Beyond the River By Michael Fillerup Signature Books, 1995. Softcover: 252 pages. ISBN: 1-56085-068-X Suggested retail price: $14.95 (US)
Reviewed by: Benson Parkinson

Paul Swenson, writing in the Salt Lake Tribune (20 Aug 1995), describes Beyond the River as a coming of age novel. If that's so, it takes the protagonist until the age of 40 to "grow up." Richard Cracroft, writing on AML-List (16 Oct 1995), says Beyond the River is about a mid-life crisis, yet half the book or more takes place before the protagonist reaches the age of 22. Swenson writes, "Until [Fillerup's] Mormon themes merge with the confluence of a wider river, the power of his literary promise will remain constrained." I hold more with Cracroft, who exults, "We finally have a sophisticated LDS novel in which the protagonist struggles through [his problems] with his feet firmly planted in the Mormon cosmos."

Jonathan Reeves is an LDS golden boy growing up in a small town in California. Tall, blond, athletic, the only child of a pediatrician, Jon is one of the few in his high school with a real chance of not spending his life working at the town's sawmill. Cock-sure and indifferent about his school work, he only goes to the tutoring center under threat of being kicked off the track team. His tutor turns out to be Nancy Von Kleinsmid, an "Albino Watusi," a brilliant, friendless girl, who badgers him, insults him, spurs him, challenges his every belief and intuition -- all in the first ten minutes after they meet. Jon is intrigued with the girl, and spends more and more time with her, reads the books she gives him, takes up writing at her instigation, questions his commitment to athletics and his beliefs (she is non-Mormon), which causes no small anxiety at home. She takes him to the preference ball, where he kisses her (but no more). He determines to marry her and pursue a literary career and can't understand why she slips away him. After fighting with his parents, he leaves early for BYU on a football scholarship, only to learn she has married almost as soon as he left. Within a year, she is found dead at a local swimming spot, under circumstances that could have been accidental or suicide.

The story follows Jon on his mission to Mexico, with particular attention to a 9-month stint in a backwards, poverty-stricken town whose citizens are nevertheless humble and happy. His mother dies during his absence. His father, in shock, moves into a rich neighborhood in a different city, dyes his hair, buys a fancy car. Jon's disorientation on returning leads to their falling out -- they have not fully mended their relationship when his father dies too some years later. Jon marries, postpones his dream of becoming a writer, has children, tries to deal with a daughter's crippling illness and the pressures of teaching remedial English in a California school. While the first part of Jon's life is presented in a mostly straightforward first-person narrative, his adult life emerges through a jumble of flashbacks as Jon tries to make peace with his past during a visit to his hometown.

Fillerup's language in this book is flowery, a little flippant, lacking in finesse. I've never noticed this in Fillerup's stories, and in fact it seems appropriate to a narrator who has put away writing since college, though I found it a little grating. The convoluted structure worked, mostly, though more than once I had to stop and ask myself if a paragraph was past or present. I'm not sure what would have been lost telling the story straight through. I was glad to see this character tell of his adolescence, his conversion, his mission, his time at BYU, making very little effort to justify or explain his Mormonness, except to non-Mormon characters in the story itself. I didn't care for the narrator's overarching burden of guilt. I've noticed this in a lot of intellectual Mormon fiction, and while I know that's out there, it's never struck me as typical of Mormons I know. A scene where he euthanizes a kitten is especially overplayed. I suppose a lot of this character's guilt grows from his estrangement from his parents, which makes it more understandable, and from his proximity to the teenage suicide. My wife, a teacher, sees that at school, and I try to imagine how hard it would be not to second guess, how hard to understand.

This book is about loss and appeasing old ghosts, but it is also about deferred dreams, in particular the dream of Mormon literature. Nancy, speaking literally from the grave through some notebooks that come into Jon's hand, berates him for compromising, for letting society and religion dictate and dilute his life. But he believes, he protests, and that brings all the rest with it, marriage, job, Church duties. She won't buy it:

--[. . .] You're floundering. You're tinking around, stinking around. Frankly I don't know what's holding you back. If I believed all you claim to believe, I'd be drooling to write about it.

--Maybe, but what makes you so sure the world is willing to read about it?

--You don't think people are tired of turning on the Seven O'Clock News and hearing the daily death count? This planet's got a giant bellyache screaming for relief. Think of the possibilities! All those beautiful concepts that have become fossilized by centuries of abuse and overuse that now exist only as provender for scheming preachers -- why, you could breathe life into those words! You could give them flesh, blood, bones, bodies, souls. You could resurrect them. Don't you see? (235)

The middle-aged Jon will leave the town and return to his family determined to find a way to accommodate his dreams.

This book is also about living a Mormon life, and it is punctuated with little nudges, little reassurances: his conversion, for example, described briefly (pp. 71-72, cf. 134), or a priesthood blessing that tells him something he has never told (pp. 153-4), or an almost audible, at times physical impulse that repeatedly keeps him from making mistakes (pp. 62, 71, 103, 139). One crucial time he fails to listen (pp. 179-80). Fillerup in the past has had a tendency to undermine such impulses with sociological observations or competing spiritualities. For example in his reservation stories, the Gospel is often something foreign, Anglo, that doesn't fit the Navajo culture, though Navajo individuals may occasionally and for their own reasons take up its forms. Navajo religion has its own, separate but equal power. That urge to have it both ways is downplayed considerably in this book -- a troubling dream that can as easily be attributed to grief, illness, or rebellion (pp. 175-6), likewise Jon's regret at not having proved his love for Nancy by having slept with her (p.226) and his desire to see her unrepentant in the spirit world (p. 79). Nancy's constant, half-joking, anti-religious badgering is coming from a non-Mormon. For all Jon's rebellion and doubting, the Spirit is present in his story from beginning to end. Frankly I can think of few other literary LDS novels that attempt this, though it is at the heart of what LDS literature ought to do. Mormon life is like that, and it should to be so portrayed. This kind of writing is a form of witnessing.

My wife, who reads young adult novels by the bushel but has little time for more high-brow offerings, is a better judge of readability. She read the book quickly, preferred the straightforward narrative to the flashbacks, found the ending ambiguous, but nevertheless liked the book a good deal. As for myself, in spite of my teenage interest in sports, my mission, marriage, and deep involvement in Mormon literature and writing, I didn't identify strongly with the protagonist or the other characters, but I liked them, felt for them, and wanted to know what happened to them. I enjoyed this book and give it a strong recommendation. For the spiritual material alone, I would call Beyond the River groundbreaking.