Some books just take longer than a week to read. David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife took more than two weeks, partly because it's long, and partly because some of it is a slog. Nevertheless it's an interesting book and worth reading for the 85% non-sloggish bits.
The 19th Wife is another one of those two-in-one tales where the author skips back and forth between a modern story and a fact-based historical one. The historical tale is about Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young's 19th wife, who divorced him and led a crusade against polygamy all the way to the U.S. Senate. The modern story is about Jordan Scott, whose mother (also a 19th wife) is accused of murdering her husband, the leader of a present-day polygamous sect in Utah. Jordan's quest to clear his mother of these charges leads him back into the sick society from which he was ejected as a teen and forces him to confront the worst of it.
Both stories are compelling. Ebershoff does a virtuoso job of writing in a variety of styles and voices. Jordan is a young gay man, filled with rage at the society in which he was raised, yet convinced that his mother did not kill his father. He's an endearing, sympathetic character, and his chapters made me feel all maternal. In contrast, Ebershoff retells Ann Eliza's story through a fictional version of her memoir, and includes multiple supporting documents to buttress her story.
It's these supporting documents that are the slog. Sometimes in the evening I would say to myself, "Well, I could go read excerpts from Brigham Young's prison diaries, or wait! Didn't we get a new issue of Rolling Stone in the mail?" Guess which reading material I chose.
At times I struggled with knowing where fact ended and fiction began in the sections about Ann Eliza. Ebershoff provides a helpful discussion at the end of the book about his sources and methods but of course I didn't find that until I was done. Observant readers of this blog will notice that this is the second book this year I've read about Mormon society (the first was Escape by Carolyn Jessop). Neither book presents the group in a positive light, though neither explicitly deals with life among modern day non-polygamous LDS church members.
