"Lead Kindly Light"

A Review of Mary Clyde's "Journeys from a Desert Road"

One thing I remember hearing a lot in LDS church meetings as a kid was the promise, usually slipped into a sermon or testimony, that if parents stay true to the faith, our families, wayward children and all, would turn out OK. I’m sure at the time I rejected such pronouncements as so much wishful thinking, but in retrospect, I was probably too dismissive. After all, what we love is determined by the rituals of our lives, sometimes without us even realizing it. These repetitive physical practices, or “cultural liturgies” (James K.A. Smith’s term, not mine), are no doubt a two-way street. When we engage in the habits that seem characteristic of modern life—habits increasingly focused on consumption, social mimicry, and self-promotion—they affect who we are as people in ways that are no less real because of their subtlety, and sometimes their effects can be negative. That is Smith’s point in his various writings on the subject.

But the opposite can be true too—the primary songs, the ward Easter potlucks, the ministering assignments, the fast-offering collections—all of these seemingly mundane rituals that constitute a particular religious life also structure our identities. They tell us who we are and where we belong. And this influence can surely endure long after we have perhaps created distance between ourselves and the religion we grew up in. “The Mormons are my people,” we sometimes hear from someone who has, for one reason or another, left the faith. It might sound like an oxymoron, but to me at least, that sentiment is perfectly intelligible. In life, we are led to an unchosen goodness by the light of maps made by religions we have at times abjured. Perhaps that’s the real truth behind those aspirational promises I remember from my church-going youth.    

These thoughts and more came to mind when I was reading Mary Clyde’s recent novel, Journeys from a Desert Road. Clyde is perhaps not as well-known as some others in Mormon letters, possibly because this is only her second book and appears several decades after her first one. But that first one, a marvelous collection of short stories, garnered Clyde the prestigious Flannery O’Connor prize, and this novel is further evidence of her considerable literary talents. I don’t know whether there will be more where this came from—I’ve heard Clyde quip that she is satisfied with being a two-book wonder. But I choose to hope for more from Clyde while also being grateful for what she’s already given us. 

And what is that exactly? Without giving too much away, the novel is about a family and the aftermath of an atomic explosion. Or should I say “explosions” in the plural? More than one explosion features, and they are both literal and figurative, each quite real. The family in question, the Wilsons, are well-to-do, thoroughly modern and secular, and living in the shadow of Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona. But they are also haunted by a Mormon upbringing that has long since been abandoned and is only physically present in the person of a devout grandmother, Iris, who still lives in Utah but also seems to be wherever the family needs her to be. When we first meet Iris, Clyde sketches her with just a few brushstrokes, highlighting her smallness and tendency to wear Jergens cherry-almond lotion. But despite the lack of frills, Iris manages to draw out of the family, and in particular her daughter, Ellen, and adult grandson, Jack, a certain moral strength befitting their pioneer ancestry.  

Where this moral strength comes from is slightly mysterious. But the cultural liturgies I mentioned above probably play a role. Jack’s memories of the Bible stories his grandmother told him and his sister when they were young; the 72-hour kits she had made in Relief Society and given them for Christmas; the C.S. Lewis quotes that Ellen can’t stop quoting from her youth; the family stories of ancestors who braved the Mormon trail; Iris’s Mormon Tabernacle Choir music; the LDS tendency to call other members “brother and sister”—all of these things structure Ellen’s and Jack’s lives, both waking and sleeping. It’s as if the rituals and hymns of the faith have long since done their work, resulting in a sort of built-in teleology, a self-sustaining directedness outlasting its moment of creation and pointed toward something good, if not the Good itself. “I don’t want to pray, Mom,” Ellen tells her mother at a low point. What Ellen doesn’t seem to realize is that in some sense her whole life is a prayer.  

And so in the wake of the explosions that turn the Wilsons’ lives upside down, the family does what their forsaken faith has imprinted on them to do: they gather. After one explosion, they take up makeshift handcarts and trek to Payson, a small town in the center of the state, to the home of an uncle and aunt where they hope they will find Iris, who is sure to know what to do. And after another quite different explosion, the family gathers in the recovery room of a hospital, Iris again a source of stoic optimism in the midst of the beeps and whirs of lifesaving machines, having arrived thanks to a ride from a ministering sister from Ellen’s family’s congregation, a woman whom Ellen barely knows and calls “Sister Pooley” but whom Iris, acquainted only since the airport, calls by her first name, “Christine.”

There will be a natural inclination to compare Clyde’s book to The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the relationship between a father and a son as they navigate a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  And there are certainly similarities: after all, they’re both stories about fundamentally good people trying to muddle through a catastrophe. But in McCarthy’s book, it was never clear where that goodness came from and whether it existed independent of one’s will that it should. In McCarthy’s world, goodness is carried around like fire and is consequently fragile, as if it might be snuffed out at any moment by an unexpectedly strong breeze. Perhaps for that reason, The Road ends on a rather plaintive note. Speaking of the brook trout that once filled the mountain springs, McCarthy writes that “[o]n their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” 

The ending to Clyde’s novel is not in any way easier to stomach than McCarthy’s. The explosions leave their mark on the Wilson family in various and sundry ways. But in contrast to McCarthy’s closing lines lamenting over the ravages of nature’s entropy, Clyde seems to see a different possibility: the thing being put back and being made right again. In other words, she ends on a note of redemption, a vision of “the bomb . . . sucking up destruction like milk through a straw: destroying what it has destroyed. Making something new.” But this doesn’t seem to be a redemption that might happen in the future if only one can muster the will to believe. That wouldn’t be all that different from McCarthy’s take. Rather, Clyde’s vision seems to be of a redemption that has in fact already happened, and possibly long ago, and that the Wilson family’s story, like all of ours, is one of simply coming to that realization. Of course, this doesn’t equate to a happy ending, whatever that might mean. And indeed, in the story’s final pages, we find the Wilson family bruised and battered and somewhat diminished from their journey of hardship. And yet, there are hints that, thanks no doubt to her mother’s steadfastness, Ellen understands something deeper about what has happened. As she tearfully observes in the novel’s closing scene, echoing every parent’s hope, “‘It’s so good to have my family here safe and sound.’”  

Zachary Gubler is the Marie Selig Professor of Law at Arizona State University, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

Art by Maynard Dixon.