Review
Original Review Date: 5/22/1995
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Title: Bright Angels & Familiars: Contemporary Mormon Stories
Editor: Eugene England
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Short Story Anthologies
Year Published: 1992
Number of Pages: 368
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 13: 978-1560850267
ISBN: 10: 1560850264
Status: Available online
Reviewed by Tim Behrend for the Association for Mormon Letters
Review date: 5/22/1995
The 1990s have thus far been a period of exceptional fertility for serious Mormon letters: at least 15 novels and short story collections (including one anthology) have been published in this three-year period five of them by presses outside of Utah. At the same time dozens of stories have continued to appear in Sunstone Dialogue BYU Studies and Utah Holiday and a new journal dedicated entirely to Mormon literature Wasatch Review International has been launched in Orem.
Developments in the related genre of personal essay so deeply rooted in the homiletic and confessional traditions of Mormonism have kept fully apace with those in fiction perhaps even surpassing them in the unexpected and majestic beauty of Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge.
And now another notable contribution has been made by Signature Books. This most recent addition which appeared late in 1992 is an anthology of short stories entitled Bright Angels & Familiars. Its compiler is Eugene England who several years ago also prepared (in conjunction with Dennis Clark) a warmly received anthology of contemporary Mormon poems called Harvest. Signature was also the publisher of that work (SLC 1989).
Bright Angels & Familiars contains twenty-two stories fourteen of which were written within the past five years and so are truly “Contemporary Mormon Stories” as the book’s subtitle promises; the remaining eight dating from as early as 1963 are included for their historical or documentary value in contextualizing the more recent fiction.
Most of the familiar names are here: the lost generation pioneers Whipple and Sorenson; the catalytic duo of BYU professors Marshall and Thayer who helped kindle the flame of New Mormon Fiction; Levi Peterson whose slow wise Western voice dominates the field; the desert-struck baby boomers Fillerup and Bennion; Sillitoe and Mortensen strong women in whose narrative and themes the political and personal tensions inherent in priesthood dominion are memorably portrayed; the experimentalist Barber; the prolific and political Young; the fantasy super star Orson Scott Card with a newcomer sci-fi minion M. Shayne Bell. Even Judith Freeman and Walter Kirn are included though these are “Mormon” writers whose connections with the cultural tradition are far less obvious than their writerly abilities.
An index of “Notable Mormon Stories and Collections” prepared with the assistance of Bruce Jorgensen forms an appendix to this collection. The index is helpful in giving quick access to portions of the corpus of recent Mormon fiction but its usefulness is greatly diminished by its somewhat haphazard construction. Many Dialogue and Sunstone listings for example are missing perhaps because they were not sufficiently ‘notable’ to the compilers. Odder still bibliographic information mentioned in the “Notes on Authors” section is not included in the master list so searchers have to flip back and forth between the index and the bio-blurbs when looking up names or titles. Students of Mormon letters would have been better served if England or Signature had hired an undergraduate research assistant to do a couple weeks of bibliographic legwork.
England opens the anthology with a brief introduction to the large patterns of Mormon literary history and to the contours of its contemporary forms making an effortless display in the process of his thorough familiarity with all parts and personalities of the tradition. This excursion through the landscape of Mormon literature however is conducted on foot: its pedestrian observations do not give the reader much in the way of critical or social perspective on the train of publishing events that it records.
The one intellectual issue that England pauses over has to do with the special character of Mormon literature — how it is Mormon in the first place and what difference that makes to the reader. He does not build a coherent argument to answer these questions or even address them frontally; instead he proffers a few opinions much in the manner of a personal essayist in which he touches lightly on certain aspects of the issues.
Most fundamental among his ideas particularly as regards the selection of stories for this anthology is England’s feeling that authors’ beliefs — which necessarily “affect the nature and quality of their writing” — are of central interest to us as readers (xviii). Indeed he explains the stories of LDS writers gathered in Bright Angels represent revelations from a divine source that can provide “further understanding” of theological moral social and psychological issues of importance to Mormons. For those readers who might doubt that “these stories [can] be revelations … if they describe doubt despair failure and sin England recommends looking beyond their narrative surface and into the shape of the author’s own belief and moral vision which inevitably show through to a careful reader” (xix).
My recommendation is to look beyond England’s insistence on the edificatory value of this anthology. For most readers the hidden truths that God might reveal to some Mormons through the fictive writings of other Mormons or the special lessons that the Saints might draw from the drama of these tales will be less important than their own personal and aesthetic responses to the stories as narrative artifacts planted in the cultural ground of Mormon society. The space and energy expended here to argue that literature is not after all bad for us would have been better used for less parochial critical purposes. The last thing our community needs is more validation for an admonition-of-Paul style aesthetic of teleology.
As regards the stories themselves England has put together a nicely representative but overly cautious selection of the short fiction being produced by Mormon writers today. On the one hand the editor’s caution is apparent in several entries — those of Whipple and Kump in particular — that draw heavily on the Home Literature tradition and would not be out of place in a collection such as Especially For Mormons or Out of the Best Books. England’s justification for including the folkloric Whipple story (one of a number discovered posthumously among her papers) derives from the importance of her 1942 novel The Giant Joshua but this little piece adds nothing to the luster of her reputation. To my mind both stories would have been better left out the more so since neither is very contemporary.
At the other end of the scale England’s apparently cautious position has led him to avoid some potentially difficult materials. Technically obscure or modernist styles as found in the more expressionistic work of John Bennion and Phyllis Barber for example are not included. Though this editorial decision makes good aesthetic sense to me personally an anthology attempting to represent contemporary literature should have included at least one example of non-linear or non-traditional narrative styles.
I also have the nagging sense that vulgar language human intimacy infidelity and other moral missteps as well as characters or themes with an “anti-Mormon” bent may be underrepresented in this collection though it would be difficult to quantify and fully substantiate the impression. What originally triggered the feeling was a sense that my literary tastes seemed to differ radically from the editor’s. In nearly every case where I was familiar with the published works of an author anthologized in Bright Angels I found myself disagreeing with England’s selection. This applied particularly for Peterson Sillitoe Mortensen Fillerup Freeman Barber and Kirn. The only selection I fully agreed on was John Bennion’s “Dust” which is the most technically and conceptually challenging story in the book.
While mulling over this odd lack of convergence in our opinions it struck me that for many authors the story that would have been my first choice had elements of language or subject matter that might have been judged potentially offensive to some LDS readers. I began to wonder: Could it be that Gene England had chosen to target this sensitive audience? Had he deliberately served up a somewhat bowdlerized PG-rated version of contemporary Mormon fiction catering to this group? The introduction with its description of divinity conducting revelatory work in part through fiction and its promise of edification or instruction to Mormons who read this collection with sufficient care does nothing to allay the suspicion that his editorial choices might be undersprung with a conservative “moral” agenda or at the least by somewhat prudish literary tastes. Since my own predilections run to the dark and earthy I would have preferred an editorial policy that in no way sought to further exaggerate the already overly chaste proclivities of much Mormon fiction.
But however narrow or constraining England’s selection criteria might have been he has nevertheless given us a collection of well-written stories that can indeed speak in special ways to Mormon readers. In a few cases that special communication is deeply cultural deriving from ecclesiastical or nostalgic themes in which the chords of Mormon church life or the communal Mormon past resonate — often colored with an ironic or bemused timbre. The parodies of Peterson and Chandler offer the most entertaining variations on these themes though they may also be the least culturally portable stories in the collection (excluding Whipple’s Marchen).
The more serious contributions in this category particularly Phyllis Barber’s “At the Talent Show” and Walter Kirn’s “Whole Other Bodies” present real characters experiencing small family dramas accessible and relevant to any audience. For Mormon readers though who share personally significant cultural experiences with the characters in these stories their potential impact extends beyond the ruminations of a fireside read and back into the private memories and interior tectonics of a Mormon childhood and heritage.
For me however the best stories in Bright Angels are those which begin from Mormon premises but then transcend them or make them incidental in the creation and movement of characters transposed by experiences of universal import. The interior struggles the imperfect relationships the spoiled expectations the sad realizations that make up much the more important part of life are here explored through characters who are first and foremost familiar because they are human. That they are close to us in their styles of worship the patterns of their social organization or the demands of their Sunday obligations makes them more recognizable on the first page and creates greater sympathy and interest on our part — both for the characters and their creators. Once the tale is in motion however the external details of Mormon affiliation recede in importance. The narrative architecture of the best of these stories is founded on the solid humanity of their characters; the ecclesiastical drapery in which they are wrapped becomes of secondary importance. Don Marshall’s “The Week-end” Pauline Mortensen’s “Woman Talking to a Cow” and Sibyl Johnston’s “Iris Holmes” are among the most exceptional selections in the anthology because of their deeply humanist portraits of characters who are you and me much more fundamentally than they are Saints and Gentiles.
My several disagreements with editorial point of view and specific selections notwithstanding I still find Bright Angels & Familiars a highly readable book and a handy portable collection of current Mormon fiction in which snippets of the most important voices in our literary discourse can be heard first hand. Since nothing appears here for the first time here (for a half dozen pieces in fact this is the third outing) this collection’s most practical contribution lies in its presenting a sampler of available texts for newly interested readers. Its limitation of scope makes Bright Angels especially suitable as a gift book or as a textbook for the college classroom or local reading group.
Gene England and Signature books deserve credit for repeating the service performed with the publication three years ago of the poetry anthology Harvest. Once again they have brought together diverse texts and authors and made them easily available to the one-stop literary shopper. For a deeper understanding of contemporary Mormon fiction however more serious students will have to await future publications of the tradition’s most well-known critic.