Books #9 and #10: House of Heroes and The Lonely Polygamist
Good week for reading this week! And a good week for non-reading stuff too, which totally cut into my interest in writing about what I was reading. I’ve found that over the course of a year the total number of books I read is usually the same from year to year, but they come in fits and starts (ask me about the time I read War And Peace the week my wife was giving birth. It’s about Russia.) S
House of Heroes
This is my first entry into the cult of the 80’s Vintage edition cover designs, which are apparently a whole deal among aficionados. I picked this up among about a dozen other books at the Boise library’s most recent book sale. I love library book sales in part because they feel like one of the last places on earth where you can buy things in an environment that is completely unoptimized. Is this book good? Is it bad? Do people want it? Doesn’t matter, it’s a dollar.
The checklist in the back of the book is honestly my favorite part, it’s like going back to seeing if I’ve read all of the Hardy Boys books. It’s quite a list - big names like Don Delillo and Richard Ford, but also folks who’ve fallen by the wayside of literary fiction history. LaChapelle appears to be one of the latter — a little internet research suggests that even though this collection, her first, was well-received at the time (I mean, it got published by Vintage, these are the big leagues) it remains her only published collection 35 years later; she’s spent her career teaching instead.
Generally I’d call these very good but not transcendent stories. The first two especially felt like they were one story element away from working, and I was afraid the whole book was going to be flat. The title story is probably the best, as it should be: a compelling story about a young woman using emotional detachment to survive a difficult job at a home for troubled boys. All of the stories have some gorgeous grace notes, like a father regretting that he ruined his child’s imaginative perception of the house they drive past every day. Overall, the kind of collection anyone should be proud to have written. If she had further books I would look for them.
The Lonely Polygamist
I’ve been picking up a lot of cheap and/or free books recently, which is probably going to force me to build more bookshelves before long. A couple weeks after the library book sale my daughter and I went up to a “bookshop” being put on by one of our many local Little Free Libraries (shoutout to LFL #143793, follow them on Instagram). In reality it was more of a “please take as many of these books as you can, I don’t have room to keep them while I wait for people to take them from the Library” scenario, which worked out well for me. Everyone was having a good time, hanging out with neighbors on the front yard (why do people use their front yards so little? Go say hi to your neighbors!) and sorting through several tables of books. I already had several in my hands, but someone pointed to this one and said I should definitely read it.
Polygamist serves as a fictional expansion to the author’s longform piece on the polygamist communities of Utah, which is also great. The lonely polygamist of the title is one Golden, who has four wives, 28 children, three houses, and zero certainty about why this is how he has ended up living his life. He also has a secret: the “retirement home” in Nevada that he’s been building in hopes of saving his construction business is actually a brothel, and he might be falling in love with one of the sex workers.
Polygamist is mostly Golden’s story, but Udall doesn’t limit himself; the perspective moves elegantly from Golden to his troubled son to each of his wives, slipping back and forth in time as each of them reflects on how they’ve ended up in this extraordinary life and what they hope to do next. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad, and sometimes it’s about the literal fallout of nuclear testing in the southwest. It’s a big, fast-moving story, one that maintains a lot of sympathy for its characters without ever forgetting that what they’re doing is illegal and, by most people’s standards, wrong and potentially exploitative.
Dealing with religion is often challenging in fiction. Authors who are themselves religious under-estimate the extent to which their beliefs are shaping their perceptions of people who see the world differently. And authors who are not religious are often dismissive of how tightly woven religious belief is in the day to day life of the people around then; too often the story turns on hypocrisy, as if to imply that people don’t really believe it, they’re either brainwashed and exploited or are using the religious systems they participate in to their own advantage. Either way, characters end up as straw men.
As a deeply religious person who tries to remain clear-eyed about how unusual this must seem to people who live differently, I appreciated Udall’s even-handed portrayal of the community, which is clearly the product of the extensive research he had done previously and some degree of personal connection. Are some of theses “plyg” families abusive? Are some of the people in these communities “brainwashed”? Probably! But for many of them the strange structure they’ve found for their lives provides something meaningful and real, something bigger than themselves that they can participate in.
This openness to the reality of religious experience in the lives of its characters without actually endorsing the specific beliefs in question as true reminded me of Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen’s most recent, which was similarly interested in a religious true believer and his family having crises of faith that resolved in favor of faith in a way that affirmed the reality and value of what they were getting by participating in religion without condescension. An elegant trick if you can do it, but to my mind that ability to see people who are different than you and understand the why of their lives without implicitly holding it up for ridicule is essential to writing meaningful fiction. Characters that exist to make your reader feel better about themselves for their superior lifestyle aren’t real characters, no matter what point of view you’re using them to caricature.
Next up: Another visit to the incredibly Italian lives of Italians in The Lying Lives Of Adults, Elena Ferrante