I just read an advance
copy of Steven Peck’s novel “The Scholar of Moab,” due out this October with
Torrey House Press (http://torreyhouse.com/upcoming-titles/).
It’s satire of the best
sort: biting what it loves, snuggling up to what it hates.
Reading about the man
whose monument celebrates “Hyrum LeRoy Thayne, Scholar and Scientist, The
Lord’s Chosen Servant and Defender of Moab, 1950-1977,” I thought a good title
for a review might be “Faith-Based Satire.” Peck clearly loves the crazy Mormon
Moabites he depicts, for he is one himself. He knows these characters – their
beliefs and miscreant deeds and rural malapropisms – so well that they may well
be mirrors of his own witty and drolly insecure self. (I know I found so many
of my own propensities and perversions and prevarications in the persons and
events that I suffered an intermittent blush as I read.)
Another title might be
“Satire of the Faith-Based.” When Mormon and especially BYU scientists are
urged by their leaders to do faith-based science, they run the risk of projects
like Hyrum Thayne’s pseudo-scientific article on bumblebee faith published as a
joke in the Bulletin of the Ecological
Society of America. Neither Hyrum nor his fellow Moabites recognize that the
article was published as humor, so the publication establishes him as the
scholar of Moab.
What is there to say
about a book that includes a mad poetess who claims aliens abducted her
newly-born baby, a two-headed cowboy who ends up in art-saturated Vienna
speculating about forms of consciousness, a dictionary thief whose diversionary
tactics (spraypainting the library wall with Communist symbols and a possible
reference to the Gadianton Robbers) infect the minds of his fellow Moabites
with Pentecostal conspiratorial flames, a backslider whose worldview nonetheless
is distinctly Mormon?
A couple of examples:
Hyrum begins his
hand-written manuscript in typical fashion:
“How
do I begin? How indeed. The rise from my beknighted state to one of mighty
& true erudition will stand credibility on your hoary head. You will see me
ascend from a miserly laborer with the USGS to a flagship Scholar invited to
stroll among the high & mighty & publish landmark Science in the prestigious
periodical the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. Why did I
underline that? Because titles are underlined in works of Scholarship. Verily,
you will learn much more than this. Much more indeed. For I. Even I of my own
Labors have engaged with the profoundest heights of Science & Literature.
It is from the peaks of these high Heights that I first found entanglements
both Wide & Deep.”
Perhaps the most comic character in all
of Mormon fiction, Hyrum is a thinker, a cogitator as my father used to say, a
philosopher who didn’t graduate from high school and thus has no basis other
than his small-town experience and his unexamined Mormon theology against which
to judge the new and confusing things that come his way as he molds himself into
a scholar with the help of books from the Moab Public Library. Confronted with
a problem, he figures it out on his own terms, as in this paragraph:
“So I
sat there in the dark on the stage in the cultural hall feeling plenty sorry
for myself. Such was the cost of being erudite & Scholarly I figure. Did
Leonardo Di Vinci have these kinds of problems? One book at the library says he
was a homo. I do'nt believe it. I suppose they think that because he liked to
draw naked men standing in circles with arms stretched out. But I think that he
drew naked men because he was too embarrassed to draw naked women. Like I would
feel mighty strange drawing a naked lady but I never had a moment of trouble
standing around in the locker room in high school with a bunch of naked guys.
So I figure people that say he was a homo just do'nt know what its like to be a
guy playing sports. But all the same he had trouble. He had to dig up bodies so
he could peer inside their skins to get the muscles right in his drawings. And
so he snuck around at night with his shovel over his shoulder no doubt causing
the neighbor ladies of his times Child Protection Society or whatever they
called it then to wag their tongues in undulations of cacophony.”
Peck’s novel is rich with dangling
placentas and mechanical pencils and Cleon Skousen books and bolo ties worn
with platform shoes and contrasting stories from the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret
News and best of all, language, lots of earnest, rurally fractured Mormon language.
3 comments:
Thanks for this post Scott. It's going to be fun to see this how this book is perceived by different perspectives.
Great review of a great book, Scott.
Thanks. It's easy to review a book as rich as Steve's.
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