Customer Reviews

Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature (Essays on Mormonism Series)

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This is a long-needed anthology of classic essays of LDS literary criticism. It is divided into two parts: historical perspectives and explications of specific works. You'll find great stuff like Edward Geary's meditation on the "Mormon lost generation"; a lucid, beautifully laid-out historical overview of LDS literary history by Eugene England; and stirring essays by Bruce W. Jorgensen, Karl Keller and Tory C. Anderson arguing for an expansive, generous canon and against the ancient Mormon prejudice that depicting evil is the same thing as endorsing it. Two favorite essays are Eugene England's look at "non-Jack fiction" (including his definitive review of Levi Peterson's " the Backslider"), and Peterson's own "Juanita Brooks: The Mormon Historian as Tragedian." This essay is very close to my heart, as it delineates how history-writing can become art; and also movingly explains how the tragedian can transform our darkest moments into "experience for our good."

One flaw in this collection is, as P.J. O'Rourke once said of another book, "Its covers are too close together." This collection seems way too short at 219 pages. I would have enjoyed 100 more pages of the seminal essays listed in the preface but omitted in the text. Another flaw is the lack of new quality criticism from the most recent generation of LDS scholars. There is a post-modernist reading here of Terry Tempest Williams' "Refuge", written by C.K. Farr and Philip A. Snyder; however, I found it almost unreadable. In my view LDS criticism faces danger on the one hand from stultifying "theory" approaches that suck the life and the fun out of reading. On the other hand, there is danger (especially at Brigham Young University) from a demand for a kind of super-orthodoxy from LDS critics that precludes discussion of anything "controversial." (I really worry about who is going to replace the vigorous, outward-looking generation of Eugene England. Even the ever amiable, good-natured Richard Cracroft may be a dinosaur and not even know it; he's too honest about touchy parts of our past.) Perhaps we get a glimpse of the future at BYU in Bruce Jorgenson's story of the student who didn't want to discuss in class Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with the Toy Dog" because of its adulterous characters.

This book is a splendid record of our literary past. I just hope that in the future we can live up to the "faithful realism" that is the best of our tradition.

In her Preface to this 1996 collection of essays, Lavina Fielding Anderson wrote, "This first volume of critical essays on Mormon literature takes its place among earlier anthologies ... it is a labor-intensive crop that has to be cultivated purposefully, and it plays a secondary, though vital nurturing role in preparing and maintaining the garden of primary, creative literature."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"Mormon writers, then, certainly have at hand sufficient MATTER with which to produce a great literature. But does Mormonism also provide insights into the resources and limitations of the MEANS of literature: language, form, style, genres, critical perspectives?" (Pg. xvi)
"Observers of the LDS church must think it odd that for all its emphasis on the spiritual worth of intelligence and knowledge and in spite of its commandment to read 'the best books,' there is no literary tradition in the church, no serious use of literature in the church, and barely a sign of interest in the emergence of a Mormon literature. One of the mysteries of literary life in America is why Mormons have contributed so little to it. To make mention of a Mormon literature is to make a joke." (Pg. 13)
"A Mormon criticism will surely not judge very quickly by superficial elements such as the presence of the always-ready-to-hand cliches of pop Mormon 'spirituality' or 'virtue,' or, negatively, by the presence of topics we disapprove or words we must not say." (Pg. 63)
"(Parley) Pratt's Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt (Revised and Enhanced), at least, is a sign that Mormon letters in the nineteenth century may not be as dead as we sometimes think." (Pg. 115)
"There is one more tragic dimension to the Mountain Meadows massacre. In exonerating (John D.) Lee, (Juanita) Brooks has indicted the church (in The Mountain Meadows Massacre)." (Pg. 140)
"I don't know why we expected early Mormons to write essays. I am not surprised that they didn't. They were too busy pushing back frontiers and building monuments." (Pg. 147)