Book Ends: David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife

And another fine read: David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife (NY: Random House, 2008):

They looked our way with desperate interest.  I knew at least one of them would not stop until she had learned the subject of our debate.  Polygamy inspires this in otherwise thoughtful women--in the relentless need to know another's business (p. 257).

I began Ebershoff's novel with keen interest after having read Hollinghurst's, perhaps because Ebershoff's back-forth set of stories revolving around 1) Brigham Young's 19th (or was she the 52nd?) wife Ann Eliza Webb and 2) a murder mystery set in a contemporary polygamous off-brand Mormon community seemed an easy read after Hollinghursts's gorgeous but always baroque prose.  And because the interplay of the two sets of stories (told in Eliza Ann's case with recourse to a mix of quasi-historical documents including letters, diaries, legal case files, newspaper clippings, etc.) was initially great fun (who can't like a golden-hearted gay bad boy evicted from his polygamous Mormon compound, who's trying to exonerate his mother, a 19th wife, from a false murder charge?), I was inclined to bridle at Janet Maslin's review of this novel in the New York Times.  

Maslin thinks too many things are going on simultaneously in 19th Wife for any of the characters to hook us.  Too many letters, diaries, newspaper stories, too much back-forth chronological shifting from Brigham and Ann Eliza to the contemporary story of Sister BeckyLyn and her reprobate son Jordan: and so we tend to lose interest in any of the characters, as the novel progresses.

By the end of the novel, I could see Maslin's point: it's hard, specifically, to stay connected to the two sets of characters as one toggles back and forth between the two eras.  By the end of the book, I found Ann Eliza frankly tiresome, as much as I wanted to cheer her on as she tackled Brigham and the polygamous male establishment of early Mormonism and lampooned the absurd theological pretensions these men used to justify their decision to add more and more nubile young female bodies to their already overstocked bevies of wives old and young.

And I wanted to know more, quite specifically, about young Jordan and his budding relationship with gay (ex-?) Mormon Tom, a relationship left hanging when the book ends.

Even so, I highly recommend 19th Wife.  Ebershoff is a fine, a sympathetic, writer.  With the debates going on in the U.S. political arena right now about separation of church and state and conscience exemptions based on peculiar religious beliefs, this is a book that has an interesting contemporary resonance, and at times, its plot reads as if Ebershoff were prescient when he wrote the novel.  The founders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints were, after all, no more or no less certain of the theological validity of their right to practice polygamy than are the U.S. Catholic bishops when they demand the right, based on their peculiar theological principles, to deny women contraceptive coverage in the health-care plans of Catholic institutions.

The only difference is that the U.S. government eventually realized it could not bow to the peculiar religiously-grounded "rights" and demands for "conscience exemptions" in the case of Mormonism.  Whereas it continues to imagine it can and must do so when it's not the Prophets Joseph and Brigham making the demands, but it's His Excellency Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan issuing them.

And for this reason alone (and because the subtext of gay rights running through this novel is of such burning importance still in American culture, in part, due to the peculiar religious demands of the LDS church and the Catholic church), Ebershoff's novel is well worth reading--for this reason, and because it's a well-told story with engaging characters about whom one definitely wants to know more, as the novel ends.