e, sticking close to Spanish “vaquero,” turns out to have been a frequent spelling well into the 20^th century, so Peterson’s usage is historically plausible: stet. But for a Vietnamese girl’s given name, Hahn looks way too German; wouldn’t that be Hanh? And so on, adding up to more than an occasional distraction. Shape up, Signature Books!

The Dialogue review of Losing a Bit of Eden may not have had room to note even the presence of so many errors in the text. To anyone who reads or has read the book, the review’s own errors should be just as apparent, starting with its misleading title (perhaps supplied by an editor): “The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists.” The review says far more about “Limitations” than about “Promise” (nothing or next-to). “Working-Class” at least partly misrepresents the collection. All but two protagonist-“focalizers” or -narrators are male and (the title might have included) white and Mormon. But Hoyt McCulley in “Cedar City” is not working-class: his parents have “social standards” and live “in a posh new development at the southeast end of town”; his father is “the wealthy proprietor of a thriving brickyard” and expects Hoyt to take over, grow the business, and become “a wealthy man” (81, 86). Rulon Braunhil, the protagonist-narrator in “The Return of the Native,” golfs while his wife goes “on a cruise with her sisters” (57); if there’s a middle class above the working class (which my working life led me to doubt),⁶ or a professional class, he might belong to it as (presumably) an electronic engineer with Boeing (see 65, 72). Similarly, Mort in “Bachelor Stallions” “was an engineer at the Kennecott concentrator where he made big money” (147). Lewis Mulenax, the protagonist-narrator of “Sandrine,” looks upwardly mobile, leaving the family farm in “a long dry valley” 50 miles from the nearest high school in far northern Utah to study forestry at Utah State (15–16), but he doesn’t imply anything about his class status after what “happened sixty years ago” in 1962 (9). And what about the couple in “The Shyster”? Leanne is a lawyer, which might put her on the yonder side of any line between working-class and whatever is next above, but her husband Arne manages a truck stop convenience store (the story presents a tricky case).⁷

In the body of the review, one glaring error in title reference, “Gentleman Stallions” for “Bachelor Stallions,” could be due to an authorial change (very unlikely) between a review copy and the published text. The review calls Peterson “one of the most adept scribes of the twentieth-century American West.” True enough I think.⁸ But two “Wild West” tales, “Jesus Enough” and “Kid Kirby” (the one story not mentioned in the review), take place before, near, and not long after the turn of the 20^th century (the review notes “turn-of-the-century” in “Jesus Enough”), and “Bode and Iris” clearly occurs in the 21^st century; so do the title story (the Fort Collins, Colorado Temple was dedicated in 2016) and “The Return of the Native,” and I suspect “Bachelor Stallions” and “The Shyster” also do. So in this collection Peterson takes on more than the 20^th century West. “Each story is” indeed “well grounded in a particular time and against a specific landscape” — two landscapes, largely, the arid interior West (specifically the “Mormon corridor” from Cardston to Mesa) and the more humid and lush Pacific Northwest, and always in specific counties and towns in Washington, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah (including my hometown Salina).⁹ I would stress that the cultural and psychological terrain is mostly that of Arid West Mormondom from the late 19^th century (1886 at the start of “Jesus Enough”) to somewhere near our present moment well into the 21^st. I think this matters seriously, for Peterson’s project in this collection looks rather deliberately historical, akin to Hawthorne’s project of moral history in his “twice-told” tales and romances of his native New England and his Puritan and Colonial forebears.¹⁰

The review offers some well-merited general praise: “a master of language,” “striking turns of phrase that linger long,” “a line or a moment that made me stop and breathe: This is the good stuff. This is what I’m here for.” Amen to all that — though when I read a story I’m “here for” more than lines and moments. As one strong instance of such moments, the review focuses on “the moment for which the story is named” in “Jesus Enough.” It alludes to “several other moments like it peppered throughout” that story, but takes no further account of those. The title phrase shows up in more than one, and it most notably echoes in the story’s last line, where the logos “Jesus Enough” gathers more meanings in the protagonist Darby’s reflections after he has abandoned his plan to kill Colin Morrell. I regret a spoiler: my last clause just did what careful reviews of fiction try to avoid at almost all costs, it gave away a story’s ending — but only partly, I think; a reader might still enjoy being intrigued and surprised by how the story gets there, and by the particular incidents, details, and language that carry it there and make that ending.

There are other ways a review may risk spoiling fiction, one of the worst being hasty general judgments, doctrinal or ideological, based on insufficiently attentive reading. This review undercuts its own generous praise near the outset (“Jesus Enough” is “quietly stunning” and “beautiful” and the book “is sprawling, beautiful, raw, emotional, human” — I think so too) by calling “this collection of stories overall [. . .] troublingly misogynistic” and other stories “even more problematic” than “Jesus Enough,” then going on to point up in about fifteen lines the same fault, misogyny, in six more stories. Near its end the review grants that Leanne, the woman lawyer with “feminist ideals” in “The Shyster,” “is a much fuller, more complete portrait of a woman than just about any other in the book,” then swiftly undercuts this with “But that isn’t saying much, as we only meet her in snatches, and from Arne’s perspective.” As I read it, Leanne and her work have strongly altered Arne’s perspective by the end of the story. We meet most short story characters mostly in snatches, and almost always from a protagonist-focalizer’s or a narrator’s limited perspective; it’s a persistent trait of the genre.

So that last clause I quoted from the review — “we only meet her,” etc. — is true, as it is of seven other stories in the book, all from male and (sometimes) working-class perspectives. The earlier hedging phrase, “just about,” admits that the review might have mentioned (as I can and shall) women in other stories who come across (to me, a white male Mormon working-class reader) at least as fully and strongly as Leanne, despite all but two being presented from a male perspective. That perspective is third-person in eight of the ten, putting their narrators and their implied author, as well as us readers, at a somewhat ironic and not always approving distance from the male protagonist-focalizers. We are obliged, of course, in reading the two first-person stories, to “identify” formally with their male narrators by (mentally or vocally) performing their voices as we read; but all first-person narrators are limited and thus to some degree fallible or unreliable, and we are equally quite free to judge them by whatever we deem their merits or demerits. We’re also not “forced” to do any of this, since we can, at will, stop lending voice or ear to any narrator; in that case, not reading a story through disqualifies any broader judgments we might make of its narrator or any character, or of the story as a whole.

Of the book’s ten stories, the review gives most attention to “Jesus Enough.” But in that story, on reading a sentence with the phrase “doing what a married man has a right to do,” the reviewer “put the book down and went for a walk” and “didn’t know if [she] would be able to pick it up again.” That was seriously misfortunate and led to damaging misrepresentations of this story and of the collection, because three lines later, “The next morning,” that married man, Darby Wilson, is “feeling depressed and guilty for exploiting her [his wife Tilly’s] grief,” and four lines farther on, as he’s about to stand up from their bed, “she put her arms about his waist and held him tight. ‘I do love you so,’ she said, and his emotions changed. ‘I love you too,’ he said, powerless to express the strength of his feelings. Love was a prairie alive with wind-whipped grass. That was how he felt about Tilly” (130–31). There’s a lot more going on in these few moments of this story — and a lot more in the whole story, in the whole relationship of Darby and Tilly — than “doing what a married man has a right to do” can suggest.¹¹ (Ponder Darby’s “prairie” metaphor, a turn of phrase that lingers long.) It’s a serious disservice to possible readers to take one distressing sentence out of its full narrative/dramatic context in an ongoing dynamic plot and say it “ruined this beautiful work.” “Exploiting her grief” seems to trouble Darby more than it troubles Tilly — it’s he who makes that morning-after judgment on himself. Last night “He went on holding her after he had finished, and eventually she went to sleep” (130); but what he thought “finished” has turned out un-finished, and starts to change him, and to change my emotions with his. Fiction writers and dramatists alike discover such things about us and how we live and love. “Moments” in a story are not scattered or “peppered throughout” but threaded into the momentous continuity we call “plot,” which Aristotle said represents action and likened to “the soul” or “life” (ψυχή, psychē) of a drama (1450a) — of any story at all, I’d say. It’s the main (but not the only) larger thing I’m “here for” when I read a story or watch a play or a film.

About two pages and two years farther on (the story’s “episodes” are not all “yearly” but dated by year, sometimes skipping up to four or six years), a similar but notably different moment occurs, suggesting that Tilly’s loving influence and Darby’s deepening love for and awareness of her have brought him some distance from the culturally-endued misogyny that he rightly felt guilty for in that earlier moment. On the eve of his departure from Oakley for a meeting in Salt Lake,

Darby had hoped to make love to her, but the moment seemed too troubled, too fraught with concern, for such a carnal deed. Resigning himself, he rummaged about his mind a bit, seeking some thoughts that would help him fall asleep. Then she spoke in a tone with just an edge of surprise. “Don’t you want to do it?”

“Do you mind?”

“It feels good to have you hold me,” she said. She tugged her night gown to her waist and lay waiting. (132)

There is much to examine here. Minimally, a willingly attentive reader should notice the echo of “hold”/“holding”/“held” from two pages back, that Tilly (in just the way she chooses in this moment) is doing what a married woman “has a right to do,” and that Darby isn’t thinking of “what a married man has a right to do” — does he now subscribe to the notion at all? But also: Tilly still grieves for her brother Albert, and her mother’s chronic deep depression compounds that grief, to the point that, amid “so many tribulations,” she wonders aloud, “Why has Jesus abandoned us?” (132). Yet she and Darby have come to know one another’s feelings and needs accurately enough that this moment occurs. She may or may not have “hoped to make love,” though she might have expected to, and clearly (as her negative “Don’t you want” question with its “edge of surprise” suggests) she supposed Darby would want to; but she’s lovingly willing, and she demurely acknowledges the solace she gets from being held skin on skin, one flesh.

Do they “make love” this night? Certainly — we’ve just read them doing that. But then the narrator averts his and our eyes from their bed, and we are not to know if they, in our more callous and limiting phrase, “had sex.” That’s a privacy in this moment that the implied author does not ask his narrator or his readers to breach. And in the couple’s words and thoughts and gestures we might detect, or suspect, evidence that Jesus has not utterly abandoned them, and may indeed have helped them give and receive,¹² each “an help meet” to the other, making love not “to” but “with.” This moment also is part of why the story is titled “Jesus Enough,” and might suggest one of the ways he can be. What would Jesus do or say in Darby’s situation? What would Jesus do or say in Tilly’s situation? How, since we’ve lost our “Bit of Eden” — the gift of sexual love without shame,¹³ guilt, disgust, or dominance and submission, but not without attentive solicitude (“help meet”) for the other who is there — how in this world does a Mormon or a Christian marriage work?¹⁴

This story also does not tell us explicitly whether Darby ever gets past the notion that “to make love” is “such a carnal deed.” Of course it is “carnal,” since only in the flesh can we do the “deed,” or “do it” as Tilly shyly puts it. But is it only that? Such a scene as this could invite us to rethink (metanoeō: perceive afterwards, change one’s mind, re-pent) how we think about sex and love, amor and caritas, eros and agape, flesh and spirit. I think that has long been one of Levi Peterson’s projects as a fiction writer who knows where some of our culture’s sorest wounds are, and has a notion about what “Bit of Eden” we’ve lost and the trouble that has laid on us. In part, this collection “somehow all feels gently connected” because its thematically linked stories¹⁵ trace some of our cultural and personal struggles with the misogyny and violence we inherit from the Wild West, the larger American and European cultures, and our own more local and familial histories.

It matters that this moment in the plot of “Jesus Enough” comes just before Darby discovers the alias and approximate whereabouts of Colin Morrell, and conceives his vengeful plan to kill the man whose escape seventeen years ago left Darby’s best friend to be hanged, not for “assist[ing] with” the bank robbery that Morrell planned (as the review says) but “as an accomplice to the murder” Morrell committed during the robbery (121). I prefer not to spoil the story any more by connecting the dots of its plot-points from here to its ending. (Reader: read.)

But I do hope that my closer attention to “Jesus Enough” at least begins to demonstrate how “misogyny” is too broad and blurry a term¹⁶ to apply in judgment to that story or to the collection as a whole. It’s useful and pertinent to interpretation, though in some contexts “sexism” might be a more accurate word; but in this review “misogyny” covers, it obscures, too much complexity, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Darby might be as unconsciously and consciously misogynistic, or sexist, as one might expect a late Victorian and Western American male to be. But neither term gets at his specific character and how it changes in the course of a story that subtends a quarter-century of his life. And it’s too long and unsupported a leap of logic to carry “misogyny” from one or more sentences or characters to the collection as a whole.

The review starts that leap, from “Jesus Enough” to the most horrific misogyny in the collection, in the story it refers to as “Gentleman Stallions.” Given the turn the review has taken with “misogynistic,” this move makes sense: “Bachelor Stallions” directly follows and sharply contrasts “Jesus Enough” as an “even more problematic” story; the review marks the two as fraternal twins under the rubric of misogyny. But besides misstating its title, the review also misrepresents some of this story’s cardinal facts. Mort is not Irvin’s “boss” but his “best friend. His only friend” (146); Irvin is the story’s protagonist and focalizer, but Mort is decidedly the Alpha male of the pair, “a giant” with “hands big as frying pans” who has put the much smaller and weaker Irvin in his debt (143), persistently calls him “Little Buddy” in both second and third person and apparently with his last breath (143–47, 150), and wants him to “develop a little spine.” “Now just keep this in mind,” he says; “We are not playing cowboy any more. This is the real thing” (145). As would-be protagonist in a Wild West melodrama he’s scripting in his head, Mort drives the plot as far as he can. He does “boss” and bully Irvin, and the narrator tells us that “when they were out on a ride Irvin fused with Mort,” like “two fetuses in a womb or, as Irvin now judged,” as they ride toward the woman Mort has decided to rape, “two prisoners in a cell, two corpses in a body bag.” All three metaphors are telling, especially as Irvin comes up with at least the second and third. “He was feeling very bad” (145). He may usually feel “fused with Mort” when they ride together, but he is not feeling much like or “with Mort” on this ride; not one of the metaphors quite signifies fusion.

Nor is this Mort and Irvin’s “first sight” of the woman Mort decides to rape and does violently assault (another partial spoiler); she “had run them off once before,” and Mort “figured” that this “professor lady” would again be “in the observation post” to study wild horses and to keep other humans and “domesticated horses” off the Cedar Mountain range. “Lord, I hate a woman who thinks she’s somebody,” Mort says (143–44), and that’s one of the milder overt expressions of his misogyny.

Mort’s “mention of rape is” indeed “chilling,” as I judge Peterson meant it to be,¹⁷ though I would not call it “lackadaisical” (see the OED). It occurs in a paragraph that (as I read it) presents, in summary or indirect discourse, Mort’s explanation to Irvin of what they’ve just seen three “bachelor stallions” do to “an unprotected mare.” Immediately after the paragraph, Mort announces, “That’s exactly what we are going to do with that woman down there” (144). A reader’s “chill” response to Mort’s brutal intent must be a counterpart to Irvin’s, intensifying our wish, our hope, that he can “muster up the courage to interfere with” Mort, whose name says Death, or Dead, and who has “often said, ‘I have never killed a person. Sooner or later, that is an experience I intend to have’” (149). In fact Irvin (“boar-friend,” suggesting potentially violent male animality) doesn’t muster up that courage in quite the way we might wish, and a more patient and just reading would attend to what he does do, and how and why, and what that might imply about violent misogyny, which does name one central issue in this story.

The review’s two-sentence reduction¹⁸ of the story oversimplifies it far too much, and my closer attention to a few passages also leaves out far too much (e.g. a reader might attend to its uses of the curiously resemblant words “person” and “prison”). It is indeed about misogyny, but that need not make the story itself misogynistic.¹⁹ At the story’s end (spoiler alert), the woman, “a battered person,” tells Irvin, “Well, let’s get going [. . .]. While we’re at it, we’ll work out a story about all this that will keep you out of prison” (151). Obliquely in that sentence this unnamed but strong “professor lady” points toward Peterson’s project in these and maybe all his stories, short or long: to “work out a story about all this” misogyny or sexism, especially in Mormon and Western American cultures, that might help us get out of its prison and stay out. “Leading [Mort’s] stallion by a rope, the weeping Irvin reined his gelding into the trail behind her” (151). She may not be watching her back, but she has reloaded her pistol. Irvin might yet quit hankering “to keep a stallion” (143), and be less tempted to fuse into a rapacious centaur like Mort.

After its reduction of “Bachelor Stallions,” the review explains that “‘The Return of the Native’ focuses on the elderly Rulon who raped his cousin when they were both teens. When she becomes pregnant, her father disowns her and sends her away. Rulon ruined his cousin’s life, and he knows it; he has spent his own lifetime ruminating on it — and the reader is forced to ruminate with him.” I doubt any reader is ever quite “forced” in just this way;²⁰ one can always “put the book down.” But a reader who chooses to “pick it up again” and go on reading a story will definitely be invited or obliged, as the writer was, to “think” and “feel in keeping with [the] spirit” of the characters; Chekhov said that (133), and did it in his stories and plays. But like a writer, a reader also always has what Tolstoy called an “independent moral relation” (GdM 866; cf 852, 855, 858) to the story and its characters and narrator, and to its writer. A reviewer exercises this independence in calling a sentence or a character or a book “misogynistic.” But it’s an independence, a freedom, that must also be accountable.

It’s the protagonist-narrator Rulon Braunhil who justly calls what he did to his cousin Cassia in that barn loft when they were both fifteen “a rape” (61; cf 65): after she aroused him by “push[ing him] down and plac[ing] a long, lingering kiss on [his] lips,” “when [he] tugged up her dress she pleaded for [him] not to do it, and when the deed was done, she wept” (60–61). Clearly this was more than statutory rape.²¹ Notably, the narrator and the implied author avert their (and our) eyes from any more detailed presentation of that one act (which a reader is still free to imagine if so inclined).

Self-convicted, Rulon has sentenced himself to “over half a century” (57) of guilty remorseful self-punishing exile, including “three decades of celibacy” (65), for ruining Cassia’s life. But her father’s deed looms large in that ruin, and looks just as violent if not more, permanently sundering the paternal-filial bond. Yet also, Cassia has had a life that sounds like something other than total ruin. Not the life she might have expected at age fifteen and likely not as happy a life as she wished (does anybody get either?), but apparently she made it a useful life, and “of considerable achievement” (71). Near the end (spoiler), her one last speech to Rulon — “‘I will forgive you,’ she said. ‘I do forgive you. I do’” (79) — sounds wholehearted to me, entirely meant. One kind of reader might judge this final small scene a fantasy on the writer’s part. I do not; I know such things can happen; I incline to believe they can and should happen more often because Jesus said “the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins” (Mk 2.10). The daughter of man too, I trust.²² Rulon’s teenage great-niece Ashley, the most admirable character in the story, one of the more fully presented young women in the book, and clearly a prime mover in this story’s action, believes it so, and, when Rulon confessed his crime — “the worst thing a man can do to a woman, short of killing her” — to Ashley in the cemetery after Cassia’s father’s burial, she told him, “I think she should forgive you. [. . .] She doesn’t seem like somebody who would hold a grudge for fifty years” (77) — which might indeed be the “ruin” of a soul (I think of Cassia’s father, and of another “daughter, who had [. . .] gone to pieces” [57]).

Surely Rulon’s half-century-plus (and soul-ruining) rumination on the rape in his “private hell” (64) says something about his, and the writer’s, judgment of the deed. It’s also Rulon who judges that he “ruined his cousin’s life” (see 58, 70); but her now dead father (in his own “patriarchal” brand of misogyny or sexism) had a good deal to do with that as well. Again, the review’s brief reduction misrepresents the story by oversimplification, especially by overlooking one determined, decent, and loving young woman whose words and actions, in a series of key scenes, change Rulon’s intentions and thus drive the plot to bring him at last to face his cousin again.

In one short paragraph the review fits “Several other stories” into its “misogynistic” frame²³ as stories “about young men who impregnate young women,” each story in a one-sentence summary. Make that “several” two (not all four mentioned), unless you count Reeves Kirby in, and re-count Darby, a young married man. In “Sandrine” it’s true that Lewis “nearly runs off with a friend’s wife,” but we may doubt he impregnated her; she offered to “show” him “how to use” the condom he bought from a machine in a gas station restroom, though we are (forced) not to know if she showed or he used (22). There’s no implication of rape or coercion here, and not much question of seduction; their feelings look to have arisen in parallel, and it’s the friend’s wife, Sandrine, who initiates the intimacies of speech and touch leading to their only sexual act (see 21–22). The review’s one-sentence reduction omits all the other cardinal facts in the story, e.g. that “in her early twenties” and thus slightly older than Lewis and certainly more experienced, she has an “eight-year-old” daughter, and her husband Max is “maybe forty-five” and strenuously persuades Lewis to drive her to the Seattle World’s Fair, putting them into their dangerous “liaison” (10, 12, 13–14, 23); it particularly omits what warrants the word “nearly”: how it comes about that although Lewis and Sandrine at first plan to be together, and not without “telling Max” (23–24), they finally choose not to, in a scene of shared and crucial moral decision, with Sandrine as a co-protagonist (26).²⁴

More (to risk a spoiler), the review elides how the action of the story ends: sixty years later, Lewis tells how he found at age 21 that “forgetting Sandrine was impossible” and that, notwithstanding a prompt and sincere two-year effort at formal repentance, he “could renounce being with Sandrine, but [. . .] couldn’t renounce loving her.” So three years farther on, when he asked “a young Mormon woman” to marry him, “she knew that as far as my private feelings were concerned, it was to be my second marriage. She knew I would come to our marriage as a widower. I am grateful that she accepted me on those terms” (28). His terms, yes (and for him unavoidable, though, as some do, he could have opted not to reveal his sexual past to his spouse-to-be), along with his enduring gratitude. This story and its ending imply something worth thinking about, which might be partly captured in D. H. Lawrence’s startling suggestion that “The instinct of fidelity is perhaps the deepest instinct in the great complex we call sex” (319). Misogyny or sexism may stain this story too (e.g., now “an ex-junkie,” Sandrine, as a teenage mother with an out-of-wedlock baby in foster care, was “rescued from the alleys of Seattle” and put into rehab by Max, a good man, divorced and with grown children, who subsequently married her and gained sole custody of her daughter [12–13, 24]); but it’s about something more and larger than misogyny, and deserves a reader’s more patient attention.

“Cedar City” is indeed “about a missionary who leaves his mission early to marry the young woman carrying his unborn child.” Immediately after their single act of fornication, the young woman, Effie Butler, who (from the fifth paragraph) is both an alternate focalizer and thus a co-equal protagonist, insists Hoyt McCulley must go on his mission; but once he learns she is pregnant, he goes home, and they both do the decent and difficult things, confessing to their bishops (including her abortive attempt to have an abortion). Loving one another and feeling that (in words Effie recalls from Hester in The Scarlet Letter) their sin “had a consecration of its own” (115), they accept the church’s sanctions and arrange to marry as soon as they can. At the end, looking eagerly and anxiously toward their wedding night, it appears their marriage might stand a good chance of working all right. My more patient summary still elides far too much of the story; but like some other stories in the book, this is a problem comedy, sometimes painful but ending with “Problem solved” (116) in what looks to become a happy conjunction of its he and she,²⁵ young man and young woman, mutually “glad,” as Hoyt says to Effie in the final scene, “we made love that night. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be together now.” Note Hoyt’s repeated dual “we.” The narrator (who sometimes presents their feelings dually with the pronoun “they”) sums their shared sense that “It was a paradox, a thing both right and wrong” (115). Felix culpa.

The eponymous co-protagonists in “Bode and Iris” (the anchor story at the end of the book) are indeed “two unlikely lovers” — we might even say star-crossed — “brought together by an unexpected pregnancy.” Bode Carpenter, a backsliding working-class Mormon and “an experienced fornicator” with “knock-out good looks” and a grunt “job at the Agri-Co-op” in Richfield (217), seems an unlikely match for “Plain Jane” Iris Denning, a religiously serious and intelligently argumentative Baptist good girl working as a waitress in Salina (217);²⁶ her dad’s “a petroleum engineer” (226), which might put her family (as he seems to think) a notch above working-class. The story tracks how Bode and Iris get pregnant²⁷ and then how, against her father’s resistance, that brings them “together.” Iris (a Rainbow) plays the stronger part, quite pragmatically, in driving the plot, which changes Bode from a crass seducer to a solicitous (not to say doting) husband, who after the consummation of their wedding night reflects that if he should somehow “qualify” for “ministering angel” status in the Mormon Celestial Kingdom, he’ll ask for “an extended leave of absence” to go down “to comfort and sustain Iris” in the Terrestrial, along with “any of their children who had chosen to go the Baptist way. It was a happy thought” (248). Was and is. Again, my longer, less-reduced reduction still has to omit far too much; but this also is a problem comedy (sex before marriage leading into marriage, despite class and religious differences) that ends with its problem solved in a way that seems to bode well for the “two-church marriage” (247) Bode and Iris mean to have, and have begun to make.

So far, that’s two for two: two rather different “young men” (one “experienced,” the other not much) “who impregnate young women” out of wedlock, each with what looks like the young woman’s full consent and co-operation, and wind up willingly collaborating in what looks like viable wedlock.²⁸ Add “Reeves Kirby and Jennie O’Brien [. . .] bound into a union destined to last for half a century” (181), and make it three for three. “Hail wedded Love”!

In “Badge and Bryant” (Rulon Braunhil’s brother and his cousin Cassia’s brother) the eponymous fourteen-year-old co-protagonists and co-focalizers do “make a pact to each get a girl pregnant” — “before we’re married to her,” Badge says, proposing his plan, “And that’s how we’ll get married” (32). Apparently “enthused” by the prospect of notoriety via disgrace, they seem totally oblivious to predictable harm, though their ultimate goal is honorable in a rather dumb primitive male adolescent way. The review’s one-sentence reduction omits those specific points of the pact. It overlooks the story’s subtitle, which signals an all-downhill (but comic) slide from the moment the boys make the pact. The sentence also (dodging spoilers, surely) makes no room for how the story goes through “the Decline and Fall of the Dogfrey Club,” nor especially for its ending (which I now spoil): “‘It was a dumb idea,’ Badge said. Bryant nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it kind of was’” (56) — as a reader might see from the start. Amid pervasive smalltown Western American Mormon misogyny or sexism, that ending and those last lines offer a small hopeful sign that all is not incurably unwell in fictional Linroth, AZ, nor in Levi Peterson’s fiction more broadly, nor, perhaps, in the Zion of Arid West Mormondom.

As the review notes in its next-to-last paragraph, just one story comes (entirely) from a woman’s point of view: “the opening piece.” It matters that the whole collection opens into and through this woman’s point of view — a straightforward cardinal fact about the book that should be taken into account as signaling toward how Mormon culture has lost “a Bit of Eden,” maybe what that “Bit” was, and even how, like Ellen Tolman, the title story’s third-person focalizer and co-protagonist, we still go on “Losing a Bit of Eden,” due in some large ways to “misogyny” and to our “keenly honed righteousness” (1) regarding anything that might suggest any possibility of sex between people not married to one another. As I read them, the stories examine, across a span of roughly 135 years, how some Western American Mormon men and women have carried the burden of their misogynized sexual righteousness. It’s a heavy element in the stories’ subjects, not an attitude they (or the writer) endorse, nor more than part of any “meaning” they offer.²⁹

In my (admittedly white working-class male, thus un-authoritative and non-final) judgment, it’s regrettably unjust to both the stories and the writer that, after its six lines about “the only story that features a female protagonist” (not quite, I think I’ve shown), the review ends this way:

Peterson is often hailed as one of our greatest Mormon writers because his work examines Mormon life with an unflinching gaze. The irony of this book, however, is that while its gaze may be unflinching, its scope is narrow. Peterson is still writing as though the perspective of working-class white men is the only one worth contemplating. Yes, it is important that we see their stories, but including a wider cast of more fully developed female characters and people of color would echo the diversity of the real world we live in — a world Peterson doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge.

I’m wary of puffery words like “great” and “greatest” and rarely use them (it’s just too hard to back up the claims they make). But Levi Peterson is surely one of our good writers, and an important examiner of Mormon life. To me the cast of female characters in the collection looks fairly wide: adolescent and pre-adolescent girls, cousins, nieces, aunts, sisters, mothers, wives, whorehouse madams, et al, each presented as fully as each shorter or longer story needs or allows;³⁰ and in more than one story a male protagonist finds himself “reined [. . .] into the trail behind” a woman co-protagonist. The few (and noticeably less often presented) people of color — Rulon Braunhil’s short-term Berkeley girlfriend Emilia, five of the seven massage-parlor girls in “The Shyster,” plus two (interchangeable?) Utes, Chester in “Jesus Enough” and Lester in “Kid Kirby” — at least faintly “acknowledge” and “echo the diversity” of the fictionalized “real world” that the stories live in. My narrow experience and observation suggest that Peterson’s stories may fairly accurately reflect the demographics of small towns in the Mormon cultural region of the Intermountain West.³¹ Could Mulenax be a Basque name, and, if so, would that make Lewis a protagonist-narrator person of color?³² Three of the (at least sometime) homeless also appear (Sandrine and her daughter Aubrey and the man Sandrine calls Noose), so I also wonder what other “class” the stories might deal with — the ten or one percent? No writer has to heed any current shibboleth like “diversity” (but might get scolded for not heeding).³³ Flannery O’Connor once wrote that “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live” (27). She too.³⁴ Every gaze narrows onto its immediate selected objects one at a time, and through its habitual lenses. No one writer (not even, say, a Mormon Balzac, if you can imagine such a creature) in any genre could ever examine all of “Mormon life” in “the real world we live in” and make all of it live on the page or stage or screen.³⁵ That’s why we need not only Levi Peterson but also Melissa Leilani Larson and anyone else who wants to take on the examinations — maybe even a reviewer of a review, of all things.³⁶

About Peterson’s “unflinching gaze” I don’t think I know for sure — does that mean he hasn’t shied from writing some stories with sex (not always illicit, never very explicit) or violence in them (e.g. murder, self-mutilation, rape, assault, mayhem). I think he has tried not to flinch in either his fiction or nonfiction, especially if that means a notable degree of candor about our culture’s and his own and others’ foibles, failings, sometimes outright crimes. Kurosawa said “To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes” — but I’m not at all sure what would count as never averting. It might come down to rather fine-grained details in the presentation of violent or sexual acts, for one thing or two, but also in presenting normally private moments of or between characters (all the way from, say, defecation or bathing to intimate talk to prayer or mystical ecstasy), and in such respects I judge Peterson has been rather more circumspect — should we say he flinched or averted more? — than many writers and filmmakers.

He has indeed cast his gaze often, as in most of these ten stories, on what we might call Some Varieties of Mormon Amorous Experience. (If you prefer, say Erotic, or Romantic, or Marital, or Sexual; but since “erotic” and “sexual” have been spoiled by associations with pornography, and “romantic” and “marital” are denotatively too narrow, I’d prefer to let Amorous stand for all of that, and perhaps more.) We cannot forget that Mormon culture’s experience in that wide and (seemingly for most) inescapable domain has been and still is deeply broadly heavily inflected by Western American, American, European, and maybe Global Human cultures. It’s a huge load, and one might say it has been Peterson’s major subject. This collection presents his more recent examinations of the specifically Western American Mormon — or if you prefer, Latter-day Saint — history of trying to carry that load, or perhaps better, to unload or offload as much of it as possible, from the late 19^th into the 21^st century. We’ve all lost “a Bit of Eden,” we (some of us anyhow) wish we could get it back, especially in our amorous lives, and we find that hard to do.

Some readers, veterans or victims of extensive literary studies or a long reading life (those would both be me), incline to believe stories can help us think and feel more clearly and articulately in and about such difficulties. Why, after all, do historians write histories, biographers write biographies, novelists novels, playwrights plays? That’s not a merely rhetorical question, and one answer might sound like this from the British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch: “the study of literature [. . .] is an education in how to picture and understand human situations” (34). Most Mormon/LDS readers might not say that “For both the collective and the individual salvation of the human race, art is doubtless more important than philosophy, and literature most important of all” (76). But Murdoch didn’t say literature was “most important” above all else, just among the arts that are “more important” than her own academic specialty. Without the literature Christians call holy scripture, we’d have nothing to think or feel about individual or collective salvation through Jesus and the Atonement. Murdoch does persuade me that “the enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue” (86) because art, especially the representational arts of “literature and painting,” can “unself” us — that is, engaging with art can be a way to lose my life and find it,³⁷ as indeed some experiences have taught me. “Good art,” Murdoch wrote, “affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent,” and is thus “totally opposed to selfish obsession” (84–86). “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego” (52).

 The “preliminary” findings of some “theory of mind” (ToM) research published over a decade ago “support [the] hypothesis that literary fiction enhances” its readers’ “capacity to identify and understand others’ subjective states,” particularly the “affective component of ToM,” which “is linked to empathy (positively) and to antisocial behavior (negatively)” (Kidd and Castano 377a-b, 380a). C. S. Lewis long ago put a similar point in layman’s terms:

Good reading,³⁸ therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. (138)

A more recent literary counter-theorist, Gary Saul Morson, offers another compatible angle on how good reading goes, suggesting that “the explicit moral one may draw from a work is not what is most important about it, even from a moral point of view. What is important is how the work ‘infects’ us with moral values that we as readers practice moment to moment while reading it” (527). “Perhaps the real education that literature provides,” he writes,

lies in the moment-to-moment decisions we make in the course of reading: where to extend sympathy and where to desire a just punishment; when to be carried away and when to remain skeptical; whether or not (to use a phrase that has gone out of fashion) to “identify” with a character. Whatever conclusions we may explicitly draw, we have practiced reactions to particular kinds of people and situations, and practice produces habits that may precede, preclude, or preform conscious moral judgments in daily life. (528)

A reader is a “moral agent” (527), an agent-in-training; the exercise of agency in reading may look more “virtual” than actual, but it can be practice for actual life.

At its strongest, fiction is not just a relief or a distraction from our difficulties but a way to reflect on them and refine our perceptions and judgments in and of them; which we may hope can eventually and incrementally help us amend our conduct: re-pentance as re-thinking leading toward living more justly and mercifully. Storytelling in the mode of written narratives, novels and short stories, can help us endure in and work out or work through, or with, some of those difficulties. This is why — or we often tell ourselves it’s why — we study scripture, much of which is narrative of a high order.

But our enjoyment of stories (spoken, written, staged, or filmed) will not help us much if we do not learn to read them well, if we enjoy them only as diversion, “entertainment,” or what Murdoch calls “fantasy-consolation” (64), or if we read them only for “messages” or “themes.” Most of us, much of the time, in our culture as it has been since at least the mid-20th century, read poorly in one or another of these ways, for diversion or for messages (which we sometimes use to ratify our diversions and fantasy-consolations, as in “it had a good message”). You don’t have to hear much talk about a novel or a movie to notice this.³⁹ Reading those ways — especially reading doctrinally or ideologically — can pretty reliably insulate us from fiction’s power to extend our experience by helping us to “feel” the “experiences” of its imagined other people, whether they are “real” actual historical persons like Joseph and Judah or Peter or Paul or Jesus himself, or “made up” by the storyteller, like Pierre Bezúkhov and Natasha Rostóva, Effie and Hoyt, Bode and Iris, Darby and Tilly, Rulon and Cassia and Ashley. Actually, any historical person finally must also be “made up” for us in sentences or images. If we had no gospels, no testaments, stories, pictures, almost none of us would think or feel anything about Jesus.⁴⁰

Criticism generally comes after our primary, less-mediated experiences of artworks; we start it when we talk or write, whether casually or deliberately, about those experiences. That makes it “secondary” to, or maybe even “parasitic” on, our experiences (Steiner 7).⁴¹ At its best, criticism can help us “receive these things,” artworks, more fully and articulately, ultimately more usefully.⁴² As one kind of criticism, reviewing is literally preliminary for its audience much of the time: it’s “before the threshold”; we read a review supposing it may help us decide whether to buy a book (print or download) or tickets for a new movie or play or Broadway show. The aggressive marketing or “packaging” of artworks also does this, and reviewing subserves marketing about as often as it subverts it.⁴³ A review can and often will prejudice, pre-judge, our experience of an artwork, and either turn us away from it (as sometimes maybe we should be) or distort our reception of it. In such cases, we might often be well off without it (see Steiner 4–11). Have you ever heard or read even a favorable review that was better than your own less-filtered experience of an artwork, whether that experience was good, bad, or “mixed”? A review more moving, shaking, disturbing, consoling, exciting than the work?⁴⁴

We’ll never get rid of criticism entirely, not so long as we’re moved to try to talk or write about our experiences of artworks. Good criticism — or at least better criticism, by which I mean first patiently and generously attentive and answerable to the work — coming after our less-mediated experience of an artwork, if we choose to attend to it, may help us know the artwork better, know it rather than know about it, “receive” it more fully and richly if we return to it.

Our best guides toward better-conducted Mormon/LDS literary criticism, I go on believing, will be not doctrines but habits: longsuffering, gentleness, love unfeigned, kindness (D&C 121.41–42). In other words, we should practice a hermeneutics of charity, which Paul said “suffereth long, and is kind,” “is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil,” and so on (1 Cor 13.4–5). Of course there can be no criticism (either interpretation or judgment) entirely without doctrine or ideology, since none of us is entirely without these. But doctrinal or ideological criticism may not serve us well, because it can all too readily be more “faithful” to doctrine than to the artwork itself, or than to Jesus, who came not “to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (Jn 3.17). If the critic of an artwork is a disciple of Jesus, wouldn’t the criticism be guided by that attitude, that mode of conduct toward the small “world” of the artwork?

I’ve used the words “attention” and “attentive” often in these pages because I think that a criticism faithful to Jesus would first of all give patient and generous attention to the work. Decades ago Simone Weil called attention the “substance” of both “the love of God” and “the love of our neighbor” (114). Long ages before her, St Augustine wrote that “anyone who thinks that he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them” (27). Having said attention “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object” (111), Weil explained that “The love of our neighbor in all its fulness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’” (115). Reading a story is as if I had asked a first-person narrator Weil’s question, then listened; or as if I’d asked a third-person narrator “What are they going through?” Either way, the “what” is the “arrangement of incidents,” the “plot” that presents the action of the story. Because it presents agents in action, a novel or a short story “can be a paradigm of moral activity,” and in reading a story, my “moral knowledge” of its agents and their thoughts, speeches, and deeds consists in “seeing a complex, concrete reality in a highly lucid and richly responsive way; it is taking in what is there, with imagination and feeling” (Nussbaum 148, 152).

For this kind of reading, a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (see Ricoeur 29–35) will not serve as well as an old-fashioned “hermeneutics of faith,” or what some recent thinkers would call a “hermeneutics of love” (see Jacobs) or “charity” (see Marion). When suspicion has found the evidence it looks for, it can and often does let itself stop looking. When ideological criticism finds something contrary to its habitual doctrinal or tribal allegiances, it may stop looking, then condemn.

Case in point: In 1942, John A. Widtsoe’s decidedly mixed review of Virginia Sorensen’s first novel, A Little Lower than the Angels, praised the book for “many fine passages,” “much careful research in [its] preparation,” and a writer “gifted in her style and expression”; for a story “well told” yet somehow also “uneven in structure” and “not colorful,” which “Only occasionally [. . .] grips the reader. Fire is wanting.” Then, “As a Mormon novel,” he judged it “ineffective” because “There were strong beliefs, right or wrong, that made possible the building of Nauvoo, that drove the Saints across the plains and enabled them to conquer the Great American Desert,” and “These compelling forces are absent, to the reader’s surprise.” The book ends with the February 1846 exodus over the frozen Mississippi, so crossing the plains and conquering the desert don’t strictly pertain; and to my surprise, at last reading a book I’ve neglected too long, I find the early Latter-day Saints’ “strong beliefs” implicit and sometimes explicit in every chapter, on almost every page,⁴⁵ and for me “Joseph Smith and his associates” do not “become [. . .] rather insipid milk and water figures” (whatever that should mean). But to Widtsoe, Sorensen’s story of Nauvoo “does not comport with the historical achievements of the Mormon pioneers.”

Widtsoe seems to have wanted a more highly-colored and rhetorically fired-up heroic or melodramatic or hagiographic depiction of “the actions of the Mormons in the tempestuous Nauvoo days,” and Sorensen let him down with her “ordinary” folks, where the non-Mormon novelist Elinor Pryor’s And Never Yield (reviewed in an adjacent column on the same page of the June 1942 Improvement Era) delivered what he wanted. But, that disappointment aside, in his next-to-last paragraph Widtsoe most strongly condemned Sorensen for “the eager grasping for modern unlovely realism,” which “allowed place” for “some trivial and repulsive episodes”: “How Simon’s capable second wife cured one of Mercy’s boys of bed-wetting does not add interest or beauty to the story. Nor does the sense of decency welcome the account of the sex temptation of Mercy’s oldest son.” I thought Jarvie Baker’s “sex temptation” (from a somewhat older and more experienced young woman living temporarily with the family as help for the ailing Mercy Baker) came across with noticeable “decency,” and must admit the bed-wetting cure interested and moved me, even seemed “lovely” in its way, showing just how “capable” and tender Simon Baker’s younger and childless second wife Charlot Leavitt could be as a mother (“competent” is the novel’s word for her), though it aroused bedridden Mercy’s fear and hostility. “Others [of the “trivial and repulsive”] might be mentioned,” Widtsoe went on, but I can’t think of any — well, maybe when pregnant Mercy has to “squat” on the ground outside the Bakers’ unfinished house by moonlight in chapter 1? or something in the gossipy quilting party in chapter 4? “Readers,” Widtsoe opined and impugned, “are beginning to wonder whether the constant stark realism of the present literary day comes from the writers, or from publishers who compel the writers in the interest of greater profits.” Maybe some readers of my and later generations are so inured to stark unlovely modern realism that it no longer bothers us so much.⁴⁶ But although official church magazines and (so far as I can tell) Apostles no longer review putative “Mormon novels,” Mormon/LDS literary reviewing has still not come far enough from Widtsoe’s hermeneutics of suspicion in the 1940s.⁴⁷

Did Jesus practice a hermeneutics of charity or of suspicion? Mostly charity, I would say. The scribes and Pharisees look totally into suspicion, especially aimed at Jesus. And not without some reason, since he often calls them out for what he sees in their conduct, and calls them bad names in public: hypocrites (Mt 16.3; Mk 7.6; etc etc), whitewashed tombs crammed with skeletons (Mt 23.27), poisonous snakes (Mt 12.34, 23.33), and so forth. Yet he did warn the large audience of his best-known discourse “That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5.20).⁴⁸ And on at least two occasions, one public, the other more private, he more quietly (as I read these texts) tried to give them what they needed to do better: “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God” (Mk 12.34); “Simon, I have somewhat to say unto thee” (Lk 7.40).

Too often for my comfort the scriptures prod me to aim my suspicion at myself, as with commandments that, if I think I love Jesus, I ought to keep: “love your enemies”; “give to him that asketh thee,” etc etc. We can each, if we re-read his sayings, come up with a depressingly long list of the ones we do not consistently keep — “Agree with thine adversary quickly,” “resist not evil,” “Take no thought for your life,” “Judge not,” etc etc etc. We may discover that indeed we’ve been doing our father’s business but not noticing who is the father of our deeds (see Jn 8.38–47). If I look into my often accusatory heart, I may see that I’m doing (there if not outwardly) the work of the Accuser General, whom scripture sometimes names in Greek as diabolos, devil, or in Hebrew and Aramaic: Satan. Want to know where the Adversary is at work? Look no further. Pogo got this right: We have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us.

If I am at work as a Mormon/LDS literary critic or reviewer and I judge that an artwork, or something in it, some “one little part,” or a bunch, or a big part, is an enemy, someway inimical to me, to “my people” (working-class or upper-middle, white or of color, male or female, cis- or trans-, Mormon or ex, however I define “my”), to the church, to what I understand as “doctrine,” to my preferred ideology, well, all right: I can call it as I see it. But marking this or that out as an enemy, must I not also then ask myself how shall I love this enemy?⁴⁹ If I do not do that, and enact some sort of fruitful answer, have I as critic comported myself as a disciple of Jesus? I find it hard to live fully answerable to this question. But if I do criticism as a disciple of Jesus, it is the one question I shall face in every moment of that work.

On one or another AML occasion, long years ago, I put the question somewhat this way: How in Jesus’s name and for his sake shall we read? Reading is choosing. Reader: choose.

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¹I suspended final editing and documentation to draft another and longer essay, and came back to this one just days after Dialogue 56.2 arrived, with Karen Rosenbaum’s letter to the editor also responding to Melissa Leilani Larsen’s review (55.2: 185–88) of Levi Peterson’s story collection. I’m pleased to concur largely with Rosenbaum’s “Another Perspective on Levi Peterson,” but will not try to note specific points of congruence or divergence.

²Wrong on two counts: I was not asking “What Is?” (though I didn’t pose my actual question as baldly as I do here), and I was not much “vs. Richard Cracroft,” hardly at all on the “What Is?” question, since I tried to sideline that; I did criticise his 1990 review of Harvest, but I had bigger fish to fry (e.g. Socrates and Plato as the ancestors of an unfortunate tendency in Mormon Literary Criticism); his address the next year was decidedly (but not solely) “vs.” mine.

³Prophetic directives notwithstanding, I go on thinking of myself, and of the literary sub-community, as Mormon rather than Latter-day Saint. Two main reasons: “Mormon” can usefully denote a broad religious-cultural tradition with a compound-complex and decidedly non-monolithic un-saintly history (which is to say it has a history); and if I think I’m a saint I almost certainly am not. I’d also feel rather awkward talking about a “Latter-day Saint” literary work, since only a person might become a saint, and (among writers, readers, reviewers, critics) God only knows who is and who ain’t. I will sometimes use “Mormon/LDS” to remind myself that within the broader tradition a more rigorously doctrinal or doctrinaire discourse sometimes impinges on literary and other cultural discussions.

⁴Disclosures: Levi Peterson has been my friend for over four decades, principally in a writing group that he convened in 1981 (among ourselves we sometimes dubbed it The Cutting Edge, a jokey and a partial misnomer). We met monthly and still do, though some members have departed and others joined, and in retirement Levi moved to Washington state; we visit when we can. In the 80s and 90s we also shared some memorable summer backpacking trips in the Uinta Mountains. I’ve long enjoyed and admired both his nonfiction and his fiction (especially its fundamentally comic plots), and close acquaintance may make me both a biased and a better reader (it will feel odd to refer to him as Peterson). I don’t recall ever meeting Melissa Leilani Larsen, though I’ve heard her speak a few times on panels. I’ve read just two of her full-length plays, seen one short play performed, enjoyed all three, and wish I knew her and her work better. I will refer as often as I can to the review, not the reviewer, because I mean to criticise the review for some ways in which I judge it misrepresents Levi Peterson’s fiction and thus misleads potential readers; some of these ways may look rather trivial, others I regard as seriously harmful. Harm reduction in this specific case is a close secondary concern, and it will take a lot of space to give fair attention to the review’s overall argument and to its claims about specific stories, and to check those claims against the texts of the stories.

⁵In my time at BYU (1975–2014), especially amid the racket and toxic dust of our 1990s subculture wars, the small to nil rewards could be compounded for humanities faculty writing in any area or genre of “Mormon studies.” You might earn a heavier teaching load after publishing in Dialogue or Sunstone, or have your application for “continuing faculty status” challenged for publishing a good novel too “provincially” with Signature Books.

⁶I once heard my distinguished senior colleague Arthur Henry King (OBE, CBE) practically shout, “As long as there is a working class, I am of it!” Me too, though the histories behind our similar feelings differ.

⁷“Class” in the USA is “a touchy subject,” says a chapter title in Paul Fussell’s Class (1983). Fuzzy too, I’ve thought. Alas, in 40 years I’ve not made time to read all of that book, which will doubtless be smart, witty, cranky, etc etc, and likely will instruct me well. It’s back on my to-read list. (Fussell, btw, rimes with Russell.)

⁸The “of” genitive here is ambiguous: is the author’s origin or his subject matter “the American West”? I read it as both: Peterson is of the West and writes of the West.

⁹Sometime during his writing of “Bode and Iris,” which is set mainly in Salina, Levi Peterson phoned to ask me about the midnight massacre of POWs there in July 1945. I was one year old at the time, so I could tell him only what my parents and one of my high school English teachers had told me later, plus a little more I’d learned from reading and from a brief visit to the Camp Salina Museum, which opened in 2016. That phone call constitutes the only prior involvement or investment that I remember with any story in the collection. The current Wikipedia article s.v. “Utah prisoner of war massacre” tells far more than I ever knew about that bloody deed. Levi and I have not communicated during my writing of this essay, though other friends in the writing group have commented on drafts, and he will have read it by the time it appears in any more public venue.

¹⁰“Kid Kirby” reads as a twice-told tale, with its dime-novel title and carefully-posted references to a sensationalized “fast-draw artist” version of Reeves Kirby’s story (153, 176, 183). If you’ve not read Hawthorne as moral historian and you care, read Michael J. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales (1984, rpt. 1995). Prof. Colacurcio directed my PhD dissertation.

¹¹The vexatious notion or principle of “conjugal rights,” understood as “the rights, especially to sexual relations, regarded as exercisable in law by each partner in a marriage” (OED s.v. conjugal, adj.), must have a long, complex, and, yes, misogynistic history in ecclesial and civil law, of which I’m utterly ignorant. But I will note that St Paul (an easy target for the labels “misogynist” and “misogamist”) in at least one epistle sets forth complementary and absolute unconditional spousal duties rather than “rights” or quids pro quo (see 1 Cor 7.3–5). I don’t recall Jesus saying anything about this, unless his (logically universal) imperative “Give to him that asketh thee” (Mt 5.42) may be thought to apply. That, as disciples say elsewhere, “is an hard saying” (Jn 6.60), a commandment that, like “love your enemies” (Mt 5.44), many of us find hard to “keep” consistently (see Jn 14.15).

¹²Readers who have attended or taken part in an LDS temple sealing will recognize these as the only two verbs that designate the deed that a man and woman do at the altar by each saying Yes, their sole vow there and then to one another and to God. Thanks in no small part to the long historical misogyny of our culture, it’s a hard pledge to make good on. We need all the help we can get — from Jesus, from writers and artists, from one another.

John Bennion has asked me if there might be “another irony” here: “A woman who wants to be held must give her man sex before he’ll hold her?” I don’t read Tilly as offering a quid pro quo, and Darby might choose just to hold her. Which, as a memorable line in As Good as It Gets reminded us, can be “better than sex.”

¹³Genesis 2.25, “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed,” has doubtless invited many readers to imagine this happy state, as when Milton in his grand blank verse epic tale of how we lost Eden, Paradise Lost, writes that “into thir inmost bower / Handed they went; and eas’d the putting off / These troublesome disguises which wee wear, / Straight side by side were laid,” and so on (iv.738–41). I judge that Levi Peterson in his prosaic and comic mode rather often exclaims, with Milton, “Hail wedded Love” (iv.750) — notably in several marriage stories in this collection (just one or two might not be someway “about” marriage; guess which).

¹⁴I fear it may not work very smoothly under the regime of “boundaries” proposed in an August 2022 Liahona article, which offers to make “physical intimacy” a zero-sum game, with one spouse’s privity the other’s privation: I win, you lose. The “one flesh” of Gen 2.24 doesn’t appear to mark such a boundary, nor have I noticed Jesus or St Paul recommending any (see note 11 above). I agree with a great deal in the article, but it does raise at least this one problem without sufficiently addressing it: How shall we negotiate what you want and I do not want?

¹⁵One might notice, for instance, the cardinal textual fact that the two longish Wild West tales bracket a much shorter story of two late 20^th or early 21^st century men on horseback “playing cowboy” (145); or that “Badge and Bryant” immediately precedes “The Return of the Native,” two Braunhil stories set mainly in Linroth, AZ.

¹⁶What, after all, does it include or exclude from any and every institutional, socio-cultural, or interpersonal situation or relation involving men and women? I assume that, along with whatever and however much else, misogyny, “hating women,” involves a fascinated fear and loathing of women’s bodies and functions and products, and, by extension, of human and animal bodies in general, as well as a fascinated fear and loathing of sex, men’s resentment of women’s “power” to arouse or quell sexual desire, women’s resentment of men’s “power” over their bodies and lives, etc etc etc. It might be clear by now that I deplore this too. I don’t think even Andrea Dworkin quite implies that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, but I’m open to further instruction on misogyny. And I must acknowledge that the review did provoke me to re-read Peterson’s collection with closer attention to the misogynistic elements in the stories. That has been its first and main service to me as a reader — undeniably worthwhile, since I’m coming to understand the book better than before. I’ll note, however, that I doubt the review’s implication that (although it seems to suggest this is their main “limitation”) working-class males have any corner on misogyny.

¹⁷It puzzles me when a reader appears to think that a writer’s judgments of characters or their thoughts, speeches, and actions differ strongly from the reader’s own. What evidence in any story supports that? I assume there must be cases in which this is true, but I’ve yet to meet a convincing one (unless in various kinds of junk fiction).

¹⁸I intend this term as description, not disparagement. Every interpretation “reduces” its object, as one might boil down a sauce or syrup or reduce a rational fraction to its lowest denominator (8/32 = 1/4). Every text reduces its writer’s experience, observation, thinking, or imagining into written sentences. That’s not always damaging, but sometimes. Some things cannot be reduced without remainder or loss, and some cannot or should not be reduced; 3/4 is just less accurate and precise than 11/16 or 13/16, and that matters to a cabinetmaker. A person or a fictional character ought not to be reduced to one trait. This is an ethical as well as an epistemological imperative. A reviewer or a critic is obliged to take scrupulous care with the “how,” “how far,” and “to what” of reduction.

¹⁹Working through that argument could fill many pages, and we’d have to take on Socrates and Plato. To call a story misogynistic because it deals with misogyny is akin to adopting the view I heard expressed by a church magazine editor, sometime in the late 1970s, that certain things (guess what kinds) could not be mentioned lest that be taken as advocating or condoning. Attitudes at the magazines obviously have relaxed somewhat since then, but the fallacy of judging an artistic whole by “one little part” or several — call it the particle or “little bits” fallacy — still looks to be staying alive and kicking in Mormon literary and cinematic discussions (see Griffin). I suspect an unstated and patently absurd major premise lurks somewhere in such arguments, which make about as much and as little sense as having a bad hair day and concluding that you’ve therefore had a bad hair week, year, or life. Or, to cite literary instances (tougher and trickier), it makes as much sense as and no more sense than saying that Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” advocates communal ritual murder (one character in the story overtly does); or that Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” condones clandestine vengeance (the avenger narrates, only his befuddled victim pleads for relief from what he does not recognize is revenge, and a few students did root for Montresor and applaud his “perfect crime”). The particle fallacy seems to be the basis of movie ratings and thus of the Mormon/LDS injunction against viewing R-rated movies — or “rated-R movies” as I hear some people say. Of course one should absolutely, universally avoid inhaling or ingesting or contacting some particles — asbestos, coronavirus, sarin, plutonium, etc etc etc. Are words, sentences, images analogously toxic or potentially deadly? Sometimes some words can be for some people (think January 6, 2021).

²⁰Obviously an English sentence like “Rulon raped his cousin” will “force” me to read “Rulon” as the subject-agent of “raped” and “cousin” as direct object and victim. But as a reader I don’t so much “ruminate with him” as perform (since this is first-person) his voice so I can listen to it; I exercise a larger freedom than he. His ruminations on the rape itself are few and, but for one (60–61), rather brief, since he has quite another story to tell.

²¹I assume the age of consent in Arizona law in 1951 was 18, as it is now, Clearly, Cassia never named Rulon as the father of her child (we are not to know why). Had he been brought to trial, Rulon’s age might have been a defense but not an exception, though sadly we know how a trial would likely have gone at that time and in that place. Teenage sex, and incestuous sex, sometimes occurred then and there, as here and now they still do, and might more likely happen between first cousins “born within six days of each other,” raised in adjacent houses virtually “as twins” by their families, and thus developing “feelings for each other from early on that first cousins shouldn’t have” (59). Rulon later learned that even as first cousins he and Cassia could have married “in Europe and nearly half of the states in the Union” at that time (70). None of this excuses Rulon, nor does he use it to excuse himself.

²²“Son of man” in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Is 51.12; Ez 2.1, 3) consistently means “human” or “mortal,” and it’s not always clear in the New Testament where it might refer singularly, in some enigmatic capital-S way, only to Jesus himself; and “power” in that verse translates Greek ἐξουσίαν, exousian, which Jerome had rendered as potestatem: authority and capacity. This story and especially its final scenes touch on something of immense importance. “The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the faculty of forgiving”; “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever” (237). Self-victimized in consequence of his deed, Rulon insists to Ashley, “Some things can’t be forgiven” (77); Derrida has replied to that: “forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable” (32).

²³It’s not particularly hard to discover this sort of “framed” or “fixed” or “replicated” or “pattern” interpretation in everyday domestic life or in the workplace, in what I call “interpersonal hermeneutics”: in one or a few interactions, one person constructs an interpretation of another’s disposition and motives (which is to say character or ethos), and then, overlooking specific contextual factors or counter-evidence, easily fits subsequent interactions into that already-set interpretation. Sometimes this is bad trouble, and serious storytelling often alerts us to it. It can be a vicious hermeneutic circle to get out of. Misogyny and the suspicion of misogyny make it worse.

²⁴This term doesn’t appear in the OED, but I doubt it can be purely my own invention. How else might one refer to, say, Butch and Sundance, Harry and Sally, Thelma and Louise, Romy and Michele? Our term protagonist might have designated the “first actor” in a tragedy (see Aristotle, Poetics1449a17-19), while it appears that antagonist would designate either of two characters opposed in a debate or other conflict (see OED s.v. antagonist, 1.5.a). But a buddy story or a love story, any story of collaboration or co-operation, it seems to me, will often call for this term. Several stories in Losing a Bit of Eden surely do, starting with “Giles and Ellen” in the title story (3, 4, 5). As the Apostle saith, “neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord” (1 Cor 11.11).

²⁵“Don’t have too many characters,” Chekhov counseled his brother Aleksandr; “The center of gravity should be two: he and she” (37). His advice apparently referred to a particular story Aleksandr was writing, and we might generalize “he and she” to stand for any “two” complementary or collaborative or conflicting opposites. The one story in Losing a Bit of Eden that does not hold its “center of gravity” literally in “he and she,” I think, is “Badge and Bryant”; even “Bachelor Stallions” puts it there, though the identity of “he” soon shifts from “fused” Mort-and-Irvin toward Irvin, and gets violently shifted to Irvin alone before that story ends.

²⁶Mom’s Café, I’d want to bet, though even in my time, besides a couple fast-food places (one still there, last I know), there were also Ted’s Lunch (my dad’s uncle) kittycorner from Mom’s, a counter in Dale’s Rexall about a half-block north of that (both long gone), and Shaheen’s several blocks west on Main Street (obliterated some time ago). Presently, in Bode and Iris’s time, heading south on US 89 past Mom’s and out toward Love’s Travel Stop and the I-70 interchange, you’d pass a taco shop, a pizzeria, El Mexicano, and a Denny’s; so Iris does have options. As a native I’ve returned less and less often to Salina over the decades, and not kept good track of its evolving commerce. I can’t begin to say how keenly I miss Uncle Ted’s french fries.

²⁷The “get” part of this expression does normally take two, though the “pregnant” part, stricto sensu, ends up burdening just one, putting the other more or less on standby. Some, like Bode, like Hoyt, like Reeves Kirby, stand to; none of these three appears to feel shotgunned into marriage; “the instinct of fidelity” is strong in them.

²⁸Of these two, John Bennion has remarked to me, “It’s difficult to write a story about characters who make a ‘mistake’ and then refuse to allow it to ruin their lives”; and a “story where the characters over and over again make the right choices” is “very difficult to make interesting.” Amen. And Levi Peterson does it.

²⁹I don’t think all or even most stories exist for the sake of a propositional “meaning” or “theme” (an expectation instilled and calcified in generations of highschool- and college-educated readers by a watered-down New Criticism, and from a post-structuralist angle, perhaps deplorably “logocentric”). Some stories (in any mode or genre) do exist to illustrate or demonstrate an idea or a thesis; and we all abstract lots of “messages” or “meanings” (as I’ve done plentifully here) from the stories we receive, since we seem to be the hermeneutic species par excellence. But we’re rather likely to value a story enough to do that if and when it has moved us, made us feel something about — and for, and with — its people and what they do and suffer; or we may do it when a story has failed to move us, or put us off or seriously offended us, and we wonder what its “point” was. No matter what else he was wrong about, I think Tolstoy was right about this: “Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them” (WIA 51; italics in original). That makes art both useful and dangerous. Talking about the “theme” or “meaning” of a story is one way to make it useful but maybe less dangerous by making it less keenly felt; it can be an exercise in what I sometimes call “contraceptive thinking,” replacing a story with an abstraction that we call an “interpretation” — “another way,” says William H. Gass, “of robbing it of its reality. How,” he asks, “would you like to be replaced by your medical dossier, your analyst’s notes? They take much less space in the file” (283).

³⁰We wade into muddy waters here. It’s unclear just what “developed” means — information as to looks, thoughts, speech, habits, tics, past, etc? And I’ve yet to find a standard gauge for more and less “fully” — how many sentences a character shows up in, by name or pronoun and in nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases, how often with transitive, intransitive, active, passive, present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect verbs? A non-speaking character in a printed story might appear as no more than a name or a general category (small child, tall man) in a prepositional phrase, but in, say, a TV adaptation would get at least a complete body in living color, whereas even a protagonist in a novel may lack some digits, limbs, organs, interior spaces, personal history (see Gass 34–54). I do think Aristotle was right: in storytelling (whatever the mode or genre) plot is the chief thing, character the next thing (see Poetics 1450a). As usual, there’s too much more to say, but one might start with E. M. Forster’s high modernist claim (wryly self-undercutting?) that “We know better” than Aristotle (Aspects of the Novel, ch. 5), and then go on to Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984), which I’m still belatedly reading. In any case, where a novelist may luxuriate in room to “develop” characters, a short story writer confronts severe formal and technical austerities. So Peterson presents eight-year-old Aubrey and middle-aged Max much less often than Sandrine, and Sandrine less often than Lewis. Storytelling just works that way because we work that way, paying less attention and paying it less often to some people than to others; even in Tolstoy’s War and Peace I think we get less of Natasha Rostóva than we do of Pierre Bezúkhov (which hasn’t made her any less memorable or lovable to me). To ask for more is to ask for a different story, not the one the writer wrote; it might also be a better story, but I feel obliged first to understand the one I have, before I ask for the other. Joyce fails to “fully develop” Mangan’s sister in “Araby”? You might just try writing her story yourself. Gregor Samsa’s sister Grete in Kafka’s Die Verwandlung? Try that one too.

³¹One might check with the Census Bureau or Wikipedia for any actual towns named in the book, but it’s at least debatable whether even “realistic” stories set in “actual” times and places are strictly obliged to “represent” those milieux with social-statistical precision. Growing up in Salina (population creeping up on 2000 then, nudging 2700 now), I saw few people of color (distinctly visible to me) other than Navajo families who came seasonally to work the sugarbeet fields (backbreaking work I avoided all I could) and lived in military surplus tents (from the POW camp) on the edge of town, and a few Navajo children in the Indian Placement Program who went to grade school with us (one stayed all the way through high school to graduation). Our family physician for several years of my early adolescence was a kosher-keeping Long Islander, a big friendly gentle bear who paid housecalls (to us anyway) on his walks home from the hospital; his and his wife’s and small daughters’ slightly olive complexions looked “white” enough to me, but some citizens did call Doctor Morris Fine “the little Jew,” and the Fines eventually moved back East where it would be easier to keep kosher. In high school I met the one Asian I knew, from nearby Sigurd, Dillon Inouye (born at Heart Mountain, later my roommate for a semester in Helaman Halls); some people called the Inouyes “Japs,” but my dad said Yukus Inouye was “a good farmer.” Nick and Ellis Shaheen were (to me) vaguely Middle-Eastern by their surname, but didn’t look much different from a lot of dark-haired Nielsens or Andersons or Sorensens, and their boys that I went to school with seemed just like the rest of us. As for religious diversity (other than the Fines temporarily), my classmate and round-the-corner neighbor Ann Cherry proudly called herself and her family Episcopalians (though her dad’s name was Wesley), and regularly attended my mother’s MIA Beehives class; another schoolmate, one of the Durfee boys from Aurora, showed up decades later as a Baptist preacher here in Provo, though I always assumed the family was Mormon; and during a brief stay at St Michael’s Hospital in Richfield I came to know the sweet kindness of some Catholic nuns. Politically, another Aurora schoolmate’s father was rumored to be a Communist. That was about the size of it, back in the 50s to mid-60s. Now there are some Hispanics, still no Blacks that I’ve noticed, and for some years an Asian family (Chinese I think) has run the town’s oldest motel, my favorite funky place to stay whenever I’m down there (in room 19 if I can, for the local-looking landscape print affixed to its windowless back wall).

³²Wild guess. The surname looks to be one of the almost innumerable variants of Molyneux, and doesn’t carry any of the more frequent Basque markers (see Wikipedia s.v. Basque surnames). But the Mulenax farm is not so far from an epicenter of Basque culture in northeastern Nevada, and Basque sheepherders were spoken well of as far away as my home county in south central Utah. My early and favorable but Hollywooden impression of Basque people was shaped by a movie, Thunder in the Sun (1959), a clear case of cultural misappropriation, with no Basque actors (that I know of) and flagrant distortions of some elements of Basque culture. Anytime I’m in Reno or, say, Battle Mountain, I try to eat at least one Basque meal, family style, for a taste of culinary and commensal diversity.

³³I favor diversity too, though even since childhood and adolescence I’ve had limited experience with it — almost none at BYU, some (mostly religious) in grad school, somewhat more (all multi-ethnic) during the ten months (1980–81) I taught on faculty exchange at BYU-Hawaii and attended a Laie ward with members from all over Polynesia and all around the Pacific Rim, and a Samoan bishop who collected our garbage on Moana Street. I see no reason to chide any artist for not making diversity an artistic agenda (as distinct from political, social, or personal); any artist’s or writer’s own ethnicity etc etc will keep him or her or them plenty busy.

³⁴O’Connor knew what she could and could not “make live,” and kept her passionately Catholic, fiercely theological gaze narrowed mainly on white working-class and middle-class Southern Protestants. Even the people of one color she couldn’t help but notice tend to be peripheral in, or absent from, her most often anthologized stories.

³⁵In these latter days, one who tried could draw fire from several directions at once for “appropriation.”

³⁶My 1991 AML address did something like this too, taking Richard Cracroft’s 1990 review of Harvest as one of its starting points (4^th in line), and thus got me into a little trouble. See Givens 219–21 for a sketch of that; but then read Cracroft’s review and my and his AML addresses to kink some too-straight lines in that account. My 1996 AML rejoinder to Cracroft (in its abridged presented and published forms) still did not lay out the complete case, much less close it.

³⁷The King James Bible renders the Greek ψυχή, psychē, in Mark 8.35 (and in five similar sayings in the other gospels) as “life,” though the word could just as well be translated “soul” or maybe even “self.” Jesus might have had in mind the sort of moment of self-forgetful or un-self-regarding absorption in something or someone else that returns us to ourselves somehow altered, othered, so that afterwards we never feel or think quite the same. In his late parable of the sheep and goats, the “blessed of my father” are dumbfounded when called to “Come” and “inherit the kingdom,” and can only wonder “When saw we thee”? (see Mt 25.31–40, esp 34, 37–39). They’d been losing their lives in doing what they felt to do, not thinking of themselves, certainly not thinking of any “blessings” they’d accrue for their service, only of the hungry thirsty sick naked and imprisoned others in need of help.

³⁸To grasp what Lewis means by this, you might just have to read the entire book, An Experiment in Criticism. The experiment is worth the time.

³⁹Read Tolstoy’s What Is Art? and sort out how and where he is right and wrong about your experiences of whatever arts you habitually enjoy; this might be worth several hours of the one irreplaceable life you’re living once and for all and in one direction right now.

⁴⁰With “almost none of us” I mean to allow for direct visionary, auditory, or even tactile encounters. But that phrase may hedge needlessly, since all but one direct encounter I’ve heard or read of have occurred either in the gospels or after the gospels were available; how else would anyone even guess whom she or he was encountering? The one exception, Saul of Tarsus, felled to the earth on the road to Damascus, does have to ask who’s calling him by name (Ac 9.3–5), but he has already heard tell of Jesus, else he’d not have been on that road.

⁴¹But see also A. O. Scott, 16–21, partly contra Steiner. In chapter 12 of What Is Art? Tolstoy takes “art criticism” severely to task as one condition enabling “the production of objects of counterfeit art” (110; see esp 111–14, also 117–18, 130). I fear he may be mostly right about this, but I also persist in thinking responsible criticism can usefully serve the reception and shared understanding of what he would call genuine and good art.

⁴²See Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art as Therapy, and A. O. Scott, Better Living through Criticism.

⁴³For a better sense of the role reviews play in the marketing of new literary artworks, see Richard Ohmann, “The Social Definition of Literature,” which seems just as pertinent today as when it was first published in 1978. And more broadly on the marketing of books, Thomas Whiteside’s The Blockbuster Complex has been outdated mainly by the ever more monstrous growth of some trends and practices it documented in 1981.

⁴⁴After reading a novel or story collection, I’ve read a few — like Margaret Atwood’s NY Times review of Frederick Barthelme’s 1983 collection Moon Deluxe — that seemed, in a sentence or two, quite accurately to articulate my reading experience better than I could, but of course in general and abstract terms. Lately, some of James Wood’s reviews have struck me the same way. But this happens rarely, perhaps mostly because I seldom read reviews.

⁴⁵Re: “strong beliefs” and “the building of Nauvoo,” for instance, see the first two paragraphs of chapter 4. Some of the strong beliefs that “drove the Saints” across that frozen river belonged, of course, to their Hancock County neighbors, and those as well as the Saints’ beliefs are very much at work in the novel as motives for action, as when Simon Baker, after the murder of Joseph Smith, endures a beating in his own cornfield for repeatedly affirming — “Yes! I said yes!” — that he is a Mormon (ch. 40). I wonder what Mormon beliefs Widtsoe expected but did not find, since most of the book’s characters trust the prophetic leadership and spiritual gifts of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and they value marriage, family, friendship, embodied life in a physical world, helping neighbors . . . to list them all I’ll have to re-read and annotate the book. Not an uninviting notion.

⁴⁶On the other hand, some younger Mormon/LDS readers seem bothered even more. Likely instructed by the pamphlet For the Strength of Youth not to let their “sexual feelings” be aroused, thus not to think about or imagine sex, a few of my students from the mid-1980s to 2013 have seemed incapable of (or seriously indisposed toward) reading anything that suggests sex. “I do not want to see it,” said one (referring to a phrase that implied an erection). Another, more than a decade later, emailed me one evening to say “I feel very uncomfortable reading another page”; “I cannot be true to myself and finish reading The Accidental Tourist.” He’d stopped on page 200 of Anne Tyler’s novel, where separated but not-yet-divorced Macon Leary and single mother Muriel Pritchett (neither having planned to) are about to get into her bed together for the first time, but on page 201 he’s “in his underwear and she covered him with a thin, withered quilt” and a few minutes later “slid under” the quilt wearing “a silk robe,” and it’s not at all clear whether they “have sex” that night; I think not, though farther on they implicitly make it a habit. Perhaps I should not tell tales out of school, and for sure the issues raised by those candid students deserve much more patient thought. Such students in their “fugitive and cloistered virtue” exercising “their right not to read,” as I observed back in 1986, may have acted on a basis of “quite valid self-knowledge,” rightly judging themselves unprepared to read anything about sex in a literature class (GME 130), wary of what might come “from within, out of the heart” if they did (see Mk 7.14–23, esp 21). The two quoted here dropped the classes. So far as I can recall, neither of them had balked at reading Montresor’s explicitly detailed first-person account of secret vengeful murder in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” which may suggest that the so-called “sin next to murder” feels more threatening to some in recent generations than murder itself, or that they feel themselves more prone to sexual desire than to homicidal vengeance. Which to prefer? — feels like a no-brainer.

⁴⁷Of course I’ve read strong exceptions to this broad generality. But I’d rather see more, or nothing but.

⁴⁸I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find it hard to measure up to the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, let alone to exceed it.

⁴⁹Perhaps Widtsoe leaned toward this in his review of Sorensen by saying, right at the end, “She has undoubted literary gifts. Much may be expected from her.” After the scathings that precede it, even buffered by his acknowledgment of “much careful research,” the first of these two sentences might sound a bit grudging; the second does not. Widtsoe lived another decade, long enough to have seen some of the “much” that Sorensen delivered from 1942 to 1952: four more novels, three of them about Mormon families, then still more to come. I can only wonder what he thought of those next four books, if he read them. His reviews of Maurine Whipple in 1941 and Richard Scowcroft in 1945 might have helped silence the one and turn the other away for decades from explicitly Mormon characters and settings, but his review of Sorensen did not deter her.

Sources

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Leon Golden; commentary by O. B. Hardison, Jr. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Cited by the standard numbering of the Greek text, normally included in translations.

Atwood, Margaret. “Male and Lonely.” Review of Frederick Barthelme, Moon Deluxe. New York Times Book Review, 31 July 1983: 1, 22.

Augustine. On Christian Teaching. Translated by R. P. H. Green. New York, Oxford University Press, 2008.

de Botton, Alain, and John Armstrong, Art as Therapy. London: Phaidon, 2013, 2016.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Chekhov, Anton. Letters of Anton Chekhov. Selected and edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York: Viking, 1973.

Cracroft, Richard H. “Attuning the Authentic Mormon Voice: Stemming the Sophic Tide in LDS Literature.” Sunstone 91 (July 1993): 51–57.

—. Review of Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, edited by Eugene England and Dennis Clark. BYU Studies 30.2 (Spring 1990): 119–23.

Derrida, Jacques. “On Forgiveness.” On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge, 2001. 27–60.

Forster, E. M.  Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, 1927.

Fussell, Paul. Class: A Guide through the American Status System. New York: Summit, 1983.

Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Knopf, 1970; Boston: Godine, 1979.

Givens, Terryl M. Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Griffin, Glen C. “It’s a Good Show — Except One Little Part.” Marriage & Families 3 (August 2000): 23–28.

Jacobs, Alan. A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001; rpt. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Jorgensen, Bruce W. “Groping the Mormon Eros.” Dialogue 20.4 (Winter 1987): 128–37. Presented in abridged form at the 1986 Sunstone Symposium. Cited as GME.

—. “To Tell and Hear Stories: Let the Stranger Say.” Sunstone 91 (July 1993) 40–50. The abridged version in Tending the Garden, edited by Eugene England and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1996), has a few too many errata and at least one editorial change I did not approve, but some readers will give thanks for its excision of too many jokes from both text and notes.

—. “Undefining Faithful Fiction: The Sophic Stranger Rides Again (With[out] His Evil Twin).” Mormon Letters Annual 1997. Ed. Lavina Fielding Anderson. Salt Lake City: Association for Mormon Letters, 1997. Presented in (even more) abridged form at the 1996 AML conference.

Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science, New Series, 342.6156 (13 October 2013): 377–80. Since this article appears in 3-column format, I will cite page numbers followed by a, b, or c.

Larson, Melissa Leilani. “The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists.” Review of Levi Peterson, Losing a Bit of Eden. Dialogue 55.2 (Summer 2022): 185–88. The review can be read online at dialoguejournal.com in html and pdf formats, and since it is brief and I largely track its claims in sequence, I will not parenthetically cite its pages, so as to slightly reduce the clutter on my own pages.

Lawrence, D. H. “A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.” Lady Chatterley’s Lover; A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. Edited by Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 305–35.

Lewis, C. S. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

Marion, Jean-Luc. “Christian Philosophy and Charity.” Translated by Marc Sebanc. Communio 19.3 (Fall 1992): 465–73.

—. “What Love Knows.” Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. 153–69.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1674. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis, IN: Odyssey, 1957. 211–469. Cited by book and lines.

Morson, Gary Saul. “Prosaics: An Approach to the Humanities.” American Scholar 57.4 (Autumn 1988): 515–28.

Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970, 1989.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1969.

Ogles, Benjamin M., and Melissa K. Goates-Jones. “Honoring Agency in Physical Intimacy.” Liahona 46.8 (August 2022): 12–15.

Ohmann, Richard. “The Social Definition of Literature.” What Is Literature? Edited by Paul Hernadi. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978. 89–101.

Peterson, Levi S. Losing a Bit of Eden: Recent Stories. Salt Lake City: Signature, 2021. I do feel obliged to clutter my pages with parenthetical page citations to this collection to reduce the number of footnotes, but mainly so readers can more readily check my fidelity to its text.

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

Rosenbaum, Karen. “Another Perspective on Levi Peterson” [Letter to the Editor]. Dialogue 56.2 (Summer 2023): 1.

Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 1991.

Tolstoy, Leo. “Introduction to the Works of Guy de Maupassant.” The Portable Tolstoy. Edited by John Bayley. New York: Viking, 1978. 851–72. Cited as GdM.

—. What Is Art? 1898. Translated by Aylmer Maude. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996. Cited as WIA.

Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist. New York: Knopf, 1985.

Weil, Simone. “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Putnam, 1951; rpt. Harper, 1973. 105–16.

Whiteside, Thomas. The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.

Widtsoe, John A. Review of A Little Lower than the Angels by Virginia Sorensen. Improvement Era 45.6 (June 1942): 380. Signing as “J.A.W.,” Apostle Widtsoe was associate editor of the magazine from 1935 to 1952. The review twice misspells “Sorensen” as “Sorenson,” and I’ve emended one of those misspellings in this citation. As my paternal grandmother (a Dane wedded to a Norwegian) used to say, “S-E-N! Ve ain’t Svedes!” The Norwegian-born Widtsoe should’ve known better (though some Norwegians bear patronymics ending in -son; about Danes I don’t know).

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Bruce Jorgensen earned a BA cum laude in English at BYU and an MA and PhD in English and American Literature at Cornell. He taught literature and writing at BYU from 1975 to 2014. He was AML President in 1990-91.