{"id":33271,"date":"2016-04-24T15:27:49","date_gmt":"2016-04-24T21:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=33271"},"modified":"2023-11-15T21:16:27","modified_gmt":"2023-11-16T03:16:27","slug":"the-holy-scripture-of-our-life-shawn-vestals-daredevils","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/the-holy-scripture-of-our-life-shawn-vestals-daredevils\/","title":{"rendered":"The Holy Scripture of Our Life: Shawn Vestal’s “Daredevils”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Daredevils\"<\/a>It\u2019s 1975 and teen-ager Jason Harder, who lives on a dairy farm in Gooding, Idaho, has a lot to be embarrassed about. There\u2019s the whole religion thing: the reactionary faith of his community with its lengthening list of end-times indicators, including \u201cnudity and sex talk in movies,\u201d the Equal Rights Amendment, the fall of Saigon, communists and \u201cjackrabbits eating farmer out of house and home.\u201d Then there\u2019s Jason\u2019s Uncle Dean, a soured polygamist from Short Creek on the Utah\/Arizona border, who has just moved to town with his wife and kids along with a mysterious girl named Loretta whom his uncle claims is his wife\u2019s visiting niece. The family has an \u201cair of self-imposed privation,\u201d but Jason finds the young Loretta, his uncle\u2019s secret second wife, hopelessly alluring.<\/p>\n

Embarrassing as well is the \u201cbunny bash\u201d Uncle Dean has called\u2013a brutal, community event where jackrabbits are routed out with brushfire along a temporary fence to a pen where boys and men with baseball bats do their bloody, adrenalized deeds while angry protesters as well as the press are gathered around and making a scene.<\/p>\n

No wonder, then, that Jason has taken a shine to Evel Knievel who, in Shawn Vestal\u2019s debut novel Daredevils <\/em>(Penguin Press), reappears in the narration using the royal \u201cwe\u201d under the recurring heading \u201cEvel Knievel Addresses an Adoring Nation.\u201d Two years earlier Jason\u2019s now-dead grandfather detoured from church with his grandson to see the motorcyclist attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in nearby Twin Falls on the steam-powered X-2 Skycycle: \u201cA little mischief is good for the soul,\u201d he remembers his grandfather telling him, \u201cleveling a thick, crooked finger toward the road ahead, as if that were mischief right there, fat and smiling on Highway 10. He says, \u2018There\u2019s\u00a0 nothing wrong with this\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Set in the rural Mountain West, Daredevils<\/em> is a coming-of-age story, as bone-crunching as Knievel\u2019s crash at Vegas\u2019 Caesar\u2019s Palace or England\u2019s Wembley Stadium. Yet the book, released this month, is scented with the sagebrush and dairy farms of high \u00a0desert America; riven with the tenacious, arid religion of a particularly American kind; and beholden to America\u2019s dick-thumping fix on celebrities, like Knievel.<\/p>\n

The novel is an unparalleled tale of the country’s excess, lunacy and delusion\u2014as personified by the loutish Knievel who describes \u201cthe best kind of love, the only kind of love [. . . as] wild, momentary, complete.\u201d At the same time the book’s compelling cross between Napoleon Dynamite <\/em>and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas<\/em> somehow grounds the reader in a tender and hard-won decency in which Loretta and Jason along with the young Native American Boyd\u2014in search of his father and an entree into the American Indian Movement of the era\u00ad\u00ad\u2014head out on the road in a stolen Chrysler LeBaron.<\/p>\n

Vestal has already favored us with his eclectic, illuminating short fiction in Godforsaken Idaho <\/em>(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), winner of the PEN\/Robert W. Bingham Prize. In that inventive debut collection, he seems to have singlehandedly advanced both Western and Mormon literature in nine stories that careen from a hellish kind of heaven in \u201cThe First Several Hundred Years Following My Death\u201d to a lapsed Latter-day Saint faced with his doppelganger in the form of a persistent missionary. In the final triptych of the collection, the stories kick into high sectarian gear, ending with \u201cDiviner,\u201d in which founding Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, smitten with treasure hunting, appears in one of his most arresting if not generous portraits.<\/p>\n

In Daredevils<\/em>, Vestal not only judiciously sets his story of religionists and misfits, pedophiles and imposters in the region (others have done that, including most recently David Kranes in his The Legend\u2019s Daughter<\/em>, also set in Idaho) but he makes no apology about informing all of it through the marrow-deep impulses of what is arguably the civilizing force of that region: the religion of Smith and Brigham Young. It\u2019s as if Vestal has recovered the revelatory \u201cpeep stones\u201d of the author\u2019s childhood faith, thrown them into the bottom of a darkened hat, which Smith reportedly did, and then started writing: a gift to the general reader who knows little more about the country\u2019s most \u201csuccessful\u201d indigenous religion than David Archuleta and HBO\u2019s Big Love<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Wisely, Vestal is first and foremost a skillful writer of authentic exposition and trenchant dialogue. His main character, Loretta, along with her \u201csister wife\u201d Ruth, share a stinging grief, the younger woman\u2019s based on her attempt to imagine the story of her young life under patriarchal faith, and the older woman\u2019s based on the real event of the 1953 Short Creek raid of polygamists by Federal agents which left her, as a child, traumatized. But Vestal never allows the reader to believe that any of this arguably extreme communal behavior, saturated as it is with prophets and gold, endless prayers and \u201cthe ugly tether of family\u201d exists anywhere other than on a cultural continuum with throat-slitting revelators on one end and the likes of Mitt Romney on the other.<\/p>\n

In the end, this wild, epic, noir-ish tale posits its own prophet whose pronouncements throughout speak to an America ruthlessly defensive about, in the words of Knievel, the \u201cperversion of our story, the holy scripture of our life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen did we first think of jumping the canyon?\u201d he says in the opening address to the \u201cadoring nation.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 It seems now that we always thought it. That it was always there for us to think. What do you \u00a0call that, when the world guides you toward its purpose? We believed, America. We \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 believed \u00a0we could do anything we tried to do. We believed we could do anything we said we would do. We \u00a0believed in ourself and the things we were saying. We believed that in \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 saying these things, we \u00a0were already making them true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How Shawn Vestal in Daredevils<\/em> navigates his charges through such a determined promised land as that is the stuff of one of the most propulsive, deeply interrogative novels of late.<\/p>\n

Author Shawn Vestal will read from and sign his debut novel Daredevils on April 27 at The King’s English, 1511 S. 1500 East in Salt Lake City at 7:00 pm.<\/em><\/p>\n

DAREDEVILS<\/strong>
\nPenguin Press, 2016
\n308 pp
\n$27.00
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Shawn_Vestal\"<\/a>Shawn Vestal <\/span><\/strong>made his literary debut with Godforsaken Idaho<\/em>, a story collection that won the 2014 PEN Robert W. Bingham Prize and was shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize. A graduate of the Eastern Washington University MFA program, his stories have appeared in Tin House, Ecotone, McSweeney\u2019s, The Southern Review and other journals. He writes a column for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, where he lives with his wife and son.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author Shawn Vestal will read from and sign his debut novel Daredevils on April 27, 2016 at The King’s English, 1511 S. 1500 E. in Salt Lake City at 7:00 pm. David Pace reviews the work in our Sunday book review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":834,"featured_media":33275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2589,69,35],"tags":[2869,2868],"class_list":["post-33271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-daily-bytes","category-literary-arts","tag-daredevils","tag-shawn-vestal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Daredevils.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-03 03:46:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33271"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71525,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33271\/revisions\/71525"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}