Review
Title: And All Eternity Shook
Author: Jacob L. Bender
Publisher: Ships of Hagoth
Genre: Memoir
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 126
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 979-8210184214
Price: 9.99
Reviewed by John Engler for the Association of Mormon Letters
It’s a read, that’s for sure—And All Eternity Shook. Jacob Bender is not messing around with his brief book of 126 pages of nonfiction memoir. I can’t quite decide if it’s a long essay or a short book, but categorizing it is not the most important thing here. This book is earnest and sincere at every turn. It’s a book about a narrator in crisis—two concurrent crises, to be specific—one spawned from the other—both of which are life-altering, neither of which have easy answers—and how the narrator faces them.
In the latest offering from Ships of Hagoth, a digital-first magazine run apparently by Bender and operating partner, Jake Clayson, And All Eternity Shook is being called “its first book-length message in a bottle,” by which I think they mean their first printed publication. The web magazine, designed “for twenty-first century saints,” exhibits over one hundred essays mostly from the past year, some experimental in form, written “by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” including Bender and Clayson themselves. That the publisher has ventured into physical print with this book-length message reveals their view of the weight of it, apparently too weighty for mere digital publication. I agree.
The paperback book is spartan in appearance. There is no cover art, for one. The title is delivered in all-black text on an all-white, glossy background in all caps, left-justified, Times New Roman 64 pt font, with 1.2” line spacing, one word per line. No kerning. No bold or italics. Halfway between the title and the bottom edge of the cover, Bender’s name is laid out, right-justified, in the same font, 18 pt, and includes his middle initial. The book is only just thick enough to have a flat enough spine for the title to be printed on it. Each chapter is titled only with Roman numerals and each is preceded by a fully blank page.
But spartan in appearance does not mean spartan in content. Quite the contrary. This book drips with the anguish felt by the narrator, David Warner (who is ostensibly Bender himself, but all names have been changed “to protect the guilty,” says the disclaimer). As a reader, you can almost visibly see emotions on the page as if Bender has poured them out of a bucket and heaped them up. Some readers might consider the effort overwrought, over the top, and I’ll admit that at one point or two, I wondered myself if Bender had taken it all a bit too far, gone a little overdramatic. But my suspicions only lasted for a moment because I found myself inclined to give the narrator the benefit of the doubt. Why? Well, because it’s the story of a Mormon missionary recently returned to discover his mother near death. By my count, that alone adds up to at least five reasons that buy Bender a good deal of latitude.
First, because LDS culture is so inextricably linked to there being purpose in all things, I find myself sympathizing with the character, understanding culturally why he might feel so distraught. Second, after their years of sacrifice and service, some Mormon missionaries can (perhaps mistakenly) come to feel a certain sense of entitlement, that they deserve special favor with God, and when that favor is not so quickly delivered, anguish can ensue.
Third, he’s just come home, not only from a mission but from a foreign land, in this case, Puerto Rico—the culture shock when coming home from any LDS mission is real, and it leaves a person even under the best conditions feeling off-kilter for a time. Fourth, he’s young, which means everything is high drama. And fifth, the drama is not imagined—his mom is unexpectedly frail, dying right before his eyes. Altogether, this protagonist gets a lot of leeway from me, even when his anguish, his intensity, and his earnestness may sometimes be off the conventional scale.
There’s one more reason why I buy it all, and it’s all about the form of the writing. Rarely have I seen prose delivered in such poetic form. It’s true that sometimes the language itself is poetic, but I’m talking more about the form on the page, the choice of paragraphing, line spacing, and even line justification. At times, there’s a page or two of straight narrative prose, and the writing is well-crafted, unpretentious, and very readable. Other times a single page might contain several visually disconnected paragraphs, or a few lines widely spaced down the page. On one page, there’s a single word. And it follows a fully blank page. This approach inserts literal space and time into the narrative and helps to convey the emotional state of the narrator.
In addition to visual creativity, the content on the pages is fractured as well. It’s not quite so random or unpremeditated as free-form, stream-of-consciousness, nor is it not quite so esoteric as poetry. But it’s not particularly close to straight prose or straight narrative form, either. Because of this, there are times when it’s not immediately clear when and where a scene is happening—before, during, or after the mission. There are times when it’s unclear what the purpose of a particular snippet might be, especially when scripture verses are cut and spliced in unexpected ways and in unexpected juxtapositions. And there are times when it feels almost like Bender had been playing darts to decide which scene to include next.
But that’s not to say the story is without a narrative arc. It builds as a story should. Even though the emotion starts out high on the anguish scale, Bender successfully manages to ratchet it up throughout the book. It builds to a climax, as effective narratives do, to the point where the narrator finds himself cornered, in a way by his own set of beliefs and is faced with a seemingly impossible predicament. The form is simultaneously traditional and unconventional, and it works.
It could be argued, both literally and figuratively, that the book is almost in its entirety a prayer, a sincere, earnest prayer from a man in very real crisis—facing the potential loss of his mother and simultaneously the potential loss of his faith. When I say it’s a prayer, I mean it literally. The protagonist kneels to pray on page 19 and the prayer ends with an “Amen” with just four pages left in the book. That being said, the intervening pages are not a transcript of a man speaking words to his God. But it’s all still a prayer.
It’s a capital P kind of Prayer, a narrative that has the feel of an Enos-on-his-knees-all-the-night-long kind of prayer. It’s a tapestry of prayer-speak woven with memories and scripture and musings and doubts and threats and imagined futures and pleadings and questions and hope—and all of the threads, long and short and of all shades, reveal an unpredictable, non-linear tapestry of a man on his knees in desperation and pain. There’s no knowing what thread you’re going to get or sometimes even what thread you’re reading, but again that’s not the essential question in the moment.
I found that the best way to read this was to soften my gaze a little and let the fluidity and unconventionality of the structure ride in the same way that one might ride a theme-park roller coaster. You don’t necessarily try to analyze what’s coming or why—you just hold on and enjoy the experience of it. Sometimes you just let a song or a landscape or a summer thunderstorm or, in this case, a story wash over you without over-thinking it. You just breathe deeply and take it all in. That’s the way that Bender’s tale works for me. It is in one moment a relatable narrative, in another moment a free-verse poem, and in another moment a prayer, the kind of prayer that one might accidentally overhear and feel compelled to eavesdrop on, only to become embarrassed for having trespassed on the sacred moment.
I’m probably biased about this book because it has so many touchstones for me personally. I, too, served an LDS mission in a tropical, foreign land—and now my own son is serving in the same Puerto Rican mission as Bender. I, too, had a mother diagnosed with cancer prior to my mission, who fought her way into remission, only to have it return. I, too, was on my mission when my mother’s cancer was rediscovered, and I also was notified in somber-but-hopeful tones about it. And I, too, lost my mother to cancer not long after my return home.
So am I particularly susceptible to Bender’s story? Yes, unfortunately. Did I intensely mourn the last, dying-filled days of my mother’s life the way Bender did? Absolutely. Did her dying raise for me the same theological and doctrinal questions that it raises for Bender? No, not at all actually. I was profoundly sad, perhaps even a little mad at God, but not to the degree that the protagonist here experiences the crisis. For me, the seminal book that best captured the essence of my own experience some twenty-eight years ago was Terry Tempest William’s Refuge. But I’m also well aware that in order to capture the variety and range of human experiences in this category, we probably need not only a whole shelf full of books but an entire library’s worth.
In And All Eternity Shook, we have an addition to the grievous but genuine genre, original in its experience, universal in its themes (especially for an LDS audience), and as sincere as they come in its effort to deliver, as all memoirs aim to do, an authentic verisimilitude of the author’s experience. I honor Bender’s experience. And I believe him.