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Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.
Sweeping and lyrical, spellbinding and unforgettable, David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife combines epic historical fiction with a modern murder mystery to create a brilliant novel of literary suspense.
It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family's polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife.
Soon after Ann Eliza's story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds-a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father's death.
And as Ann Eliza's narrative intertwines with that of Jordan's search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love and faith.
Review:
After weathering the scrutiny and debates kicked up by Mitt Romney's run for the White House and Warren Jeffs' polygamous sect in Texas, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints probably deserves the rest of the year off. But, lo and behold, here comes an engrossing new novel that resurrects one of the Mormons' most destructive opponents: Ann Eliza Young, a beautiful, articulate woman who once... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) shared Brigham Young's bed and then devoted her life to destroying him. She's brought back to vivid life by David Ebershoff, an editor at Random House who bears no grudge against Mormons but has spent the last seven years studying their genesis and considering the human costs of revelation and inerrancy. His great collage of a novel mixes the early history of the Mormon Church with the story of a modern-day murder in a breakaway Mormon cult. Readers of "Under the Banner of Heaven," Jon Krakauer's best-seller about the violent beginnings of Mormonism in the early 19th century and a double murder carried out by Mormon fundamentalists in 1984, will recognize this mingling of old and new. But Ebershoff has produced a different kind of book. For one thing, he's made up his modern-day adventure and fictionalized the historical record to shape his own ends. And more important, he's produced a novel that poses engaging challenges for the faithful in any denomination without discounting the essential value of faith. The result is a book packed with historical illumination, unforgettable characters and the deepest questions about the tenacity of belief. Ebershoff's title and much of his material come from a popular memoir that Ann Eliza Young published in 1875 called "Wife No. 19, or the Story of a Life in Bondage, Being a Complete Expose of Mormonism, and Revealing the Sorrows, Sacrifices and Sufferings of Women in Polygamy." (The Gilded Age knew how to write a subtitle.) Ann was raised in a polygamous home during the early days of the LDS Church when the saints miraculously created towns in the Utah desert. In 1868, when she was 24 and Brigham Young was 67, she became one of his many wives. The total number of his wives and her position among them remain matters of continuing dispute, but all agree that it was not a match made in heaven. Brigham mostly ignored her as he ruled with absolute authority over a prosperous theocracy in uneasy coexistence with the U.S. government. Five years later, citing abuse, neglect and abandonment, Ann began divorce proceedings and demanded $200,000 of Young's awesome fortune. Given these oversized personalities and the sensational details — multiple sex partners! millions of dollars! — the case exploded across the nation's newspapers and resulted in Ann's excommunication, Brigham's brief imprisonment and a torrent of horrible publicity about the church and its leaders. Ann emerged with a new career as a popular lecturer and writer about the degradations of "plural marriage," and 15 years after she began her crusade, the LDS Church ceased the practice of polygamy. Ebershoff's presentation of Ann's life is a complicated revision of her memoir — sometimes an act of aggressive editing, other times an act of literary creation. In addition to excerpting her tale and shaping new episodes, he has focused her narrative, trimmed away its considerable detours and subtly modernized her Victorian language while allowing her fierce testimony to retain its antique tone. But hers is only one voice in the remarkable collection of voices that captures our attention here. Some of the best parts of "The 19th Wife" are those that Ebershoff has largely invented, including a remorseful chapter by Ann's father, who looks back on his life with deep regret and tries to make sense of his daughter's apostasy. "Her assault is cruel," he admits, "but I often wonder if her assassin's blade has been forged from an unalloyed truth." We learn from him about the tragedy of the so-called Handcart Disaster of 1856, in which fresh Mormon immigrants from Europe were lured into making what became a deadly trek across the United States to Utah. Ebershoff also creates a deposition from Ann's weary brother; it's filled with shame for his part in her marriage to Brigham and for his own failings as a husband. And there are letters written in the late 1930s by Ann's adult son, who's finally found peace in the worship of nature. He regards all that religious drama involving his mother during the previous century with a kind of wistful good humor. A.S. Byatt once wrote a novel called "The Biographer's Tale" that presented an incoherent collection of notes meant to reproduce the baffling challenge of ordering disparate material, but she succeeded too well. The various documents and testimonies that Ebershoff creates in "The 19th Wife" are more artfully designed to play off each other, despite their initially cacophonous sounds. There are newspaper articles and archivists' memos, advertisements and playbills, letters and coded marginalia, even instant messages and a Wikipedia entry. From the conflicting records of others and an alternately moving and self-aggrandizing diary, Brigham Young himself emerges as a fascinating, frightening man of unbridled power who felt the full burden of saving so many souls — and wiping his enemies off the Earth. It's difficult to remember that Ebershoff is the ventriloquist behind all of these, even the Master's thesis about Ann supposedly written by a feminist Mormon in 2005. It fills in interesting detail about the period and demonstrates the LDS Church's gradual willingness to tolerate academic research into the darker aspects of its own history. Less satisfying is the modern-day murder mystery that winds through this complicated collection of material. Jordan Scott is an endearing young man who was expelled at the age of 14 from the Firsts, a fundamentalist Mormon cult in Mesadale, Ariz., that sounds a lot like the one in Texas that dominated the news this spring. After a tough period of destitution and prostitution, Jordan has made a life for himself in California. But that hard-earned stability is disrupted when he hears that his mother has been arrested for murdering his exceedingly creepy, polygamous father. He drives back home to see her for the first time in six years and reluctantly decides to help prove her innocence. He's funny, a little flippant, finally at ease with his homosexuality, "just your regular run-of-the-mill polygamist boo-hoo tragedy," he says. His story, with its corny Hardy Boys theatrics, provides both levity and pathos, but it's jarringly incongruous with the novel's 19th-century voices, and its drama simply can't compete with Ann and Brigham's titanic clash. Still, as Jordan risks his life snooping around this violent cult, he offers provocative commentary on the splinter groups that Joseph Smith's revelation spawned, the unimaginable humiliations of polygamy and the difficulty of thinking outside the parameters of one's religious community. "I know it's hard to believe people really talk like that," he says about his mother's stubborn devotion, "but consider this: if you didn't know anything else, if your only source of information was the Prophet ... you'd probably believe it too. You wouldn't know how to form a doubt." Even after her brutal denunciations of Mormonism and Brigham Young, Ebershoff shows Ann feeling that same persistence of belief, the difficulty of breaking outside everything she once knew. "My faith had been emptied out like a can," she says, not in celebration of her freedom but in full recognition of how harrowing such emptiness is. "I have heard an esteemed medical doctor say that illness is the loneliest state. I would argue that doubt deserves that claim." There's no use pretending that reading "The 19th Wife" isn't a lot of work, but its rewards are correspondingly vast. Admittedly, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will have reason to react unenthusiastically to this portrayal of their early leaders, and members of pedophilic cults should definitely choose something else for book club. But the voices Ebershoff has brought to life here dramatize one of the most remarkable periods of America's religious history, and he's just as discerning about the bizarre descendants that can sprout like toxic weeds from a founder's revelation. The greatest triumph is the way all this material, though it's focused on the peculiarities of Mormonism — devout and heretical, ancient and modern — illuminates the larger landscape of faith. Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com. Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"Great fun to read with its enticing characters, swift dialogue, and neatly structured plot, Ebershoff's sensitive and topical tale...provides much food for thought in the mode of such seriously popular writers as Jodi Picoult, Anna Quindlen, and Andre Dubus III." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review:
"The 19th Wife is a big book, in every sense of the word. It sweeps across time and delves deeply into a world long hidden from sight. It offers historical and contemporary perspective on one of the world's fastest-growing religions and one of its oldest practices, and in the process it does that thing all good novels do: It entertains us." Los Angeles Times
Review:
"Ebershoff takes a promising historical premise and runs with it....Reminiscent of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose in scope and ambition, though the narrative sometimes drags." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"The 19th Wife succeeds in illustrating how the same issues have spanned great temporal changes in polygamist culture. And although its period-piece chapters about Ann Eliza prompt apprehension, they sustain interest and come alive." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review:
"[Ebershoff is] able to strike an authentic feel without subjecting us to the bone-dry and overly mannered language of the period. He makes Jordan's voice feel authentic, too, and somehow the contrast between the modern and historical passages is not jarring." Charlotte Observer
Synopsis:
This new novel from the author of The Danish Girl and Pasadena is a spellbinding work of literary suspense, set against the history of the Mormon Church, that combines historical fiction with a modern-day mystery.
David Ebershoff is the author of two novels, Pasadena and The Danish Girl, and a short-story collection, The Rose City. His fiction has won a number of awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lambda Literary Award, and has been translated into ten languages to critical acclaim. Ebershoff has taught creative writing at New York University and Princeton and is currently an adjunct assistant professor in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. For many years he was the publishing director of the Modern Library, and he is currently an editor-at-large for Random House. He lives in New York City.
dgrassel, January 1, 2012 (view all comments by dgrassel)
An intriguing look at the history of polygamy in the Mormon church and the modern day practices of polygamist families and communities.
Stephanie Patterson, August 17, 2008 (view all comments by Stephanie Patterson)
This is a tour de force certain to please both lovers of murder mysteries and lovers of historical fiction The very talented Mr Ebershoff intertwines a contemporary murder mystery narrated by the alleged murderer's gay son (Did mom, the 19th wife of her radical Mormon husband, murder him?) with an account of the life on Ann Eliza Young, the apostate 19th wife of Brigham Young. This entertaining and absorbing novel is also a cautionary tale about religious zealotry.
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Wendy Robards, July 29, 2008 (view all comments by Wendy Robards)
Ann Eliza Young was a plural wife of Brigham Young in the late 1800s. Her life, including her very public divorce and attack against Celestial Marriage (which spurred the passage of the Poland Act, and ultimately forced the LDS Church to ban the practice), is the basis for David Ebershoff’s third historical novel The 19th Wife. Ebershoff weaves the fictionalized version of Ann Eliza’s story with that of a present day plural wife, her son and a murder mystery.
Ebershoff’s writing engaged me immediately, especially when he speaks in Ann Eliza’s voice. He includes letters, newspaper reports and occasional other narrators to construct a complete picture of the life of this interesting historical female character. I was less engaged by the parallel story from present day. It was during those parts of the novel where I remembered I was reading a book. At times the plot felt contrived to connect to Ann Eliza’s life, and I never really related to the primary narrator who is the son of an accused murderess.
At times, Ebershoff tends to ramble a bit, but he quickly gets back on track and moves the plot forward. His portrayal of the first Saints is not entirely flattering and this may upset some people. But, he relies heavily on the history of the LDS church and its leaders to weave his tale, and for that he cannot be faulted.
The novel is a real door stopper at nearly 600 pages (I read an Advance Reader’s Edition) but despite its length, it is a fairly quick read which speaks well of Ebershoff’s direct and compelling prose. I would be interested to read Ebershoff’s first novel The Danish Girl, loosely based on the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener who became the first man to undergo a sex-change operation in 1931.
This novel will be released by Random House August 5th. For those readers who like historical novels or who are interested in the history of the LDS church and its leaders, this is a book you might like.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (25 of 46 readers found this comment helpful)
Product details
528 pages
Random House -
English9781400063970
Reviews:
"Review"
by Booklist (Starred Review),
"Great fun to read with its enticing characters, swift dialogue, and neatly structured plot, Ebershoff's sensitive and topical tale...provides much food for thought in the mode of such seriously popular writers as Jodi Picoult, Anna Quindlen, and Andre Dubus III."
"Review"
by Los Angeles Times,
"The 19th Wife is a big book, in every sense of the word. It sweeps across time and delves deeply into a world long hidden from sight. It offers historical and contemporary perspective on one of the world's fastest-growing religions and one of its oldest practices, and in the process it does that thing all good novels do: It entertains us."
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"Ebershoff takes a promising historical premise and runs with it....Reminiscent of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose in scope and ambition, though the narrative sometimes drags."
"Review"
by Janet Maslin, The New York Times,
"The 19th Wife succeeds in illustrating how the same issues have spanned great temporal changes in polygamist culture. And although its period-piece chapters about Ann Eliza prompt apprehension, they sustain interest and come alive."
"Review"
by Charlotte Observer,
"[Ebershoff is] able to strike an authentic feel without subjecting us to the bone-dry and overly mannered language of the period. He makes Jordan's voice feel authentic, too, and somehow the contrast between the modern and historical passages is not jarring."
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
This new novel from the author of The Danish Girl and Pasadena is a spellbinding work of literary suspense, set against the history of the Mormon Church, that combines historical fiction with a modern-day mystery.
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