an open curtain with a dead body behind it

I pulled another book out of my to-read pile – The Open Curtain, by Brian Evenson - and finished it late last night. Imagine my surprise when there was a comment by George Saunders on the back…coincidences are weird, sometimes.

I have to say that this is a major case where the blurb on the back of the book seemed to have little or no relation to the inside of the book. (Who writes those, anyway?) The plot is a slowly-unraveling type of plot with mystery-like edges, so perhaps they didn’t want to ruin the story for readers. Still, I feel the quote from Bradford Morrow below the blurb summarizes the content much better: “[f]amily, secrecy, truth, anger, history, the desire to belong, the need to discover oneself…”

The protagonist is Rudd, a Mormon teenager in Utah who has problems with every single one of the above. The narrative begins as he finds letters from a mysterious woman to his dead father, who claims she’s had his child. Rudd finds and sort of befriends his half-brother Lael. At school, Rudd starts writing a research paper about how the founder of the Mormon church’s grandson murdered a woman in New York. Lael seems to be extremely violent, then there’s Rudd’s crazy and mean mother, then Rudd nearly gets murdered…for you action lovers, there’s a lot of that.

The plot construction is so careful: Evenson places just the right amount of clues to let you know if you’re looking that there’s something going on with Rudd, and changes the point-of-view to recently orphaned Lyndi at just the right time. The third section features the point of view of Joseph Smith’s confused grandson wandering New York after his murder of Anna Pulitzer. Small details (I don’t want to ruin it for you) and the labeling of three consecutive chapters as chapter one let the reader know that again, your point of view character is misleading you or himself mislead.

I found the author’s note at the end of the book fascinating: I figured the book was fiction, but I didn’t know that the Mormon church did have secret rituals that used to include the miming of violence. The author explains that when he started the book, he was Mormon, but because of the reception of his previous book (which was also about less savory parts of Mormonism, I figure) and other factors he asked to be excommunicated. The repressed violence and rumored early violence in Mormonism, mostly referenced in the book through the shadowy practice of “blood atonement,” clearly disturbs him in his author’s note. I felt, though, that he handled the issue with a lot of sensitivity.

While Mormon theology influenced the book’s violent events, I didn’t read it as a situation where you could directly say “The Mormon religion is directly to blame for this!” Perhaps Evenson still feels some compassion for his old religion, or perhaps he meant to not point fingers, or both. Rudd and Lyndi both have problems they have to face, and their surroundings and family (including Lyndi’s aunt who is not Mormon) don’t help them face those problems in the way they should. Lyndi, in particular, makes bad decisions all by herself. The moral ambiguity makes the book stronger and more like the ambiguity of real life. Obviously there are writers that point fingers and have strong attacks on people or institutions – in satire, for example – but most non-satirical fiction has to keep that ambiguity to be successful. I can’t think of any that haven’t, actually, but you’re welcome to correct me.