"remarkably clean" ... "stares deep into the heart of intolerance, grief, and redemption, and does not blink." --
Tim SandlinThere is nothing subtle about Robert Van Wagoner's first novel, Dancing Naked, nothing at all. Released in October by Signature Press, a small publishing house known and respected for its promotion of scholarly work critical of Mormon history, the novel has already caused a great deal of local controversy. Van Wagoner, himself a former Mormon missionary and practicing Mormon, was warned by church authorities that, because of the complaints they'd received from church members attending his reading, they would be watching him closely. Van Wagoner, who now resides in Concrete, Washington, with his wife and two children, finds the criticism predictable but bristles at the notion that this work is anti-Mormon. Such attacks on Dancing Naked have only benefited Signature Press' advance sales. It is, in many ways, the best publicity Van Wagoner could hope for, coming from a state that has often lost talented Mormon fiction writers to just such nonsense. Moving between Salt Lake City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Maine and spanning the history of two families, Dancing Naked explores the unraveling of the Walker family as they seek to recover from the suicide of 15-year-old Blake. Layers of guilt, self-doubt, importance, loathing, anger, and familial abuse float to the surface of the novel and threaten to strangle the protagonist, Terry Walker, a mathematics professor at the University of Utah. After Walker discovers his son's body hanging form a shower curtain rod, head covered by a plastic bag, and pornographic pictures of naked men splayed on the bathroom floor, his normally ordered mathematical world dissolves into chaos. As a self-avowed homophobe, Walker finds Blake's death an almost unbearable cross to carry. Seeking answers in his own dysfunctional landscape, he floats form present to past, trying to make sense, hoping to unlock the mystery of his son's demise. To do so will uproot the protagonist from a world he believes to be balanced and comfortable and plunge him deeply into a self-examination of profound significance. Terry Walker will see things he'd prefer not to, hear whisperings about his son that disgust him, and engage in behavior dangerous to himself and his family. Survival, for him, depends greatly on the ability to forgive and to accept the cards he has been dealt. Walker's journey through the novel is dark and painful, placing at risk all that is holy and sacred to him. To confront his son's demons, he must revisit the untidy questions of his past. His relationship with his own father, a respected Mormon elder, was brutish, abusive, and condescending. Never able to fully please his father as a child, Terry finally rejected the Mormon faith, the expectation that he would fulfill his parents' dream to go on a Mormon mission, and committed the most unpardonable of all sins, marriage outside the faith. Repugnant as it was to his father, Terry's mother, a revisionist of her own life, accepted her son's choices while trying to justify and dismiss her husband's cold, methodic alienation. --- continued -
It is in the character of the protagonist's wife, Rayne Walker, that hope and possibility exist. Spunky, humorous, and sarcastic, Rayne, a public high school teacher, is uncompromising in her love for her family and husband. Throughout Dancing Naked, Rayne is a strong character, sympathetic and supporting on all fronts. Early in their relationship, she steadfastly refuses to allow Terry to compromise his dreams. Her strength in dealing with his family confounds and stimulates Terry. In a direct confrontation with Terry's father, Rayne finds the words Terry can't. She does not cower, verbally defending herself while Terry watches from the wings, mute and impotent. Rayne knows who she is, understands her son's journey into his own private hell, and above all remains convinced that her husband will come to a greater understanding of himself through this tragedy. Even so, the complexity of Terry's depression and his spiraling, reckless decline into a psychologically dark abyss push Rayne to the boundaries of her own limitations. Ultimately, Terry Walker's inability to accept and understand his own shortcomings exacts a heavy price on the family nucleus. Terry, an unsympathetic character, hovers on the brink of self-destruction and insanity, and his own salvation hinges on a single dark act. Coming full-circle, the reader is compelled to roll the dice with Van Wagoner's protagonist, dice shaved and loaded with the weight of guilt. Van Wagoner is a juggler of sorts tossing universal themes into the air and managing, with a trained eye, to keep his focus on the central issues of the novel. Not once, in the arc of the novel, does he falter. We may not want to face these issues in our own lives, to acknowledge, as Tolstoy did, that all families are dysfunctional. But we are compelled to follow Walker's nightmarish journey. There is no turning back. Like passing a horrible roadside accident, Dancing Naked forces us to take a look. We do it because we can't help ourselves. We are curious curious to see if anybody survived. In that moment we are reminded that life is capricious and reckless, that horrible things happen to good people. It isn't fair and it makes no sense. And it is this equation that Terry Walker, brilliant mathematician and loving father, finds unfactorble in his own life. Dancing Naked is an ambitious first novel, one that demands the reader be fully armed and prepared to do battle with unimaginable grief. There is no safety net to help the audience negotiate the tightrope of this well-crafted novel. It is not for the faint of heart. Dancing Naked is dense and loaded with serious issues. At times it cuts to the bone, laying open wounds that are difficult to watch heal. Dangerous and edgy, it is brutally honest in its exploration of the human spirit. --The Bloomsbury Review, Jeff Metcalf
