On the Road to Heaven: An Autobiographical Novel

By Coke Newell

Reviewed by Jonathan Langford
On 9/27/2008

Zarahemla Books, 2007 Trade paperback:
333 pages
ISBN-10: 0-9787971-3-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-9787971-3-3 $16.95

Back in the early 1970s, when I was in fourth grade or so, one of my favorite books was My Side of the Mountain, by Jean George--a book about a teenage boy who went to live on his own, in the mountains of upstate New York. Granted, living off the land wasn't something I ever had the skills to do--I never even made Tenderfoot in Boy Scouts, for goodness' sake--but growing up loving the woods and mountains of western Oregon, I used to fantasize about it, even while knowing that between mission and college and all those other things that faithful Mormon boys were supposed to do, it was never going to happen to me.

Given that background, it's fairly easy to see why--when I heard about On the Road to Heaven, a book about a boy who grew up in (and largely on) the mountains of Colorado in the 1960s, and then made the transition from eco-hippie to Mormon--I knew I had to read it. And I was right. Newell's experience of balancing Mormonism and environmentalist counter-culturalism may have been more dramatic than mine, and sequential rather than simultaneous, but still there was a lot I found to identify with.

This book combines two classic Mormon genres: the conversion story and the mission story. In summary, it's an account of the spiritual journey of a boy who grew up with a love and reverence for nature, influenced by native American perspectives (at least in some of their better-known versions), who hitchhiked and used marijuana with his friends and experimented with hippie culture, only to find it ultimately unsatisfying. Somewhere along the way, he acquired a Mormon girlfriend--rebelling against her own convert family background--and the two of them fell in love, mixed up though their lives were in other ways. (And whose teenage life isn't, in some way or another?) And then he encountered the missionaries and joined the Church, and she (independently) became active again, and they broke up--sort of--and each served a mission, and then came home and got married. The end.

It's a well-crafted story arc, showing the passion of the boy's first, early yearnings for spirituality, and how the path that led him to Carlos Castaneda ultimately was the same path that led him to Mormonism, and eventually to preaching the gospel to poverty-stricken Colombians whose very culture seemed to hold them back from achieving better things. For Newell's character, white shirts and ties may have replaced tie-dye, but not as a repudiation; rather, as a destination, a fulfillment of sorts. (Okay, I admit it: I don't remember offhand if he ever mentions wearing tie-dye, and I'm not going to skim through the book to find out. But hey, it works on a symbolic level, right?)

And it was very good, and a most enjoyable read. Satisfying, and hatred-inducing, in an envious-writer sort of way.

I do, however, have two complaints about the book, two things that keep me from enjoying it as much as I otherwise would.

The first is a certain hesitancy, a kind of jerkiness in the writing, particularly in the first part of the book. Mostly, I like the informal, highly personal style. Still, there are times when it seems a bit self-conscious. I can't decide if that's because the words haven't been polished quite enough, or because they come across sometimes as too polished--deliberately affecting a tone that should come naturally. Maybe it's a matter of voice. During the first part of the book, is the person we're hearing the naive hick/hippie teenager, or the middle-aged adult looking backward? It's not always clear.

The second has to do with the book's basic genre. I know that "autobiographical novel," paradoxical though it may sound, is indeed a perfectly acceptable genre. It's just that I don't like it.

Part of narrative--particularly first-person narrative, which this most decidedly is--is that it invites us to get to know the person behind the "I," holding out the promise of a potential connection with someone. I'm perfectly fine with that "someone" being a fictional character; some of my best friends have names like Frodo Baggins. Still, it's important to me to know just whose acquaintance I'm being asked to make. Frankly, the autobiographical novel seems a bit like a copout: claiming the moral and narrative authority of "I-was-there," without making any commitment to live up to the accompanying responsibility to tell the truth as best you can. That makes me uneasy.

And so I like the "Everon 'Kit' West" of the story, and I can't help but think I'd like Coke Newell too, but I can't really be sure. All I really know for sure that's true about the protagonist-as-Coke-Newell (from the About the Author page at the back of the book) is that he was indeed "a former tree-hugging, Zen-spouting, vegetarian Colorado mountain hippie" who joined the LDS Church, as described in the book. All I know for sure that's not true is that his name wasn't Everon West (or "Waist" as the Colombians pronounced it). Everything in between is, presumably, negotiable. Just how negotiable is unclear.

I'm sure some people will want to call me to task for imposing an unacceptable limitation on the creative choices of the artist. My point, though, isn't that Newell shouldn't have done whatever he did in this book. Rather, I'm simply saying that the choices he made got in the way of my connection with the story. Even just an Author's Note explaining the nature of his fictionalizing--Did he change the names? Did he combine characters and events? Did he switch locations? Did he make up events out of whole cloth?--would have helped me sit back and enjoy it, clunky though such things (author's explanatory notes, that is) often are.

One possible reason for the fictionalizing becomes evident in the latter part of the book. Like the character in some kind of missionary epic, Coke's main character lives through--or knows other missionaries who experience--most of the classic missionary experiences, both good and bad: the miraculously refound golden contact, healings, being taken for CIA agents, having girls put their hands down his pants, punching out someone, getting tapeworms and losing a life-threatening number of pounds, encountering intensely envious and bizarrely affectionate anti-Americanism, eating the mysterious and horrible local food, eating the miraculously wonderful peanut butter from home, experiencing the gift of tongues, missionaries going on dates with local members, and much more.

While it's possible that the real-life Elder Newell really did experience all these things, it would certainly be understandable if he decided to fictionalize--just for the purpose of getting all the good stuff into one story. On the whole it works, at least in part because despite all the experiences he goes through, "Elder West" remains a believable character, well-meaning and committed but also a fallibly human boy/young man on the cusp of adulthood--like most of the missionaries I knew, and indeed like the missionary I remember being, though my mission wasn't (thankfully) half as exciting as his.

This, indeed, is for me the great strength of the book, despite its mostly minor flaws: that it recapitulates, in a realistic way, so much that is real and and true and typical about my own experience, and I think that of many other Latter-day Saints of my own age and generation, despite--or perhaps because of--all the ways in which Newell's narrative is specific to one particular character leading one particular life. Sure, he served his mission in Colombia, not Italy (an important difference--I can still remember my native Italian teacher in the Missionary Training Center responding, when asked if it was okay to drink the water in Italy, "We are not South America"). And he was a convert to the Church, while I was raised Mormon. And I never tried drugs, and I didn't even have a girlfriend until my sophomore year in college, after I got back from my mission.

Still, Kit West's experiences resonate with me. On the whole, this is a book I wouldn't hesitate to put in front of my non-Mormon friends and say, "Here. Read this. Kit's story isn't mine, but this will give you some idea of what being a Mormon felt like during my growing up, and part of why I'm a Mormon still."


Copyright 2008