{"id":16687,"date":"2013-01-27T07:00:33","date_gmt":"2013-01-27T13:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=16687"},"modified":"2019-11-14T12:54:51","modified_gmt":"2019-11-14T18:54:51","slug":"the-scholar-of-moab-by-steven-l-peck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/the-scholar-of-moab-by-steven-l-peck\/","title":{"rendered":"The Scholar of Moab by Steven L. Peck"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve always thought Sundays are a great day for reading — whether in an easy chair with your favorite paper, curled up on a couch with a good book or out in the park with your favorite ereader. With that in mind, we’re going to be running a regular Sunday feature about books and writing. David Pace, our new literary editor, will be helping us out, organizing reviews of fiction, poetry and nonfiction works, particularly books by a Utah author or with a Utah or Western U.S. connection.
\n<\/i> (and we’ll be running these in the monthly editions as well).* You might even find us publishing some original writing here. You’ll also find a number of reviews of national and international books dealing with the visual arts, and every once in while we’ll sneak in a review of a literary work that is not associated with Utah but is associated with the visual arts. To kick things off, here’s David …<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"scholarofmoab\"<\/a>The Scholar of Moab by Steven L. Peck<\/h3>\n

Hyrum Thayne, the protagonist of Steven L. Peck\u2019s riotously original novel The Scholar of Moab<\/i>, writes, \u201cI think this story is interesting cause my other friend had strange things happen too.\u00a0 There are weird things in the world.\u00a0 Strange even for a Scientist & Scholar like me.\u201d\u00a0 The story Hyrum is speaking of is his friend Rick\u2019s story, though Hyrum\u2019s story, told in the novel by the anonymous \u201cRedactor\u201d who, a generation later, is trying to get to the bottom of Hyrum\u2019s mysterious death in the \u201870s, is no less strange.<\/p>\n

The \u201cother friend\u201d Hyrum refers to is another important player in the book, Dora, a poet and resident of Moab\u2014yes, that Moab, the red rock town nestled near Utah\u2019s La Sal mountains.\u00a0 Peck\u2019s epistolary work involves space aliens (maybe), a missing baby whose paternity is in question, and conjoined twins with PhDs \u00a0who, for five critical years on horseback, wrangled cattle–all in a town and its environs whose characters, including Hyrum, mix uneasily and phantasmagoric-ally <\/i>with geologists, communists and imaginary Book of Mormon-era robbers.<\/p>\n

Peck\u2019s wild and whimsical\u2014some might say undisciplined\u2014scheme is to weight everything equally:\u00a0 philosophy, public TV revelations, evolution, the scientific method (classic and quasi), small-town hysterics, the poetic imagination\u2014and yes, religion.<\/p>\n

A cross between Jude the Obscure (referenced, clumsily in my view, at one point in the novel) and Huck Finn, Hyrum is a simple man who is not so simple.\u00a0 He is on a quest to be a scholar, and his notion of a scholar has more to do with appearances and the \u201cright\u201d vocabulary than innate brains or long hours in academic discourse.\u00a0 (\u201cI glanced up at the mountains rising before me,\u201d he writes in his journal at one point, \u201c& saw my own climb into Scholardomhood.\u201d) But he is sincere, and therefore both hilarious and touching.\u00a0 In his adventures as a sensing station technician for the United States Geological Survey, he works up in the mountains all week before returning on the weekend to his adoring simpleton (truly) of a wife who is nesting in a trailer park.<\/p>\n

At one point we find our (anti)hero\u00a0 torching the entire reference section of the Grand County Library, ostensibly to divert suspicion from himself as he steals its non-portable dictionary, in which he hopes to look up the flurry of words he\u2019s heard from his new scholarly associate in the field, words such as \u201cX a Jesus,\u201d \u201cdoggrowl,\u201d and \u201cLazy fair.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cI began to feel more & more Adjudicated \u00a0in what I was doing,\u201d he says, equating himself with Leonardo Da Vinci\u2019s robbing graves to study anatomy.\u00a0 \u201c[A] whole bunch of such things that are pretty darned hard and time consummating\u2026\u201d\u00a0 (The malapropisms throughout are worth the price of admission.)<\/p>\n

In another scenario we find Hyrum in company with the suspicious poet, Dora, in those same mountains, a kind of liminal space for all strange things that happen to Moabites.\u00a0\u00a0 Crazies abound in this story, but Peck is sincere in positioning them as auguring questions about the nexus of consciousness, faith, desire and the natural landscape.<\/p>\n

Many of The Redactor\u2019s \u00a0documents are taken from Dora\u2019s diary, filled with free-association and conflations between first and third person.\u00a0 Here is one such passage:<\/p>\n

Will cryptogramic soil evolve to become some intelligent thing as its components specialize, differentiate, and explore new spaces in the topology of life?\u00a0 This she wonders.\u00a0 And she wonders, because she wonders what will become of her son\u2019s children.\u00a0 In to what creature will her line transmogrify?\u00a0 What possibilities will arise?\u00a0 None.\u00a0 Unless I can find him.\u00a0 Unless I can take back what is mine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These rants from a woman who ends up, we learn early on, in the state mental hospital in Provo, simply punctuate the overall arc of the story, which is more coherent and, regularly, fall-off-the-bed funny.\u00a0 But their inclusion attests to the author\u2019s respect for his wide cast of characters and for the wonder that emerges out of not only the mind but the unfathomable universe and its products.\u00a0 They are products as varied as the brilliant Milky Way high above the La Sal on a dark night, \u201cthe silence voiced by a plateau canyon wind,\u201d and that moment when one feels \u201cboth immeasurably small and immeasurably important in the same instant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hyrum Thayne is a part of the growing line of memorable Mormon literary characters that extends back through Levi Peterson\u2019s \u00a0Frank Windham\u00a0 in his The Backslider<\/i>, Samuel Taylor\u2019s Jackson Skinner Whitetop in his Heaven Knows Why<\/i> and Maureen Whipple\u2019s Clorinda in her The Giant Joshua<\/i>, <\/i>among others.\u00a0 There have already been a handful of breakout or crossover Mormon novels over the years.\u00a0 I think this is the most imaginative to date, perhaps corroborated by the Association for Mormon Letters which awarded it Best Novel for 2011.\u00a0 And if the book doesn\u2019t find an audience outside of Utah, it won\u2019t be because of its local religious content and references.\u00a0 In Scholar <\/i>one can easily skate over at will the arcane references to home teachers,\u00a0 Lamanites and the LDS lifestyle even while picking up on the essential (and delightful) atmospherics.<\/p>\n

As it is, The Scholar of Moab<\/i> tumbles forth, pell-mell, with generosity and a wry eye for the exquisite frailty of our desire to find not only meaning in the universe, but a purpose for our existence.\u00a0 Any answers that are given easily\u2014whether in philosophy, in science or in religion\u2014never seem to be \u00a0completely satisfying\u2014 are often vastly unsatisfying<\/i>.\u00a0 Only a narrative that is as big-hearted and deftly-written as Peck\u2019s can suggest the whole of the world and our stubborn longing for a unifying theory of truth that will always, thankfully for the purposes of literature, elude us.<\/p>\n

THE SCHOLAR OF MOAB\u00a0<\/b>\r\n Steven L. Peck\r\n Torrey House Press<\/a>\r\n 302 pages<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
*Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0 15 Bytes considers literary works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction for monthly review within its pages, particularly books by a Utah author or with a Utah or Western U.S. connection.\u00a0 Send review copies to:
\nArtists of Utah
\nP.O. Box 526292
\nSLC, UT 84152<\/i><\/p>\n
Interested in writing a book review-essay for 15 Bytes? Contact us at: literary@artistsofutah.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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