A longtime reader submitted this piece on David Ebersoff's recently published third novel, The 19th Wife
, which is getting spectacular reviews everywhere and hit the NYT extended bestseller list. It's great to see Ebershoff again making gay lives central in his work, as he did in The Danish Girl
and his story collection The Rose City, but did not in his bestselling second novel, Pasadena
.
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Past Plural
“It’s not that I actively dislike the Mormons, it’s just that they actively dislike me,” says twenty year old Jordan Scott, a modern-day, gay Huck Finn, caught in a world of plural marriage and violence going back two hundred years. Jordan is abandoned, emotionally and physically abused, outcast, nearly murdered, and damned by everyone from his Mom to his Prophet, in David Ebershoff’s powerful novel, The 19th Wife. But Jordan Scott remains strong and funny as all hell. He lives there.
"I am telling you all this because people always get me wrong. I know what they see— hustler, twink, whatever. But I’m not some precious stone… I’m just a guy who got totally screwed when he was fourteen, and by all odds should be in jail, or dead, or both, but actually is managing just fine.”
The 19th Wife ties the knot between historical Mormonism,
creation of seer-Prophet Joseph Smith, with the modern day horrors of
the fundamentalist Mormon church (FLDS) in what Jordan calls a “little slice of Saudi
America.” “Polygamy is at the center of everything they
believe,” writes the 19th wife of Brigham Young, Ann Eliza Young, in
the Preface to the revised edition of her memoir, rewritten as part of this time machine of a novel. The original sin of
Mormonism is polygamy, and it's frightening precisely because it is neither
dead nor historically removed. It is alive and very much among us in
its unintended consequences from Mesadale, Arizona to Los Angeles and
Salt Lake City. The unintended bloody consequences of Joseph Smith’s
“revelation” are the core of this story for the “sister-wives” wearing
their “prairie burka” dresses, the young girls who are “child-mothers”,
and the “lost boys” like Jordan , excommunicated and gay -- all stalked
by the past.
Connecting the past and the present, Ebsershoff creates parallel stories of two women two centuries apart, both of whom embody the title. Both are runaways. Both are deeply enmeshed in the violent dramas of their families and faiths; and both are seeking to reinvent themselves as individuals in the Americas they inhabit. In the 1800s, Ann Eliza Young stopped being Brigham Young's willing wife and became a radicalized runaway, writing two memoirs [Wife No. 19 was published in 1875] and speaking widely across the United States about the evils of polygamy. Ann Eliza Young actually did play a significant role in ending polygamy in the Mormon Church, and she was likely murdered for her apostasy. A forgotten feminist emancipator, Young vanished without a trace sometime after 1908, with no death certificate, police report, estate papers or obituary.
“To some she [Ann Eliza Young] was a real hero,” says Kelly Dee a fictional descendant researching Ann Eliza’s life. “But a lot of Saints, even today, they’re angry at her. Some people, like Brigham’s descendants, won’t even say her name. Young has been “Edited out of history!,” exclaims Dee. She is edited back into history by Ebershoff, who employs a dazzling range of memorabilia and documents including journals, legal filings, letters, handbills, university research papers and news stories, all fictional, but all based on his serious research.
Contrasting Ann Eliza's saga, the other titular character is Jordan's mother, a present-day 19th
wife in a fundamentalist Mormon desert cult, a theocratic hell called
Mesadale. She abandons Jordan when he is fourteen on a highway at
2:00am, on orders of the cult's Prophet. Six years later she is accused
of murdering her husband. Now Jordan must prove her innocence after having survived, against all odds, every type of horror and indignity endured by all his fellow lost boys.
“You know what makes me angriest?” Kelly Dee asks Jordan. “That someone has put them through this in the name of God. That’s the saddest part, these kids come out and they’ve been robbed of everything. Their childhoods, their families, but, worst of all, they’ve been robbed of God. And most of them never find him again.”
Jordan is saved by Kelly, now running the Ann Eliza Young House in modern day Salt Lake City. There she helps abandoned and shattered Mormon kids victimized by the Fundamentalists’ polygamy and the LDS homophobia. According to Jordan, Kelly saves him because “….she wasn’t just helping, assisting, offering a hand. No, she was researching, reading, learning, talking, understanding. Working hard to understand, wanting to understand, telling herself that’s the most important thing she can do. And it meant more to me than anything else. She got it… She got me. She knew I had been completely totally royally screwed.”
Jordan survived his abandonment by learning and understanding, and the novel tells us this is the best we can hope for. What makes all this so moving today is that getting dumped on the highway does “mess you up” (and rile you just a bit). Gays are now in a full-throated, direct confrontation with the LDS in California.
The Wall Street Journal reported that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has contributed more than any other donor toward the passage of Proposition 8 in California to ban same–sex-marriage, bundling more than 40% of the dollars to support its passage. That’s one man and one woman. As Jordan and his friends in the novel ask, if Joseph Smith and Brigham Young himself were wrong with the divine revelation of polygamy, “How can the Mormons go around editing God? If you ask me, it proves the whole thing, whether LDS or Firsts or whatever, is a piece of crap,” writes the 5th daughter of a plural marriage.
The Mormons are stuck with “an untenable theological problem,” writes Dee Kelly in a letter to her professor. As if speaking for Ebershoff, she questions: “If polygamy was no longer a divine doctrine, many in and out of the Church asked, “what about the Doctrine & Covenants as a whole? And what about the Book of Mormon itself? Could it too be edited, revised, trimmed, amended and otherwise altered by Church Leaders in Salt Lake? Brigham Young’s nineteen wives and fifty-seven children are the root of the problem for Ann Eliza Young, who probably lost her life fighting polygamy and its subjugation of women; for Jordan Scott, a young gay man who escapes with dignity intact a hundred years later; and gay Americans, like Jordan, who also need to understand this original sin of Mormonism. The plural past stalks us, too.