The 19th Wife

Dear Readers,

Okay so far I am an utter failure at blogging. It has been over two weeks since my last post (which was only my second). All I can say is, I have been reading! And I have much to report. But in the interests of posting shorter, more frequent entries, I will confine this one to the book I read immediately following Beauty Myth, to wit, The Nineteenth Wife by David Ebershoff. This was a good example of one of those books that sweeps you up in the first two-thirds—it’s almost impossible to put down—and then suddenly ceases to be compelling and begins to drag, so that you become impatient to get to the end, not only because you want to know what happens, but because you are tired of reading the book. I try to finish every book I start (the lone act of discipline in a sloppy life) but I skipped a chapter of this one, without feeling I was missing anything all, and by the time I got to the end, my opinion of the craft and writing had dropped precipitously.

The 19^th Wife is partly based on the true story of Ann Eliza Young, who was the 19^th (approx.) wife of Brigham Young, the second President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). Ann Eliza divorced Brigham and fled Salt Lake City and the Mormon community in 1873 and traveled east across the United States speaking out against polygamy. She petitioned Congress, eventually succeeding in putting sufficient political pressure on the Latter-Day Saints that they renounced polygamy as a practice in 1890. However, a small splinter group broke away and formed the Firsts, continuing to practice plural marriage in a remote desert community in Utah. The novel alternates between Ann Eliza’s memoir, giving the history of the LDS Church and her own life story, and the present-day narrative of Jordan Scott, a young man who grew up in the Firsts and was kicked out onto the streets at the age of 14, because the Prophet told his parents it was God’s will. When his mother (who is also a 19^th wife) is arrested on suspicion of murdering his father, Jordan returns to the Firsts to investigate the murder and see if he can help the mother who abandoned him.

The Ann Eliza segments are based on her real-life memoir, also called the 19^th Wife, although the author explains (somewhat unclearly) in an Afterword that he has taken liberties and made additions and subtractions. These sections can still be extremely long and tedious, especially since there is a fast-paced murder mystery going on in the other plot line; Ann Eliza’s story covers about 40 years, while Jordan’s takes place in a week. Jordan is reasonably likeable and his sections tend to chug along, but the solution to the murder mystery was annoyingly inane, and the dangers of returning to the Firsts’ community were handled a little sloppily; I never felt all that nervous for him, and when he did meet with some degree of foul play, it seemed contrived and silly. I did like the fact that Jordan was casually gay; that the author wrote a gay protagonist without making it a plot point or a source of angst. He met a guy and had a little romance on the side of his detective work, and there was nothing pointed or heavy-handed about the fact that it was a gay romance.

What was most striking to me about plural marriage, and I’m not sure whether this says more about me or about the writing, was the heartbreak and humiliation endured by women (such as Ann Eliza’s mother) who married men they really loved and then were forced to share them. The objectification, economic hardship and degrading inequality of polygamy did not seem as profoundly awful as being told that a younger woman was being brought in to share your household and your husband’s bed. In a particularly sadistic twist, the first wife has to give her permission before her husband can take another wife, so Ann Eliza’s mother endured an agonizing ritual every time her husband (whom she married before the edict of plural marriage was issued, and who initially opposed it fiercely) took a fancy to another young woman. It destroyed their marriage to all intents and purposes—she moved out and ceased to see her husband after the third wife—and had a corrupting, morally weakening effect on Ann Eliza’s father, who began the book as a very decent man and a somewhat skeptical Mormon. Jordan’s mother, too, truly loved her husband and mourned when told she was being “phased out,” or taken off the sex schedule, to make room for his latest wife (also his step daughter). Of course, a system that teaches women to think of being a plural wife as an honor worth keeping is deeply sick. Ebershoff emphasizes the brainwashing arguments made to these women that plural marriage is absolutely central to salvation, which sort of explains why many of them go along with it so willingly. But I thought the novel was at its most powerful, and precise, in its close depiction of the way polygamy caused the once loving, once mutual marriage of Ann Eliza’s parents to crumble into disrespect and estrangement.