Turning Hearts: Short Stories on Family Life
Edited by Orson Scott Card and David Dollahite
Bookcraft , 1994.
ISBN: 0-88494-948-6
(Reviewed by Scott Parkin, May 8, 1997)
This anthology came out nearly three years ago and officially qualifies as old news, but multiple-author anthologies of Mormon short fiction are sufficiently rare that they are newsworthy if for no other reason than their mere existence. So though there has already been a review of this book on the list, I wanted to take another look at it and offer a few thoughts on the general state of Mormon short fiction as represented by this book.
Turning Hearts is a theme anthology containing stories from many familiar names in popular Mormon fiction (Card, Weyland, Cracroft, Randle), as well as a few relative newcomers. These stories are all centered around the broad theme of family relationships, and take a “faithful” approach to dealing with family situations. Topics range from dealing with the death of a family member, to divorce, to racism, to personal identity within the family, to the reality of family history. The stories are written in a variety of styles and voices, from easy conversational through experimental to polished narrative.
Turning Hearts is a worthwhile book that would be a strong addition to any home library, and I can heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys short fiction with a Mormon flavor. There are some excellent stories in this anthology, and I have to admit that I was both a little surprised and a little relieved. I have not been overly impressed with a lot of the Mormon fiction I have read — I find too much of it to be poorly told stuff that relies too heavily on stock emotional response or simple characterization. I went into this anthology with a low expectation, and I was quite happily surprised.
When I buy an anthology I generally expect to utterly despise several stories, to dislike a few, to accept half as solid pro quality but not be particularly engaging to me as an individual reader, to like a few, and to be impressed by one or two. To my delight, I found most of the stories in Turning Hearts to be not only adequate pro quality, but to lie well above the baseline. Yes, there were several stories that I just plain didn’t like — for reasons of craft, voice, politics, literary effectiveness, or differing experience — but that’s to be expected in any collection. As a whole, this anthology is a solid success that was well worth the money and time spent to read it.
It’s difficult to comment on an anthology like this in more than general terms. What makes fiction work for me may seem trivial or overstated to another reader. Because there are such a wide variety of approaches, styles, and voices, it makes commenting on individual stories a purely personal matter. Similarly, what makes fiction stumble for me may be an idiosyncratic aspect of my own personality that has no meaning for other readers. (If Siskel likes something and Ebert doesn’t, I generally won’t care for that film. Knowing the trends of the reviewers makes all thedifference.)
Nevertheless, a little angst never stopped me from offering an opinion or two.
Perhaps more interesting than the stories themselves is what this anthology shows about the state of short fiction in the general Mormon market. Rather than a showcase of Mormondom’s brightest lights (like Eugene England’s Bright Angels and Familiars), Turning Hearts is a general slice of working pros in the Mormon market, and is perhaps a little more accurate in showing the general level of quality in Mormon genre fiction. That makes it quite interesting to me as both a Mormon reader and writer.
If this anthology is a truer representation of the craft, storytelling, and vision of Mormon short fiction authors, then the state of Mormon art has not yet made it all the way to the top of the heap. There are some excellent stories here, but there are some interesting trends that come out as one reads the whole book.
Perhaps the most predictable limitation of many of the stories here is that–well–they are very predictable. Maybe it’s not fair to comment that I was never in fear of any of these stories ending with anything but a fully happy resolution — the editors make it clear in their introductory and concluding essays that the goal of the anthology is to portray the successful resolution of problems within the family. And yet, when comparing these stories with other professional short fiction, one can’t help but feel a tad overwhelmed by the persistent success all the characters experienced. The general plot structure used for the stories in this anthology is, “POV is proud/overwhelmed/unaware of a problem in their life; someones steps forward/an event occurs that shows them how to be happier; the end.”
Which is not to say that there is anything substantively wrong with a collection of positive stories. Far from it, I believe that our problems do have solutions and that honest fiction at least recognizes that positive solutions are not only possible, but often well within reach if we choose to go in that direction. And yet, all of these stories ended up with the main characters coming to great realizations or complete inner peace or complete resolution of whatever bothered them. It was almost eerie how pleasantly all these lives worked out within the boundaries of these stories. I wish things resolved so well in my own family all the time.
(Note: Actually there was one story, “Sandwich Filling” by Sharon Downing Jarvis, that did not end with a smile, and I felt it was one of the more effective stories in the book. It was unsettling in a deeply real way, and the contrast with the other stories made it that much more striking. “Hanauma Bay” by Margaret Blair Young is arguably neutral, but that’s quite arguable.)
How much of that is the editor’s plan, how much is the publisher’s requirement, and how much is authorial choice is one of the questions that I think the general Mormon literary community needs to think about. In this particular case it is clear that the editors wanted stories that “help us better understand, teach about, and strengthen families.” (Dave Dollahitein his concluding essay, page 297.) In light of this goal, which is clearly stated, I can find nothing wrong with the mix of stories; these stories are all competently written and relatively well told within the limits of the stated theme. I can suggest that I think the anthology would have been more powerful for the addition of some stories that didn’t resolve quite as cleanly. It’s worth thinking about.
I thought there were some very good stories here that deserve specific notice. The cost of the anthology is repaid by these stories alone.
“Tim” by Kristen Randle is an intriguing story that works on several levels. It creates a complex and difficult situation and carries it through to a conclusion that reveals as much about the narrator — and, by extension, the reader — as it does about the title character. While the story end spositively, it does so in a way that exposes the pettiness and casual disregard many of us show for those we should appreciate most. Some may find the last scene to be a touch melodramatic, but I found it to be deeply powerful and moving. Nice, but with teeth. Featuring Kristen’s distinctive, energetic voice, this story is arguably the best piece in the collection.
“Hanauma Bay” by Margaret Blair Young deals with divorce and forgiveness and how a child can still love both parents. It offers a snapshot look at a situation that is becoming all too common and that puts the most stress not just on the divorced couple, but on their children.
“Sandwich Filling” by Sharon Downing Jarvis offers a difficult choice between serving one’s aging parent or serving one’s children, where seeing to the needs of one requires that the other must suffer. There are no easy answers here, and Jarvis exposes the difficulty of that problem for Mormon women.
“The Door on Wickham Street” by Robert England Lee is a beautifully written piece that paints a vivid picture and takes an understated look at what it means to have personal revelation. The story was a little soft and relied on a bit of deception at the end, but the description and language were worth reading for their own sakes and were sufficient to overcome other limitations for me.
There were other fine stories in this anthology, but these were the ones that stood out for me.
If you want an anthology of Mormon short fiction that doesn’t take too many chances, Turning Hearts is a good, solid collection that tells affirming stories with a high degree of readability. These are stories that assume that people are basically good and that problems can be solved — positively. Though the quality of the writing varies somewhat from story to story, the overall quality comes in at a solid pro level and is worth the time andmoney to buy and read this anthology. This anthology shows that there is an increasing pool of Mormon writers who are not part of the traditional literati, and suggests that the field is both filling out in numbers, and expanding in scope.
If you want stories that push the edges of ethics, that explore very complex issues with characters that are struggling with deep flaws, this is not the right anthology for you. There are some stories that look at difficult issues here, but these are not tremendously complex stories and they do not challenge too many basic assumptions about how things are, or how they should be. Then again, this collection aspires to no such pretentions and it would be unfair to expect the book to be something it is not.
The remainder of this review will discuss some of the general questions I have about the Mormon market, Mormon readers, and Mormon writers as represented by this anthology. The questions are more about the general Mormon market than this specific collection, though it uses specific examples from the anthology to illustrate those questions.
Whose Idea Is This?
The overwhelmingly positive nature of the stories in this anthology begs an interesting question: Are Mormons writing this kind of fiction because it represents the stories in their hearts, or are they doing it because that’s what editors and publishers perceive the market demand to be?
One of the consistent critical comments about “mainstream” Mormon fiction has been that it is unrealistic, that it idealizes to the point where real people simply can’t live in those stories. Comments about “cheap thrills” in place of authentic spirituality are quite common, and while I question the ability of any reviewer to be the absolute arbiter of things spiritual, such comments do reveal a trend in Mormon fiction, where authorial manipulation seems to demean the depiction of things of the spirit until they seem cheap or tawdry. Or worse, artificial.
None of the stories in this anthology featured characters that were too clean to be real, but many of them featured only superficially flawed characters. There was the new bishop proud of the spiritual validation that his calling gives him who is immediately brought low by his self-absorbed, overbearing daughter (“Flower Girl” by Herbert Harker). There was the teenage girl who couldn’t imagine that her parents actually experience love, but learns better (“Still Dancing” by Susan Dean Strange). There was the man who willfully forgot his own part in the death of his dog and blames it on his father, then forgives his father after a twenty-year grudge when he finds out his father actually felt bad about it all those years ago (“Birthday Gift” by Carroll Morris).
There were problems, but most of them resolved with serendipitous ease. It’s unfair to criticize this particular anthology for that — it’s one of the design choices the editors made in putting the collection together. In his dedication, Orson Scott Card wrote, “For Richard Cracroft, shepherd of mantic fiction among the Mormon people.” Clearly the editorial intent was to provide stories that met the mantic ideal, and this choice drives content. And yet there were still disturbing and complex stories from Kristen Randle, Margaret Blair Young, and Sharon Downing Jarvis. Perhaps the limitation does reside with the authors and not the editors.
Still, the question remains: Is the clear majority of soft stories in this anthology a symptom of the Mormon cultural mindset, is it authors responding to an editorial dictum, or is it a comment on the ability of Mormon authors to create complex characters? I don’t know.
The Mantic Ideal
Richard Cracroft is the champion of the mantic story that specifically teaches a lesson using plot, character, and allusion to illuminate a gospel truth. The purpose of fiction is to teach, to expand our understanding and offer vicarious experience to help us make better decisions in our ownlives.
All of the stories in this anthology are “about” something. By this, I don’t mean just that they have theme or narrative direction — I think all successful fiction does that — but that each story starts from the premise of illuminating some truth, and goes from there. In other words, the stories are less about characters than about Truths. As such, many of the situations and events in these stories seem almost forced, contrived to support the chosen principle, rather than natural course of real events.The plots seemed less “this is how it really happened” than “this is how is should happen (resolve) when everyone is doing the right thing.”
Maybe that’s an artificial difference, but to me many of the stories here felt at best incomplete in dealing with complex issues, and at worst outright manipulative in showing me the “right” answer to every problem — Sunday School lessons, not stories. When I sit down to read fiction I look for certain levels of complexity or beautiful language orunique insight; when I sit down to read a Sunday School lesson I look for something else entirely.
Which makes it difficult to comment critically on stories like these. I’m not arguing that the illustrated gospel principles are correct. I’m not questioning the moral certitude or intent of the authors, or the reality of the events depicted here. I’m not even claiming that the stories do not represent real and valid slices of real and complex lives. What concerns me (in a somewhat nebulous way) is that Mormon storytellers may not see beyond the “gospel truth” they are illustrating into the real lives of the characters. To criticize craft is not question testimony; likewise a fervent testimony does not excuse simple stories with simple problems and simple answers as quality literature.
There’s a great deal of discussion on what levels of emphasis should be represented in Mormon literature. Certainly the gospel is part of our lives in a complex, everyday sort of way. Certainly the answers are right there before us and the solutions relatively easy to institute once we set our priorities right. There is little ambiguity in determining what the more correct responses should be.
The answers are not hard; it’s the implementation that’s the problem. We all know that thrift and industry and honesty and humility and obedience will prepare us for an eternal life, and yet very few of us manage to live up to the ideal in this life. So a fiction that offers up the same answers with few new insights into how to implement those answers strikes me as less realistic, fulfilling, and worthwhile than a fiction that emphasises not success in meeting all problems, but acceptance of the struggle for abetter reward. Sometimes the reward does not come in this life, though sometimes it does. Show me both kinds.
Turning Hearts does not contain simplistic stories, but many of the stories in the anthology do present relatively simple problems and solutions, and the solutions almost always work on the first try with immediately positive results. This may illustrate the correctness of the gospel principle, but it stops a little short of offering a satisfying look into the dynamics of real life. Again, I’m not saying all stories need tobe dark and ugly and full of unresolved pain — there should always be a balance between the ideal and the worst case — but I am suggesting that Mormons, of all people, should understand that there is a larger world that cares little for our personal struggles, and that knowing the right answer does not always mean we can easily implement it.
That doesn’t mean that the mantic ideal cannot — or should not — be served in Mormon fiction; I think a true Mormon literature is one of hope. But at thesame time, the presense of a Truth does not forgive lazy storytelling or weak craft. I think too many Mormon authors are relying on the audience to accept fiction for its Truth, not its actual quality as Story. Because the story is About Something it does not need to live up to the same standards of literary development that we expect of other types of fiction. “Turning Hearts” does little to disabuse me of the notion that many Mormon authors work from this assumption, though a few of the stories do manage to mixmessage and medium in a very literarily satisfying way.
So is this a cultural limitation on the Mormon mindset, an editorial requirement, or a comment on the craft of Mormon writers?
The Important Issue
Similar to the general issue of telling stories about Gospel Truths instead of people with problems is the issue of telling stories about the “big” or “important” issue at the expense of real characters. The difference here is the relative size of the issue and its likelihood to boil the blood of the reader despite the actual quality of the narrative.
Jack Weyland’s “Your Own People” struck me as one of these stories. He didn’t deal with a Gospel Truth, he went for the Important Issue of racismin the church and how people deal with it. This could have been a powerful story, and suggested many difficult issues, but the story itself pulled up short of actually dealing with any of those issues.
Unlike many of the other stories in the anthology that offered relatively simple answers, this one offered none at all. The basic story is of a poor, black, inner-city family who meet the missionaries one day. Eventually the mother and daughter are taught and decide to go to church, overcomingapathy by other family members to travel cross-town to the LDS chapel. The twelve-year old daughter consistently misunderstands what she hears such that one begins to wonder if she understands anything she has learned so far. They are faced with overt racism during testimony meeting and the story resolves with the reactions of the two black characters to this white LDS ward.
He raised the spectre of racial prejudice in a Mormon ward and offered as his solution either the mother who simply walked away, or the daughter who had so misunderstood what was happening around her that her decision to be Mormon was not so much a stand for higher truth than it was another misunderstanding on her part. It’s not that the girl looked past the racism, she simply didn’t understand it.
Perhaps this was an attempt to show how individual sensitivity can affect how we perceive the world around us. The mother overreacted to a real problem and chucked the whole church based on the actions of one of its members. The girl decided that if the feeling of rightness she had at the Mormon church was real, then all other concerns were secondary. But the girl was so hopelessly clueless that her valiance seemed obliviousness rather than childlike acceptance and faith. Both approaches were unsatisfactory and based on simple reasons. Perhaps it’s a limit of the short story form, in which case the author should have tried for a smaller issue that could be dealt with in the space provided.
In either case, the story felt indistinct and vaguely drawn, as though theauthor believed that by waving the Important Issue of racism in the church before our eyes we would automatically impart deeper meaning to a story that failed to create real characters. In fact, the stock depictions of the black family bordered on stereotype, and I found myself being offended onbehalf of blacks because of it. I don’t believe that Weyland meant any disrespect in creating his characters, but his shallow portrayal of what it’s like to be black in a white LDS ward was so thin that the whole thing approached offensive under-representation of a difficult and real issue. In this case, the size of the issue was not enough to overshadow the vague story behind it.
Which raises another question: Is it enough to merely point out the existence of an important issue in order to create satisfying fiction? In the church we have a real problem with racism — an issue that we need tolearn to deal with. In an effort to avoid didacticism do we avoid seeing that solutions do exist? Part of what bothered me about “Your Own People”was that no on stage effort was made to recover the mother (all efforts were wrapped up in a single narrative transition paragraph so that we never saw the Important Issue being dealt with). A story about racism seems torequire a direct argument about racism that highlights the pain it causes individuals, not a passive transition paragraph that passes over it entirely. If the issue was worth writing about, it should have been worth writing about, not skirted around.
This is probably a case of my reading versus the author’s intent, but Istill feel manipulated. It seems like Weyland pulled out the Big Issue as away of adding depth to a story that failed to provide its own context, details, and realistically drawn characters. Understanding that stereotype happens because a lot of people fit into it, I still felt that the story did nothing more than raise the issue without really looking at it. I’m not bothered by a lack of answers — easy answers are worse than no answers — but I am bothered by a cursory examination of an issue that deserved more thanit got.
Explore the issue and expand my perception — there’s nothing wrong withthat. But racism, like death, is not interesting in and of itself; it’s theinteraction of realistically drawn characters and their reactions thatdraws attention. Otherwise it seems shallow and manipulative to raise theissue at all.
Create Your Own World
One of the things that bothered me about many of the stories here is that there seemed to be a lot of issue-raising, but not enough context-setting, world building, or character creation. The death of a parent, child, or pet does not automatically mean that I accept deep sorrow and irrational behavior on the part of the characters. I need a local context in which these things exist for the story to have meaning beyond its types, or elsethe story is populated by concepts, not characters. Puppies do notnecessarily represent warmth, and grandma was not always a nice person.
This is a problem common to all fiction. In telling realistic stories thereare only so many points of departure from the “norm” that can make a storyunique from others of the same type. But the difference should be in howthe characters are built, in how unique experience colors their perceptions and reactions. In many of these stories that simply doesn’t happen. Relying on the pathos of dead relatives or animals isn’t enough to draw me into a character.
The story that best illustrates this is the lead story in the anthology, David Dollahite’s “Possum Funeral”. The story is about how a man finally deals with the death of his own father 25 years earlier, grieving for what he has lost, apparently for the first time. The plot revolves around the approaching baptism of POV’s son and the synchronicity of realizing thatPOV is the same age now as his father was when POV was the age that his son is now (does that make sense?). A pair of dead possums in the driveway provides the backdrop for the father to deal with his suppressed grief.
This story bothered me a lot because it suggests a deeply powerful theme that I feel it failed to deliver on, not because the author was indistinct or the idea unclear, but because the story did not effectively justify the actions of its characters. I was expected to accept the father’s sudden grief over a 25-year old death simply because one must grieve about thepassing of one’s own parent. The story itself did not give me thebackground to understand why this old grief should suddenly come so hotnow. The device of the baptism was a good start, but Dollahite dropped itas a binding element in favor of scenes where the father is suddenly overwhelmed by grief at work and at home each day of the week.
(I admit to my own odd experience here. My mother died in July of1995 — July 24th, actually, which give that date a slightly different meaning for me than it does for most Mormons) and I never had a massive grief. Perhaps it’s because I was older (though about the age of the POV in”Possum Funeral”), perhaps it was because I had decided years ago that my mother would die young and this was just the fulfillment of my own expectation (she had uncontrolled diabetes for many years that led to major health problems; she was barely 50 when she died); and maybe it was that she was the third close relative to die in three weeks and I had reached grief overload. Or maybe I’m just an unnaturally cold person who doesn’t have the capacity for that kind of grief; I only cried once during my portion of the eulogy. In any case, the simple fact of the death of a parent is not enough to elicit a sympathetic response for me as a single reader.)
Again, I have no problems with the reactions, what I want it to understand how and why this is all happening now. Show me the flashbacks to the week POV’s father died in the fire. Give me a hint of why POV has never shown his children pictures of grandpa or told the story of the heroism that ledto his death. Let POV agonize over the nameless, senseless fear that his own children might grow up without a father the same way he did. Have POV suddenly take unusual interest in simple, ordinary interactions with hisown children that he was denied as a child. Expand POV’s experiences andobservations so that I understand the character, then his grief will make sense to me. Forget the possum (I know, it’s a symbol for false death and the reality of a resurrection) and replace it with hard, concrete detail. Lose the persimmon tree (I know, it’s a metaphor for how time can turn sour things to sweet, and the natural passing of seasons) and give me justifications for POV’s reactions other than “His dad died 25 years agoand he’s just now dealing with it.” This story had every right to be more powerful than it was, but hurt itself with too much reliance on stock reaction and insufficient context and detail.
Using Turning Hearts as a cross section of the average Mormon professional writer, we seem a little stuck in fairly basic errors like this that are forgiven because the “point” of the story was important and worthwhile. There seems to be a belief that so long as the story delivers a visible moral, the other points of craft are less important.
Again, is this true and a part of the definition of “real” Mormon literature, or is that a case of Mormon writers settling for less because they don’t think the audience demands it?
The Depiction of Women
One of the completely unintended aspects of this anthology that struck me was the general depiction of Mormon women as harried, guilt-ridden, overwhelmed housewives. What was striking was not that the depiction exists, not that the depiction was specifically non-representative, or thatthere is a real and crushing stress on women in Mormon culture. What was striking was the near-universal portrayal of all Mormon women as overwhelmed and shivering with angst.
I guess there are a couple of questions here. The first is whether this portrayal really should be taken as a universal and representative of the average Mormon woman. The second is whether this once cutting edge portrayal has now fallen into the realm of stereotype.
For me the depiction falls short. Many Mormon women are overwhelmed by extreme expectation, but each woman is overwhelmed for purely individual reasons. The commonality of the representation seems to demean the very real issues beneath it to the point where it becomes almost laughable. Are we pounding a one-note song to where the issue is lost under the repetition? In this particular anthology the common use of this description across nearly all of the stories really begged the issue.
The heavy reliance of Mormon fiction on “important” issues, stock response and character context, and/or illustration of “gospel truths” at the expense of character development is not unique to Mormons, but it seems more prevalent.
At the same time, the presense of real issues or questions of morality is part of what differentiates Mormon fiction from other fiction. But I can’t help but wonder if we aren’t relying too hard on that moral uniqueness to where we aren’t working as hard on the rest of the story. I believe if we would work harder to incorporate moral vision and techniques of good fiction we could create a literature with the potential to stun the world.
This particular anthology suggests that we have the potential, but that wehaven’t quite reached the consistency to get it done. I don’t know whetherto be heartened or depressed. But I do know that there is still plenty of room for improvement in a genre that has all the talent and potential in the world.