I felt guilt and grief over leaving her alone when I went away to college-a regret from which I suffer even now.

My father died when I was nine, so my mother, an intensely religious person, was the chief influence of my childhood. “I was the last of thirteen children in a composite family, my father having had six previous children and my mother two. Being on the edge of a vast range-land, the town also gave me an enduring taste for wilderness, as well as the ultimately untenable assumption that the civilized and the wild are compatible. The isolated town gave me an intrigue with Mormon villages wherever I find them. “Born in 1933, I was raised in Snowflake, a small Mormon town in northern Arizona. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. More joyous than cynical, it sympathizes deeply with the plight of all of God’s backsliders.

Shifting from one to another, it builds suspense and elicitsĬomplex emotions, among them a profound sense of compassion. It can be read as a love story, a satiric comedy, or a dark and sobering study of self-mutilation. The story engages readers as it alternates almost imperceptibly between Frank’s naïve consciousness and the more informed awareness of its narrator. Along the way Frank encounters a closeted secular humanist, a polygamist prophet, a psychiatrist, a Mason, government employees, college professors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs-all drawn with heightened realism reminiscent of Charles Dickens or the grotesque forms of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Frank’s extended family is just a generation removed from polygamy and still energized by old-time grudges and deprivations. Of central importance is his Lutheran girlfriend, Marianne, whom Frank seduces, begrudgingly marries, and eventually loves. He is saved by an epiphany that has proved controversial among readers, either interpreting it as an extreme impiety or celebrating it as a moving and entirely plausible rendering of a biblical theme in a Western setting.įrank comes into contact with a host of rural and urban characters. He is a dedicated sinner until family tragedy catapults him into an arcane form of penitence preached among frontier Mormons. A young ranch-hand, Frank Windham, conceives of God as an implacable enemy of human appetite. Recognized as a Mormon classic twenty years after its release,The Backslider features longstanding Christian conflicts played out in a scenic, sparsely populated area of southern Utah.

The Backslider by Levi S. Peterson