Captured by the Mormons; Or Betsy Goes to Church

     Two days later, they told her Charissa had been killed. Her murder was committed in the name of a cult under the direction of Charissa's mother.
     The knowledge forced Karen to harbor fierce hatred for cults -- all cults -- even traditional religious organizations. --from Prologue

The cover picture and title of Lisa Peck's Dangerous Memories suggest a romantic thriller. The prologue suggests the novel's purpose, but not its genre. Had I read more of the back cover than the blurbs I might not have expected a thriller, but I often learn more about the plot from the back cover than I want to know. So I was pleased to find, under all the packaging, a literary novel, and a delightful one, by turns satire, comedy of manners, romance, psychological novel, and a novel with a clear (and intrusive) purpose and message: to the convincing of the Christian and the Gentile that Mormons are not cultists.

Lisa J. Peck is a noticer, notices the kinds of things that make someone like Walker Percy so interesting to read, things like the middle-class family that leaves California and ends up in Provo, Utah buying a mansion in Indian Hills because it has a nice view and they made enough selling their nice middle-class tract home to afford a home their income can't match:

Peering at the coffee table, she spotted the electric bill. Karen sighed. It wasn't right for her to live in one of the richest parts of Provo and be searching for a low-income job because she was unqualified. Those two things didn't add up. It was like putting a lady decked out in a million-dollar coat in an old VW wagon. She fluffed the couch cushion, rested her head on it and allowed these thoughts to drift away as sleep guided her eyes shut. (28-9)

Telling a story through an outsider's eyes is a traditional way of commenting on one's culture, and of commenting on the outsider's perceptions. Peck does both nicely. The main character is a woman named Betsy who has spiritualist beliefs. She lives with her brother George, his wife, Karen and their children, Mikey and Sam. Betsy has created tension in the family after reading Mikey's blue book, a gift from her friend Agatha.

     Dark blue was the color of the fifth chakra, which signaled a communication problem. Chakras were points in the body that everyone had. If they're aligned properly, then a person has happiness and mental health. But if they aren't aligned correctly, a person needs color breathing to the problem areas.
     The dark blue foretold of ill feelings and anger. A Freudian mistake. She had tapped into the souls of the founders of this strange religion.
     On that summer day Betsy believed that if these Mormons would listen to her and do color breathing, their inner turmoil and hatred would dissolve. If they let go of their anger they'd be washed in a wave of relief. Love would spill over them. (10-11)

Of course, Betsy has read the book, believed it, and joined Agatha's church -- hence the tension. And the comedy. George laughs at Betsy's conversion, and in doing some color breathing she imagines a conversation with him, asking him why he laughed. "Face it, Betsy. You're different. You've always been different. Don't fool yourself that some conservative organization is going to accept you lickety split" (17). Betsy figures any church that adds new scripture would be more accepting of her ideas than George thinks.

She couldn't become the pastor. The church hadn't progressed to that yet, but the position of Relief Society president was obtainable. She'd hold monthly lessons on the proper way to do inner transformation. The missionaries had informed her they didn't teach that kind of stuff at church, but it was time for a change. (18)

And she'd be glad to write the next book of scripture.

All this could be resolved comically, tragically, satirically, but Peck chooses to resolve it with a calling -- to the primary, the ten-year-old boys. Betsy doesn't teach them inner transformation, but to get rid of negative energy in the room she does makes them meditate in a half-lotus position. A parent demands she stop teaching witchcraft and Betsy calls the bishop, saying he should probably release her. He simply reaffirms her calling, his faith in her abilities to do what the Lord has asked her to do.

Betsy's bishop is a type in Mormon fiction -- well worth exploring -- the moral center of the congregation. Given Joseph Smith's observations on the corrupting effect of power in his letter from Liberty Jail, one might expect to see a great deal of ambivalence toward bishops in our fiction, but Linda Sillitoe's "Bishop Ted" is probably the only story I've read where the bishop is more or less the villain. (I haven't read Brian Evenson's Father of Lies.) The bishop in Levi Peterson's The Backslider is a strong compassionate leader who becomes Jeremy's protector after Jeremy turns himself into sister Alice. The bishop in Neal Chandler's "Benediction" sets up some ward politicians for comic humiliation when they demand he release the liberal intellectual Gospel Doctrine teacher, and the bishop in Levi Peterson's comic "The Christianizing of Coburn Heights" struggles against the snobbery of his rich ward members and the recalcitrance of a poor woman. (Molly Bennion, who lived in the ward next door in Seattle and chaired the Northwest Sunstone Symposium (maybe still does) told me once that she buys each of her new bishops a copy of The Canyons of Grace so he can read this story as a thank-you for the generally thankless work a bishop does.)

The bishop in Michael Fillerup's Beyond the River comes into his counselor's thoughts to help him in a moment of temptation, and the main character in Fillerup's "Hozhoogoo Nanina Doo" is a branch president leaving the reservation because, being Anglo, he can't own land there. As he paints the church ceiling -- Michaelangelo-like -- he ponders his love for his branch members, his service to them and his failings as their spiritual leader.

And there's President Piggott in Margaret Young's Salvador. We first see him as an evil man, but by the end our perceptions of him change as we see him using his priesthood to save a woman's life whose husband has tried to murder her through a priesthood blessing.

The husband, of course, imagines himself a prophet. One of Dangerous Memory's major themes is what happens to the people around a prophetic figure. Notice how that sentence makes no distinction between a true and false prophet, just as Karen makes no such distinction, spends the next twenty years fighting such a distinction. So when her children are Charissa's age and their aunt joins a church headed by a charismatic figure Karen's need to protect them causes her to almost reject Betsy, like the mother who wants to protect her son from Betsy's witchcraft: "You're a dangerous woman. A devil in sheep's clothing," she says, warning Betsy not to hurt the children in her primary class (158), thus mirroring Karen's attitude towards the Mormons. There are other mirrors as Betsy and Mikey start doing sneaky things to struggle against Karen's contron, which reflects back to her Karen's fears that Mormonism is a cult teaching its children to do sneaky things to subvert their parents, and its adults sneaky things to diminish parents' authority and influence.

Thus, for a novel whose clear purpose is to show the difference between Mormons and cultists, Dangerous Memories draws some interesting parallels between the two groups. Part of the novel's strength is Peck's ability to draw the parallels in a way that will not offend her audience. It's also the novel's main weakness. (You knew I was going to say that, right? It's rhetorically predictable. Given Ether 12:26, it's also part of Mormon culture to recognize how intertwined are our strengths and weaknesses.) Knowing almost as soon as you meet Karen that the novel's issue is going to be how rather than whether she will join the Church robs the novel of a certain needed tension.

In other conversion novels, like Jack Weyland's Sara, Whenever I Hear Your Name, or On the Run, or Margaret Young's House Without Walls, or Levi Peterson's The Backslider the conversion comes at a cost we don't know the characters will pay until they do. The cost Sara pays is to forgive the priest at the sacrament table, who has been spreading vile rumors about her around the high school. Both Jessica in On the Run and Isaac in House Without Walls have to figure out how to move into a different religious tradition without denying the tradition they have grown up with and struggled to maintain. Frank Windham's struggle in The Backslider is to shake off a tradition of madness and death in his family, and we're not sure until the end that he's going to be able to. And there is another conversion in the novel which sneaks up on us, movingly, joyously.

This surprise, suspense, tension, is missing from Dangerous Memories, which may be why it didn't seem to have the moral weight of two Sleeping Beauty retellings I read at the same time, Dean Hughes' Family Pose and Kristen Randle's The Only Alien on the Planet. Those stories are about people making difficult, significant choices. So is Dangerous Memories, but the choice is telegraphed by the prologue.

But there's a more serious problem with the book -- the editing. Or non-editing. In 180 pages I count about 63 typos, and grammatical errors, including errors in French grammar. The editor does not know, apparently that lie is a present tense intransitive verb -- a verb that doesn't take an object -- and that lay is the past tense of this intransitive verb. I'm not being sarcastic. Lay/lie is confusing because lay is also the present tense of a transitive verb, as in "Now I lay me down to sleep." This confusion is a staple of editing tests.

So all through the book lie is used as a past tense intransitive verb, as when Betsy thinks back to when she first saw the Book of Mormon and wanted to protect Mikey from it: "Since Mikey's mother lie upstairs ill, she must be the protective mother figure" (11). Similarly, when Betsy thinks about how she read the Book of Mormon to understand its ideas so she could protect Mikey from them she remembers how "she had no choice but to steal the work to see what lie inside" (13).

The editing is so sloppy the galleys weren't even spell-checked, which would have caught mammel (21) and Shildren (66), but there is a more serious problem with the editing than mere annoyance. It affects our perception of Betsy's ex-husband, who is French but sounds a bit like Pepe LePew because his French is not grammatically correct. He is continually addressing Betsy as "mon cherie," but mon is masculine. Any French man would address her as "ma cherie." I checked this with a friend who served in France and he confirmed my memory of high school French. He also reminded me that gender in French depends on the word's gender, not the addressee's, so that "mon petite choux" (117) with its mixture of masculine, feminine and plural should be "mon petit chou" because while Betsy is feminine chou is masculine.

Another annoyance (especially for the French language police) is that the French phrase n'est-ce pas is replaced with the Americanism n'est pas, which anyone remembering high school French would read "neigh paw" and look around for the dogs and ponies. These are small things, but they distract greatly from the world Lisa Peck has created, and very few readers want that kind of distraction.

Let me emphasize that everything in the last four paragraphs is the editor/publisher's responsibility. As Lynn Gardner reminded us recently (Fri, 10 Dec 1999 "Re: Jane Manning James onstage") the publisher can mangle a manuscript even after the author has approved the galleys:

     There's no way, after a book has been published, you can explain to readers that after the galleys had been approved, typeset, and were ready to print, the narrator of the tape said "I can't read this!" and someone went back in and changed the written word in the book as well as the condensed version for the tape.
     But they didn't bother to smooth it out. They simply removed the "objectionable material" and left the reader wondering what really happened in that shower scene, because it didn't make sense. Never mind that this was a "G-rated" shower scene between a husband and wife!! I'm still burning over that issue!

Heavy-handed or sloppy editing serves neither readers, writers, nor publishers well, and at $20 or $25/hour it would have added far less than $100 to the publisher's costs to hire a good line editor to go through the manuscript, and would have greatly enhanced a novel that deserves to be read for its quirky characters (I haven't even mentioned Betsy's Tammy-Fae-Bakker-style makeup), its observations about Mormon culture, and its sensitive exploration of the differences and similarities between cults and charismatic religions. Indeed I hope the book sells enough copies to go into a second printing and that the publisher will care enough about it to make that printing a new edition.