The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

Some books just take longer than a week to read. This one took more than two weeks, partly because it’s long, and partly because some of it is a slog. Nevertheless it’s an interesting book and worth reading for the 85% non-sloggish bits.

The 19th Wife is another one of those 2-in-1 tales where the author skips back and forth between a modern story and a fact-based historical one. The historical tale is about Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young’s 19th wife, who divorced him and led a crusade against polygamy all the way to the U.S. Senate. The modern story is about Jordan Scott, whose mother (also a 19th wife) is accused of murdering her husband, the leader of a present-day polygamous sect in Utah. Jordan’s quest to clear his mother of these charges leads him back into the sick society from which he was ejected as a teen and forces him to confront the worst of it.

Both stories are compelling. Ebershoff does a virtuoso job of writing in a variety of styles and voices. Jordan is a young gay man, filled with rage at the society in which he was raised, yet convinced that his mother did not kill his father. He’s an endearing, sympathetic character and his chapters made me feel all maternal. In contrast, Ebershoff retells Ann Eliza’s story through a fictional version of her memoir, and includes multiple supporting documents to buttress her story. It’s these supporting documents that are the slog. Sometimes in the evening I would say to myself “Well, I could go read excerpts from Brigham Young’s prison diaries, or wait! Didn’t we get a new issue of Rolling Stone in the mail?” Guess which reading material I chose.

At times I struggled with knowing where fact ended and fiction began in the sections about Ann Eliza. Ebershoff provides a helpful discussion at the end of the book about his sources and methods but of course I didn’t find that until I was done. Observant readers of this blog will notice that this is the second book this year that I’ve read about Mormon society (the first was Escape by Carolyn Jessop). Neither book presents the group in a positive light, though neither explicitly deals with life among modern day non-polygamous LDS church members.

(Book 36, 2009)

Two Books in One

I am reading The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff. It's really two books in one: Ebershoff retells Ann Eliza Young's original memoir of her life with, and subsequent divorce from, Brigham Young in the late 19th century. Young (Ann Eliza, not Brigham) went on to be a crusader against polygamy and against Mormonism itself. Layered between the pages of this story is a modern murder mystery set in a fictional fundamentalist LDS clan in Utah, told from the point of view of one its "lost boys." Ebershoff also includes historical background material that retells Ann Eliza Young's story from different points of view. These include a memoir by her father, depositions by her brother, and extracts from a graduate student's research.

The question for me is, what is real and what isn't? Ann Eliza Young really wrote a memoir, but how accurate is Ebershoff's retelling? Is he using her words? How do I figure this out? Is the material that was supposedly written by Young's brother and father real or fiction? The only thing I know that is certainly fiction is the modern mystery, which is also very good.

Ebershoff has a Web site but it's not very comprehensive. Wikipedia has a good article about Ann Eliza Young. I am starting with these, but this process is taking me a long time. The book is long and engrossing, but is also slow going.

So that's where I've been. Just wanted to give you an update.

Mother on Fire by Sandra Tsing Loh

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer, performance artist, and public radio commentator. I don’t hear her much on radio but I do read her pieces in the Atlantic. I’ve also never seen any of her one-woman shows but would sure like to. In 2008 she published Mother on Fire, a memoir about her life in Los Angeles, specifically framed around her search for an appropriate school for her kindergarten-age daughter.

This is a very funny book, filled with raw emotion and angst. Loh takes on issues of class and status, money worries, stalled careers, the mommy wars, and the frantic pace of life in LA. She expertly captures the desperate panic of educated, affluent, urban parents in search of the perfect environment for their precious offspring. Loh herself vacillates between being one of these super-obsessed types, and being a slacker mom, and freely admits her own contradictory impulses. That’s partly what makes the book so entertaining. One day Loh is touring the $22,000-a-year private (pseudonymous) Wonder Canyon School, where “children honor diversity, learn peaceful conflict resolution and are taught music using the Orff-Schulwerk method.” Of course there is no diversity at Wonder Canyon; as Loh points out, the children must honor it because they don’t actually experience it. The next day Loh is letting her daughters watch Disney princess videos for the 82nd time and feeding them Kraft macaroni and cheese. She is consumed with guilt for failing to provide Baby Mozart and organic broccoli all the while railing against the forces that make her feel guilty. But despite how much Loh wants the Wonder Canyon, there is no way that she and her husband can afford it on the combined income of a journalist and a musician.

Thus Loh’s daughter ends up at an LA public magnet school. It’s a better choice than the local elementary school (which Loh dubs Guavatorina for its 89% English Language Learner status) though she is still the only blonde in a sea of Central American and Armenian children. But why is this a bad thing, Loh asks? Her daughter’s school is a warm and loving place where the children thrive. As a result of this revelation Loh becomes a public school activist and runs a Web site for parents of children in LA public schools.

Loh’s writing style takes a little getting used to. Her articles in the Atlantic are straightforward magazine-style journalism but Mother on Fire is filled with exclamation marks! –And interjections! Also lots of $%^#@!!!!! Before writing this book, Loh performed a stage version of Mother on Fire for 7 months in Los Angeles. I imagine the book reflects the style of the show. Was there a lot of ranting and desperate proclaiming? I bet there was.

You can find Sandra Tsing Loh everywhere on the Web. Here are some links to an interview in Salon, her articles in the Atlantic, her NPR pieces, a New York Times review of Mother on Fire, and her personal Web site.

(Book 35, 2009)

Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris

I keep coming across these mysteries that take place in exotic locales. This was another one, set in Saudi Arabia. A teenage girl called Nouf goes missing and eventually turns up dead. Because her family is rich and powerful it’s easy for them to bribe the coroner into suspending his investigation and recording the death as “accidental,” thus avoiding any hint of scandal. But Othman, Nouf’s favorite brother, wants the truth, and he arranges for two people to investigate on the sly. They are Nayir, the desert tracker initially hired by Nouf’s family to look for her, and Othman’s fiancée Katya, who works as a lab technician in the corrupt coroner’s office. This unlikely pair team up to find out what they can.

I can’t say that I know anything about the criminal justice system in Saudi Arabia. Is it really this easy for a prominent family to sweep something like this under the rug? Is there no one in charge who would force a real investigation? I guess not. Thus the author’s setup is a good one. She does the best with what the society offers in the way of investigative type characters. And she makes dramatic use of the cultural roadblocks our investigators encounter. The two cannot be seen in public together because they are not married to each other, which makes it difficult to visit places relevant to their investigation. Katya, the lab tech, must perform some of her forensic research at home because her working conditions are so constrained by gender segregation rules. Nayir is constantly struggling with guilt for his inability to erase his memory of Nouf’s naked body on the coroner’s table. These are not things that typically hamper U.S. or British cops!

A subtext is of course the status of women in Saudi Arabia. Katya is a rebel because she has chosen her own husband, and because she insists on working in a lab instead of using her chemistry PhD to teach at a women’s college. Nouf is a contradiction: she rode a jet ski in an abaya, she agreed to an arranged marriage, yet she routinely disguised herself as a boy to scoot around Jedda on a motorcycle. Nayir, at first extremely pious and traditional, grows through his contact with Katya and Nouf into a man who can see a woman’s point of view. All this adds up to an interesting story but not really an interesting mystery – the solution is a bit of a letdown, an afterthought, a little dangling bit that we don’t really care about as much as we care about Nouf’s life and what will eventually happen to Nayir and Katya.

(Book 34, 2009)