Wallace Stegner. Maurine Whipple. Levi Peterson. Brady Udall. There are a few others, but it’s a rather short list of authors with works vying for the title of Great Utah Novel. Of course, coronating such a subjective title is nigh impossible, but there are clear contenders. Karin Anderson’s latest novel, Things I Didn’t Do, makes confident strides to be in the running with the field of favorites.

Set against the sprawling spaces between the Four Corners, the Book Cliffs, and the Tintic district on the southwest ore-battered haunch of the Wasatch Front, Things I Didn’t Do chronicles the life of a boy whose origin story is a mystery that unfolds over a generation or two. More than a coming-of-age story, the novel crawls intimately into the Utah landscape—mine tailings, desert sand, mountain scree, the silty riverbed of the Green River—with all the attendant history and myths.

Base of the Book Cliffs. Edge of the quarries, where Heavenly Father put dinosaur bones to test the faith of the Mormons—people who had choked corn and alfalfa out of the dry gray earth, learned the twists and turns of the San Rafael, fought Paiutes and shared provisions both ways, chased stolen cattle through stone labyrinths where the Utes could disappear a herd like summer clouds.

Ryder Mikkelson is adopted at birth and raised by flawed parents, among non-genetically flawed cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. Flawed in the sense that they are all mortal and influenced by corporeal impulses and desires. His mother, Evaleen, says, “What makes us human is we learn to take care of one another.” A simple tenet.

As populated as the novel is with Ryder’s adopted kin—grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and the friends and lovers that come along—it is also overrun with animals of every stripe indigenous to Utah.

Badgers. Jackrabbits. More ponies, black cows with white faces, sage grouse, field mice, stray cats. Ravens, coyotes. Flycatchers, a red-tailed hawk, a horned lark, sparrows in the trees.

Amid this brilliant menagerie of creatures and shapeshifters two stand out: the coyote—the trickster—and the bear. The coyote nearly leads to young Ryder’s demise and leaves him wounded, vulnerable, marked for life. The bear’s first appearance comes after its death:

The high mound of the bear’s butt lay toward them, still covered in fur but thinning. Black tufts lay about her like petals. Rotten flesh and whitening bone shoed through naked patches at the ribs. Ryder could see a front paw sticking outward, heavy pad and long curving claws, but the head was hidden behind the shaggy body.

After this tangible encounter, the bear is only present in dreams, hallucinatory, a ghost, and it seems a rough guide for Ryder. A spirit mother bear watching over as stand-in between an unknown birth mother and Evaleen, Ryder’s mother.

In Navajo tradition the bear is a guide. Things I Didn’t Do is rich in Indigenous culture and how it has bumped up rough against the Mormon colonization of the West. Sami, Ryder’s wife, a Diné participant in the LDS Indian Student Placement Program, laments her experience in the program:

They were super religious. Ephraim’s dad was always going on about the Lamanites. Said I’d be white someday if I proved I deserved to shake off the curse of my ancestry. But everybody told me something like that.

Ancestry is a common thread stitching the novel, from the unknown of Ryder’s heritage to the clearly branched tree of the Mikkelson line, both paternal and maternal, and the native ancestors drawn in tradition and etched in stone on the walls and alcoves.

But what of the Great Utah Novel? Where does this one fit in? In a state thick with pride on knowing our heredity to the bone comes a character who is a cipher in his coded lineage, a boy whose DNA may as well be a toss of the dice. In a community where blood matters so deeply, Ryder struggles with the otherness.

He wanted to be their blood, complicated as it was by generations of strain, disorder, alienation. He wanted to be Almas’s son so he could be their cousin. He wanted Evaleen to be his mother so Great-Grandpa Yeadon could show him where he was headed. … He wanted to live among his family and assume—never dream otherwise—that he was among his own, decreed by DNA, reiterations of likeness.

If his Diné wife by decree of the Mormon prophet can change her DNA maybe Ryder Mikkelson can change his. If he is worthy.

The story of Utah is thick in our narrative DNA. From the handcart to the pew, to the overtaking of native land and culture for the building up of Zion; from cultivation of the earth, dominion of beast, and shame of an unwed mother; charitable acts of communal need, the taking up of a child not one’s own; how we yearn for perfection and break our backs on righteousness. These are the tales of our imperfect state.

Anderson, with this novel, taps into the beauty and the untidy that is Utah. Like a great cottonwood tree, Things I Didn’t Do has far-reaching roots that nourish all the branches—even one that has been grafted for Ryder—into a canopy of pure and simple truth.

Things I Didn’t Do
Karin Anderson
Torrey House Press
2025
350 pp.
$18.95

Larry Menlove

Larry Menlove’s short fiction and essays are published in numerous venues. His debut novel, Rush, will be available in November from Shotgun Honey Books.