Wives and Sisters
Natalie R. Collins
St. Martin's Press, $23.95
In the 270 pages of Wives and Sisters, novelist Natalie Collins gives us, among other events, a child abduction, an abusive father, a mother dying in childbirth, a rape, two murders, a dead baby and a suicide. Subtlety is not part of Collins' plotting.
We also get characters who talk in a way that isn't hard to understand. The narrator, Allison Jensen, at one point tells a would-be lover, Frank, "I don't do nice guys." And when she argues with her father about religion, she says, "You can take your church, and your temple, and all your blessings and endowments and shove them up your ass. I never want to see you again." Subtlety is not part of Collins' dialogue.
At one point, a man aims a gun at Allison's chest and she "[points] the Glock directly at his head." There isn't a page in the novel that wouldn't benefit from a generous dose of subtlety.
That lack of subtlety is most evident in the attitude the author brings toward the central character in the novel. That character is not Allison Jensen, although most of the action happens to or around her, but rather the LDS Church. Collins, who according to the dust jacket was raised a Mormon and has always lived in Utah (she is a former Salt Lake Tribune employee), presents the church as evil.
Every bad thing that happens in the book is in some way connected to the LDS Church. She presents the church as being filled and run by the type of crazies who believe God has told them to kill people in his name. Even if a reader is willing to believe that the crazies were in some way influenced by the church's teaching, it's a big logical jump to conclude that means all members of the church are either evil or dupes.
In one scene, when Allison is 9 or 10, her father, driving along a country road, hits a kitten. He says, "Children, this young kitten didn't obey its mother. It left her guidance and care and wandered off into the world on its own. The world is not a safe place for children who leave the side of their parents." Then he bashes in the kitten's head with a rock.
When Allison is a teenager, "A magazine for Mormon teens appeared in our mailbox one day with my name on the subscription label. I threw it in the trash." Years later, she tells us, "I graduated from the University of Utah. . . . No one in my family attended the ceremonies. . . . I didn't tell them the time and place."
Characters who lack subtlety in their actions or language are fine. There are people like that. But as readers, we have a right to expect their motivations are complex and even beyond their ability to comprehend. That's not what we get in Wives and Sisters.
We get characters driven either by unbending devotion to church teachings or anger at those who will not bend, evil action sanctioned or excused by church leaders, and conflict as superficial and unrelenting as a soap opera.
Anger does not promote subtlety, and subtlety promotes art. This is an angry novel.
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Martin Naparsteck reviews books from and about the West for The Salt Lake Tribune.
