Title: Return to Paradise
Author: Kathryn H. Kidd
Publisher: Hatrack River
Year: 1997. 206pp.
(Reviewed by Andrew Hall, AML-list, Jan 17, 1998)
With this novel Kathryn Kidd has managed to keep her place as one of my favorite Mormon authors, and certainly as the Queen of Mormon comic fiction. Only Sam Taylor’s classic Heaven Knows Why is in Kidd’s league in terms of hilarious depictions of in inner workings of an LDS Ward (although I hear that Robert F. Smith is up there too, I haven’t read his stuff yet).
During my yearly swing through Utah last month I was excited to see that Kidd’s sequel to Paradise Vue had hit the shelves. I snatched it up, and devoured it in one day while waiting in airports and flying back to Pittsburgh. I loved every minute of it, and heartily recommend the book to you all.
The story opens with Amy, the narrator and protagonist of both books, saying good-bye to Alex, her best friend from the first. With the Relief Society presidency broken up, Amy gets called to edit the Ward newsletter, with lots of help from Bess. A key component of the newsletter is the “Snoop Sisters” column, anonymously written by the new RS presidency, which is a “positive gossip column,” telling funny, positive stories about the sisters in the ward. The Bishop assigns Horrace Forrest, the Ward Clerk, to help her understand the computers she uses for the newsletter, but their time together makes his wife, Norma Jean Forrest, suspect that Amy is trying to steal her husband away. Norma Jean’s paranoia grows, and she manages to convince many other sisters in the ward she is right, without Amy even suspecting she was the target of such animosity. Amy’s attention is turned towards the question of whether she should let her manipulative older sister force her to take her rebellious daughter in as a roommate while she attends the U nearby. The thought of opening her carefully protected privacy (remember her husband died soon before the first book) to a potentially disruptive influence fills Amy with dread. Meanwhile Norma Jean’s machinations bring about a painful and funny conclusion.
That doesn’t sound very humorous, and frankly it isn’t as funny as Paradise Vue. One reason is that every other chapter (1/3 of the text) is told through Norma Jean’s diary. Norma Jean has a Marilyn Monroe fixation, patterning as much of her life on Monroe as an church-going Mormon can. While that is funny at first, as the novel progresses we are shown the roots of this obsession, and how sick and destructive it really is. Therefore a good chunk of the story is told not by our beloved protagonist Amy, but through the eyes of a character who is at first simply unpleasant, but increasingly becomes pitiful. These sections are still funny, mind you, but the humor comes from seeing how misguided Norma Jean is, which is not nearly as fun as laughing with the intelligent and likable Amy. Still, it is impressive that Kidd is able to pull off using such a dislikable character as a narrator for part of the book. While perhaps it makes the story less funny, I think it gives it needed depth.
Another difference is that we meet fewer crazy ward members (the old widow who kept inadvertently getting her Visiting Teachers drunk in Paradise Vue was a work of comic genius). The story focuses on the newsletter, Norma Jean’s misunderstanding, and the niece/potential roommate. That’s fine, since it gives Kidd a chance to dig into these stories a bit deeper.
Kidd addresses several interesting questions–bad and good uses of gossip, the evil of labeling people, especially when the labelee begins to believe it, and how far we need to go in looking out for each other. Most of all she is a very engaging story teller. She certainly has the “inside a LDS ward” humorous novel genre down perfectly. A neat thing about Kidd’s work is that she successfully treads a path of poking fun at the ward members enough to be funny, but she never descends to nasty caricature. There are plenty examples out there of both sappy and cruelly humorous stereotypes. Kidd, however, is able to sharply observe and criticize certain cultural behaviors without at the same time attacking the church or the gospel. That is quite a talent.
Now that she has this genre down, it would be exciting to see Kidd put her talents to work on some different genres in the future.