Not unlike the historical epoch from which it emerged, What Falls Away is a novel that looks back in anger, while it looks ahead with hope. As in our lives, the anger is aimed at a greedy, patriarchal order that refuses to yield power, while the hope is shared among a generation that has chosen to bond around new values they hold in common, and to create their own society within sight of the prior regime.
The action of What Falls Away begins in 2019, when Cassandra Soelberg, a professional artist living in Minnesota, accedes to her long-estranged brother’s demand that she return to Utah and take over the care for their mother, who suffers from dementia and can no longer manage without full-time care. The Soelberg family is part of the Latter-day Saint community in the fictional town of Big Horn, located in the Clearlake Valley: stunning scenic views and uncontrolled residential and commercial development scattered between Mantua and Logan, and hinting that author Karin Anderson has adroitly adapted Cache Valley for her setting.
Cassandra primarily markets her art online, so she is able to indulge her brother’s demand. As she settles into her childhood home, circumstances recall the events of her past, including some vivid scenes of both her high school and college careers as an art student. There is also the influence of her grandmother, who uses her adult powers to prevent what was done to her in her own youth from being repeated with Cassandra. Irene Caldwell had been forced to abandon her education and assume a traditional gender role in a stranger’s family, and she makes certain that her granddaughter’s prodigious artistic gifts are not similarly wasted. Even after Cassandra falls prey to the most prolific seducer in the county, whose numerous and unacknowledged offspring she will encounter on her return, Irene enables her to overcome the traps that lie in wait for her. In the end, she is expelled by her father and his cohort of traditional male Saints, and would probably never have returned, were it not for her mother’s eventual need for care.
There are some, perhaps many who oppose the patriarchal society that confronts the accidentally pregnant Cassandra, kidnaps her daughter through a privately-operated adoption agency, and still clings to power years later through theological and political ideologies. That opposition is best represented by a network of women, beginning with her own family ties, but also including such unexpected resources as Relief Society members and unexpected bonding with her grownup school friends. These friends, who unlike her found roles within the existing social order, work discreetly to improve their circumstances. One of them is a former juvenile delinquent whose antics irked the would-be virtuous Cassandra, who now finds in Andraya’s mature capacity and adult experience an invaluable ally. Ironically, it was Lori Ann, one of the pregnant mothers she lived with in Seattle while waiting to give birth, who first opened her mind to ways of thinking and speaking she’s not encountered anywhere before.
Karin Anderson is a skillful, eloquent, and powerful prose stylist who has mastered the jargon of the power structure, which she reproduces accurately in the speech of her characters without making them seem too impossibly grandiloquent. Real people probably don’t talk this well, but those in movies do all the time and their argumentative precision helps diagram Anderson’s version of the opposing sides. It’s clear, in any event, that somewhere in the past, someone has addressed these phrases to these people. Anderson also captures the look of the places and people where the story took place and continues to unfold.
Holding a just-finished copy of What Falls Away feels a little like grasping a stick of dynamite; a bit risky. There is the remarkable candor with which Anderson writes about some issues that vex the LDS community: premarital and gay sex, and gender roles among women, men, and children are serious enough. Even belief in God comes up for a second look. But the book considers all this not only in the light of scriptural arguments, but in their own, sacred language, which is not always done in public. Some Latter-day Saints will be pleased to see these controversies exposed to the light of day, but others may feel less sanguine. Neither reader is likely to imagine how the old rules and new impulses finally encounter each other. And it turns out that what falls away, and what remains, cannot be anticipated, even if their collision does finally come to feel inevitable.
What Falls Away
Karin Anderson
Torrey House Press
2023
384 pp.
$18.95
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Book Reviews | Literary Arts
