In Smith's debut novel, his pretty-boy park ranger protagonist, Tartan Jones, flees the double trouble of pressure to wed and rumors that his unattached state reflect an interest in an "alternate lifestyle." To escape his lifelong Utah home, Tartan accepts an obscure assignment elsewhere in the Mountain West. With wry humor and empathetic condescension toward the local yokels, our hero chronicles his struggles in love and culture shock in the twisted little town of Longfellow. This community's most volatile problem is sectarian strife between Mormons and Baptists who vie for demographic dominance of the town while rejoicing in each scale-tipping arrival or departure that benefits their camp. However, the Mormons also spend plenty of time squabbling among themselves. The Baptists presumably do as well, but we see little of them despite the book's title.

This novel is very funny. I sustained a smirk throughout most of my reading, chuckled about every three pages, and down-and-out busted up every twenty or so pages. Smith' style is engaging and clear. Below is a sample of his prose that explains why two of the book's characters do not get along:

     It all stemmed from the time Orvil had appeared on Wheel of Fortune. Orvil got on the show but didn't win a single dollar. He kept spinning bankrupt, and when he finally got a chance to win he mistakenly guessed . . .
     "Funger sandwich . . ." instead of Finger sandwich. It was a dumb mistake, especially considering that every letter had been up on the board except the two I's. But Orvil had never heard of a finger sandwich and thought the concept to be quite disgusting when the puzzle was finally solved by the next contestant. Bruce made a big deal about Orvil's stupid guess.
     "Funger sandwich? What the heck is a funger sandwich?"
     Orvil made up some lie about the Native Americans having a ceremonial treat called the funger, but admitted the truth after Bruce began searching through books at the library. Orvil did end up with a box of Tyson potpies and a really nice hairbrush as consolation prizes, but it just wasn't the same as, say -- ten thousand dollars.
     Ever Since then, however, Orvil and Bruce had been bitter enemies.

This story is typical of hundreds in the book. BBBQ does have a sustained plot to work out, but it is often lost behind a plethora of unrelated shimmering anecdotal sequins. Smith molded character personalities and plot lines to service the needs of this anecdotal humor. This strategy made the humorous asides the level on which the novel is most successful. One way to read this book is as a collection of very very short short stories.

I have thus far focused on what I see as the novel's strengths. Below I level some criticisms (mixed with some more praise) which I quite readily admit can be seen as a review of the book I think the author should have written rather than the one he actually did write. However, by tackling a topic as significant and troublesome as Mormon/Evangelical relations, he takes on a responsibility to handle it with a certain sensitivity and insight. This is true whether or not the book's primary objective is light humor. And I suspect Smith is trying to achieve more than light humor anyway because at the end of the book, he begins to play with a disturbingly dark ironic situation in a way that shows promising high literary potential. A pretty despicable antagonist performs a grizzly and unwitting atoning work that makes for a Bell's of Saint Mary-style faux-miraculous community healing event. (Sorry to be so cryptic, but I don't want to be a spoiler for first-time readers.)

This probing into the deep dark places of the human condition seemed joltingly incongruous with the lightness of the book's earlier untroubled comedic depiction of violence and dysfunctional relationships. In fact, some readers may be disturbed by the surprising amount of death and violence in this work of faithful Mormon fiction, especially since it is depicted, and then laughed off, in such a cartoonish manner. Other readers, because it is cartoonish, might not even notice it.

BBBQ also buzzes with sexual energy as Tartan and his new girlfriend Charity fall in love. With a brilliance I have not seen before in Mormon fiction, and without even alluding to a single anatomical feature below the chin, Smith captures the body-wrenching God-given physical attraction -- from a male point of view anyway -- that brings couples together into Temple marriages that produce eternal families. In the LDS worldview, this power is distinguishable from the sinful lasciviousness which leads people to sexual relationships without commitment and offspring without supportive two-parent families.

This distinction, difficult for outsiders to see and thus good grist for the mill of LDS fictive treatments, has yet to be fully explored. Blurring it is common in work such as that of Levi S. Peterson whose wigged-out rural Mormons seem to have influenced characterizations in BBBQ. One Peterson character, the monumentally ill-tempered, socially inept, and physically mis-shapen Rendella Kranpitz from the short story "The Christianizing of Coburn Heights" is reincarnated as the troublesome Mary Longfellow in BBBQ. Smith is no Levi Peterson clone however. While Peterson explores deep sexual and theological dysfunctionality of people on the fringes of Mormon religion and culture, Smith examines dysfunctionality mostly in inter-personal skills and surface level Church practice among committed Latter-day Saints.

My largest disappointment with BBBQ was the lightness with which the book treated the kind of nuts-and-bolts contextualization required to make a story read like it is taking place in believable people's lives. For example, the main character is a forest ranger, yet his creator does not make the world of this occupation relevant to the story or compelling to the reader. Perhaps Smith can be allowed this since the book is not about rangering. However, the title clearly promises meaningful treatment of LDS/Evangelical relations, yet this book simply provides no theological or cultural information about Baptists other than the fact they have pastors instead of bishops.

Unfortunately, Smith's evasion of theological and cultural content detract from his book's power to be the cautionary tale about the evils of prejudice that it strives to be.[1]

Despite these criticisms, read this book. Its success as humor outweighs my idiosyncratic take on its weaknesses. Smith is a gifted story-teller. As Joseph McConkie Says on the dust Jacket, "The kid has talent." With BBBQ, Smith has established himself among the best Mormon humorists writing today.

Notes

1. For a serious dialogue toward understanding and smoothing out LDS/Evangelical Christian disputes see Craig L. Blomberg and Stephen E. Robinson's How Wide the Divide? A Mormon & an Evangelical in Conversation. (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997).

Reviewed by Eric A. Eliason, a folklorist in the English 
Department at Brigham Young University.