Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination By Phyllis Barber Signature Books, 1999. Trade paperback: 129 pages. ISBN: 1-56085-120-1 Suggested retail price: $16.95 (US)
Reviewed by: John L. Needham

When Tom Lyon speaks of "emplaced literature," of writing informed by a specific place and sensibility, he frequently turns to describing its enemy: "[the] notion that the world is becoming an electronic village and that we are headed toward a universal, market-centered monoculture. . . . [A world in which w]here you're from or where you live is supposed to be pretty much interchangeable with other places, both in the mind and on the ground" (The Literary West, New York [Oxford University Press, 1999]: xi-xii).

In this world that idealizes universalism, that seeks to neutralize the particulars of culture and place, the title of Phyllis Barber's latest work, Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination, strikes a minor chord. There is, it seems, little place in this electronic village for a distinctive religious identity. Nor does this global consciousness have much room for stories tied to a specific stretch of land. In short, this world monoculture would ask, what is a "Mormon imagination"? Such essentialism -- a people claiming an imagination of its own, believing that stories set in its homeland hold significance -- has grown passe. Ours is an integrated world, this politics of sameness goes, in which, of all people, social conformists like Mormons participate in a geo-political and ideological commons, speaking a lingua franca of technology and the dollar.

There exists, of course, a competing movement, a politics of identity that claims we aren't all alike -- that we, particularly those who participate in the cultural construct of Americanness, may be subdivided by hyphens: Asian-American, Jewish-American, and the like. Here, too, Barber's Stories from a Mormon Imagination may not find a receptive audience. Who, after all, has ever heard of a Mormo-American? The faith's international membership aside, contemporary Mormonism is primarily white, politically conservative and upwardly mobile -- a barely distinguishable subgroup in the hegemonic Euro-American mainstream. What reason have we for placing Mormons under the protectorate of political correctness, for validating their stories?

This characterization of two mentalities abroad today necessarily exaggerates the prospects for Mormon literature. But not entirely. So learned Phyllis Barber -- whose merits include the Associated Writing Program's award in creative nonfiction for her memoir, How I Got Cultured (Athens [University of Georgia Press, 1992]) -- when she attempted to publish the stories in the present collection to a national audience. She described the collection in a 1996 essay as an effort to "help the culture at large see the beauty, complexity, profundity, and engagement of Mormonism, rather than the usual scandalous misperceptions" ("The Precarious Walk Away from Mormonism, Always with a Stitch in My Side," Dialogue 29.3: 125). But, as she shopped the manuscript around, a refrain familiar to other Mormon writers sounded: "numerous national publishers have turned it down, usually saying that they love the writing and the stories, but don't have a clue who would buy them" ("Precarious": 125). While many of us may be skeptical of the totalizing discourse of globalization, and while we may be willing to accept Mormon literature into the context of minority or ethnic literary studies, it seems we're still not ready to put up money for Stories from a Mormon Imagination.

But what is such an imagination? What do Barber's stories invoke about Mormon places and sensibilities? Inspired by folktales and legends the author heard growing up in southern Nevada, as well as others she uncovered at Utah State University's Fife Folklore Archive, Parting the Veil's stories are awash in cultural specifics -- echoes from Mormonism's epic nineteenth century past and ruminations on its burgeoning present. Each story meditates on the belief -- held in many of the world's cultures, but endangered in the Western tradition -- that our bodies are possessed of an immortal spirit which transcends what is visible, that some in this world share concourse with angels and demons, that the "thin veil" between these twin worlds of body and spirit is "fluttering nearby" (Parting, xi; hereafter, just the page number). Or, as the author puts it: "When I was a child, it was as common to think of an angel appearing by my bed as it was to drink orange juice for breakfast" (ix). In some stories, this veil parts only in mood or symbol; in others, it spreads wide, revealing a spectacular view of Mormon longings for an earlthly heaven.

Not surprisingly, Barber's tales include the figures associated with public Mormonism: the authoritarian though witless polygamist husband and his squabbling wives or, among contemporary images, the charismatic young missionary or octogenarian prophet-CEO. Though Barber's story, "Bread for Gunnar," treats the classic theme of a first wife's struggle with her husband's obligation to live The Principle, the husband proves disarmingly sincere; and his wife, beyond petty jealousies. Instead, the wife is at odds with the prospect of not simply sharing her husband, but partitioning their love, as if such a sublimity could be drawn and quartered.

Glimpsed only through his letters home, the sickly missionary in "Wild Sage" hides -- with his co-conspiring mother -- the pre-mission transgression of sexual promiscuity. Intervention by three men, known to Mormons and their folklorists as the Three Nephites, prompts the missionary's mother to mail her bedridden son an elixir common to Great Basin Mormon country. "Here is some sage," the doting mother writes. "Make some tea and drink every drop. Everything'll be okay, son. You hear?" (21).

Perhaps the most surreal of the collection's stories, "Prophet by the Sea" follows a man "with white hair like the mane of a lion" -- described only as "the prophet" -- and a Spanish-speaking, Sancho Pancho-like companion on a walk across the orange sands of a beach at sunset (107). While his anxious companion speaks frantically of the "many people who need to hear the [Mormon] gospel" and of his heretical wife who "insists . . . that she speaks not only with God, but God's wife," the prophet turns to building a sandcastle. In a climax that defies expectations of the suited, power tie-wearing Mormon hierarchy, the white haired oracle stoops to heal a wounded sea lion, then asks, "Now, before it's completely dark, will you build a castle with me, Fernando?" (107-8).

Rather than the familiar Mormon types who appear in the literature of the imagined West, the characters who people most of Barber's stories are less aggrandized, sometimes liminal, players in the Mormon story. In "Spirit Babies" we enter the dreams of a mother of seven who envisions opening her home to yet another child. "I'm waiting, Mama," a little boy in an oversized white robe calls out to Delta Ray, appearing to her in dreams (5). To this mother, life is a crusade, a state in which a woman must submit her whole being -- particularly the womb -- to the interests of the Mormon kingdom. To those who ridicule her rotund figure, or who question her unmitigated fertility -- "Don't you care about pollution?," one critic scolds -- she describes herself as "Blown up like a dirigible, flying for God" (8-9). Indeed, Barber's character flies well as a representative of a host of contemporary Mormon women, the mothers of Mormon country, whose visions of "angel babies" affords the state of Utah the nation's largest number of children per household -- and a public morality that recalls 1950s innocence (8)

"Ida's Sabbath," another story that probes the inner life of a Mormon woman, draws its drama from a seemingly fleeting transgression of the culture's code of righteousness. By a turn of circumstance, Ida finds herself seated at her post before a congregation, on her 1,039th Sunday as church organist, wearing nothing but a pink suit and white high heels. Absent are her garments, the underclothing worn by temple-going Mormons, the reminder of her promises to God. Though the gravity of such an act may puzzle one unfamiliar with the culture's internal logic, it's certainly not lost on Ida who, by the story's end, collapses under the weight of guilt.

The conclusion of "Ida's Sabbath," where Ida lies partially conscious on the chapel floor, exemplifies what makes Barber's stories such a pleasure to read. It's the sense of suspension -- the way she holds characters in air, as it were, with their whole lives passing before them. At each story's climax, as the veil begins to part, Barber pauses, allowing a swirl of memories, impressions and instincts to grip her characters, to cluster in the reader's mind. This sense of crossing over, of touching the divine, repeats in "A Boy and a Hand," in which a boy choking on a fishbone senses himself becoming the fish he has eaten, "sinking . . . to the bottom of a cold stream" (25). It returns in "A Brief History of Seagulls" where a pilot, whose plane is downed by Utah's once favored bird, floats under a parachute, wishing he had feathers and wings, knowing finally "the providence of birds" (104). And, in the collection's final story, "Mormon Levis," the sense of suspension again takes hold of the reader as the protagonist -- a girl in the backseat of a car, chasing through the desert with her wild teenage friends -- finds herself soaring over a railroad crossing, calling out, "Jesus, we just might be coming to you. Hold those arms wide open" (124).

Although a folklorist may appreciate the collection's epilogue in which Barber discloses -- in one sentence or a long paragraph -- the source of inspiration behind each story, one who reads only for the pleasure of a well-told story may be frustrated by the author's auto-analysis. To be sure, Barber had to credit those from whom she borrowed elements of her stories, particularly recorded, archival sources. And, certainly, there are some for whom the Mormon culture she invokes is completely foreign, who may need orientation to its history and terminology. But to have a fanciful story such as "The Fiddler and the Wolf" deconstructed by its own creator has the effect of tearing the stuffing from a teddy bear. What remains is a limp coat of folkloristic dissection, rather than the tale that once held sway over the reader's imagination. I had the fortune of not discovering the epilogue until I had read most the collection's stories. I suggest it be avoided by all but the most ardent scholar.

As this critique suggests, however, in the raw Barber's stories do what the best fiction does: They expand their reader's world. Her tales acquaint one with unfamiliar types -- women, children and others at the fringe of Mormon culture -- with an intimacy that is almost embarrassing. Indeed, Barber exposes so much of the mental life of everyday Mormonism that one cannot help but come away blushing at, while reveling in, the voyeurist insight. Her stories were likely lost on national publishers for the very reason that they are so compelling: They invoke a foreign culture with startling deftness, engendering a sympathy for her ofttimes peculiar characters that is almost unnerving.

Toni Morrison reports that, upon publishing The Bluest Eye, she was chided by fellow African-Americans for revealing too much of her people's story. "You know . . . I really liked that book," black readers would tell her, "but I really was furious with you because you let them know about it . . . This was our information . . . now they [white readers] have access to it" (Interview with A.S. Byatt, Writers in Conversation, ICA Video, 1980). Until the appearance of this new story collection, Mormons ran little risk of having their stories exposed. The faith has had its storytellers -- Vardis Fisher, Virginia Sorensen and, more recently, Levi Peterson and Terry Tempest Williams, to name a few. But no Mormon writer has ever brought together so many of the culture's stories, and told them so well, between two covers.

Still, judging from the collection's earlier rejection, there is hardly reason to fear its reaching more than a limited, regional readership. Except for the few who encounter Barber's Mormon imagination by reading this collection, from most Mormonism's stories will remain safely hidden, lying wait in the memory of its storytellers or in archives that dot the Great Basin. This world would widen, however, if pundits of its so-called monoculture or advocates of minority literary studies would cast their view in Mormonism's direction and part the veil of misperception that obscures this culture and its stories.

John L. Needham
Logan, Utah
jln@xmission.com