Jon Reeves, the narrator in Michael Fillerup's Beyond the River, frets about the impossibility of writing while pursuing the Mormon lifestyle, what with job, marriage, children, and church responsibilities. Levi Peterson's career both gives the lie to and confirms that bind. He has managed to publish two story collections, a biography, and now two novels while raising a family, getting a PhD., and living the life of a professor and department chair at Weber State University. Five books to his credit, all of them well received -- but only five. Aspen Marooney is his second novel and already he's writing about forty year high school reunions and about characters looking towards retirement and concerned about their grandchildren.

So, has age tamed Aspen Marooney and Durfey Haslam, her high school lover? This book features no violent deaths, like Canyons of Grace, nor self-mutilations, like The Backslider, nor suicides waiting to happen, like Canyons and Nightsoil. But passion, specifically guilty passion, is what interests Levi Peterson, and it's still there.

The book opens on Durfey driving across Nevada with his wife Elaine, headed for the Shakespeare festival in Cedar City and his class reunion in Richfield. He has avoided reunions for forty years for fear of running into Aspen. Durfey is an insurance investigator in the Los Angeles area, successful but dissatisfied, sensing he missed his calling. As a boy he wanted to be a cowboy, then a steamboat captain. Durfey comes from an inactive LDS family, poor farmers, near the bottom of Richfield's social ladder, with a skeleton or two in the closet, which contributes to his low self-esteem. He works hard, is good with his children, attends church, and takes things as they come. His belated confession to Elaine of his youthful indiscretions with Aspen brought them near divorce. She won't let him tell her he loves her, perhaps not so much because of his sin, but because of the way he still pines for Aspen.

The point of view shifts to Aspen now, headed south from the Salt Lake Valley to the same reunion with her husband Roger. She too has Durfey on her mind. Aspen's parents didn't approve of Durfey, and she slept with him at least partly to force the issue of marriage, though in the end she lost her nerve, went to BYU, and married Roger instead. Roger is in Church administration, a kind and patient though not particularly passionate man. They have eight children to Durfey's three, most of whom have turned out well. The big exception is Gerald, who is obstinately bitter and profane. Aspen has never confessed her sin to anyone, not her husband, certainly not the bishop, but that is not all she's kept to herself. In the course of the reunion, during a chance encounter in a drug store, she lets slip to Durfey, dazed from a fat lip he got from an old enemy, that Gerald is his son. Roger doesn't know, Gerald doesn't know, and she begs Durfey not to tell anyone.

The book takes us through a 24th of July parade, the rodeo that night, and sessions of the reunion. We are introduced to a typical bevy of Peterson characters -- colorful, rambunctious, and profane -- along the way. Several, as in Peterson's other fiction, speak alike, delighting in big words, with a habit of reflecting out loud with little provocation. I've noticed that Levi speaks like that himself -- though the cadence, the facial expression, and thus a measure of his warmth, are often missing when his characters do so on paper. The book has a strong, clear structure, and certain passages that mix powerful, conflicting emotions, are as effective as anything Peterson has ever written. Toby's frenzied dance on the float while Durfey roils and Aspen holds her welted cheek (p. 63), the counterpoint of Durfey's half-heard reminiscing through Elaine's heavy brooding (p. 80) -- this is superb and moving writing. A few places could have been fleshed out more, and half a dozen passages refer to things that haven't been explicitly described in the narrative. I suspect this book underwent harsher cuts than it deserved.

Peterson's characters, though obsessed with religious issues, are typically drawn from the fringes of Mormonism. One thing that impressed me in this book was his sympathetic treatment of Roger, a man wholly in the Church. Here is an LDS patriarchal figure who is not in any way hypocritical or overbearing, who is diligent in his concern for those he perceives as in his charge, who seeks to move them only through kindness, persuasion, and longsuffering, never railing or condemning or seeking to compel -- even the adolescent Gerald. (Compare Fillerup's narrator's father decking him when he challenges his belief in God.) This is an ongoing theme with Peterson -- Roger is a good man, but a man without strong, unruly passions, who takes to the Church and civilized society because there is no real wildness in him. Durfey is (mostly) tamed because he wants what civilization and the Church can give him, but Roger is just naturally tame. There is a particular kind of patriarch that I've been looking for in Mormon literature, passionate but committed to the Church, hard working, creative, tickling, joshing, gruff and grumbling, but also reverent, and with a masculine tenderness. Peterson hits on one side or the other, with passionless men like Roger or Darrow in "Shriveprice," and with fanatics like Jeremy Windham in The Backslider or the polygamists in "Canyons of Grace." The only hope he holds out for passionate men is that age will smother the fire, make them more like women. For example, it occurs to Durfey that "men were less and less masculine and more and more human as they got older. The world was better for that fact. It was too bad men didn't age sooner" (192).

Anyone who was ever stood up for a date will relate to Durfey's anger and confusion over Aspen's original parting. She had returned several months after his initial confession, explaining that she couldn't marry him, but then sleeping with him three times during the night. He assumed she had changed her mind, but he never sees her again until the reunion forty years later. Anyone who has ever felt torn between doing what she wants and what society wants will relate to Aspen's indecision, her inability to give Durfey up, or to go against her parents wishes, even though she knows clinging to both will lead her to ruin. I hope not too many will relate to the way that, all grown up, these two let themselves fall into old traps, especially on the last day of the reunion, when they find themselves climbing the hill to the grove, laying out their clothes on the ground (166), or to the way they nurse their guilt. Durfey is

willing to assert that when a respectable man and woman, nearing sixty and virtually strangers to one another, disrobe in a sundrenched grove, undeterred by their own ridiculous nudity, it is not for erotic pleasure. Rather it is for the perfection of their guilt, which is self-initiated punishment, a mode of self-replicating pain. (189)

Aspen comes to realize she will not confess.

She cherished her unworthiness too much [...] If she had learned anything at this reunion, it was that her secret had long ago become as indispensable as breathing. [...] Down some dark Fallopian conduit of her spirit swam a seminal power. Each year her secret doubled and redoubled in its cells. It fed, it stirred, it exerted weight within her abdomen -- vital, reassuring, beloved. Without it there was no such person as Aspen Marooney. (210-11)

Unlike the unfocused guilt that afflicts so much intellectual Mormon fiction, this is guilt for actual sin, though apparently still not the sort that will do the sufferer any good. In poeticizing that aspect of their lives, Peterson might be accused of ennobling their adultery. In their minds, Aspen and Durfey are willing to sacrifice their integrity and their hope of salvation for the good of others, continuing to go to the temple rather than arouse suspicion, refusing to confess and have it wreck their homes. There is no evidence in this book that there might exist a true repentance, capable of healing them and their families.

But people do think like that. People fall into old traps and nurse their guilt, and fail to repent and get testimonies. The author shows his characters' basic worth and goodness and acquaints the reader with their pain. It is difficult not to see the writing of a book like this as a moral act. Peterson increases our empathy with our understanding.