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The 19th Wife: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: David Ebershoff
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  57 reviews
Sales Rank: 2059
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 514
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 6.6 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400063973
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781400063970
ASIN: 1400063973
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
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Product Description
Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.
Sweeping and lyrical, spellbinding and unforgettable, David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife combines epic historical fiction with a modern murder mystery to create a brilliant novel of literary suspense.
It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife.
Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death.
And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love and faith.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 52 more reviews...
 Meanwhile, in another novel.,, December 3, 2008
Gay coming of age stories have been so overdone in recent years that there are even successful parodies of them now, but Jordan Scott has one that sets the rest on its ear.
Jordan has lived since conception in Mesadale, an iron curtained combination of the worst parts of The Truman Show, Jonestown, nd Afghanistan where sexuality of any kind is simultaneously banned by holy writ, completely suppressed, regarded as sinful and as holy and is as omnipresent as the desert heat in summertime. It's a hellhole where the healthiest of babes will grow like a bonsai, deliberately warped and bent to the whims of the Prophet who gardens them, and where the one good thing about the place is that it is at least secure, its plyboard walls and billion year old mesas sheltering its people from the Evil of the world outside.
Though most gay males acknowledge knowing on some level long before puberty that they are 'different', fourteen is an age when most gay youth even in the most tolerant of environments are, at most, just beginning to process their sexual identity, and it's hard to conceive of a community less tolerant than Jordan's lifelong home. Teenage boys are taught to cut throats lest the outside world ever enter Mesadale like serpents into the sands of their Eden and that lustful glances can cause pregnancy, thus Jordan's sexual confusion must have already been immense by age 14 when he is literally driven into the desert, barred re-entry into what he has been taught is Paradise and damned to the buffetings of Satan by the Voice of God Himself. Soon, far from cutting the throats of the unfaithful he is literally on his knees before them and bartering the same naked body he has been taught from the cradle to regard as wicked unless being used for procreation for money and food. He has to perform the most debased of acts (Ebershoff tells us- twice, just in case we didn't get it the first time- that Jordan agreed to be 'fisted' for $50 by one john) just to stay alive, all while only things that were certain in the world- the Will of God, his mother's love, his place in an enormous family and among the Lord's Elect- are all lost in a nightmarish desert whirlwind. Falling through a hole in the Earth and awakening in a land filled with lecherous centaurs and flesh eating talking buffaloes would be no more bizarre, nightmarish, or utterly impossible to absorb than what Jordan experiences at 14, an adjustment that would lead the strongest of spirits into drug use or madness or suicidal depression or anything else that would seem to offer liberation even for a moment. That was Jordan's existence at 14.
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Six years later Jordan is fine and dandy and living in Pasadena. He's living hand-to-mouth but so are most people, and he lives in a tiny apartment with a beat up fourth hand vehicle just like most self-supporting 20 year olds- all things considered his life is pretty good. He's well adjusted, he's out and proud and isn't going to take any crap about his sexuality from anyone, and the demons of his past- both the metaphorical and the ones he literally believed in- are, if not exorcised altogether, at very least bound and cast into a pit from which he cannot hear their cries and taunting. Oh, he has bitterness and anger and a sense of missing closure about his past- but who doesn't? He is on the whole an emotionally healthy and pleasant person, not to mention a beautiful rosy chinked Nordic featured twink.
So how did he go from a dangerously inbred abandoned youth peddling his body to ephebophilic perverts somewhere in the desert to a studio apartment with a wonderful dog and colorful friends in Pasadena in just six years time? Well...
Meanwhile in another novel, here's a 60 page fictionalized first person account of Brigham Young's friend cum one of his many fathers in law) multi-dozenth one time father in law lusting for his Liverpudlian landlady in the 1850s, or if that won't do then how about a lengthy excerpt from Ebershoff's reimagining of WIFE NO. 19 (the real book is rather staid at that) in which among other things you can't understand the plot without knowing you learn that St. Louis fiddles can lead to prostitution. (In the real WIFE NO. 19, incidentally, Ann Eliza Young was far from open about anything related to sex, marital or otherwise, but in the reimagining her book is probably the raciest bestseller of the 1870s.)
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Well, a few chapters later let's drop back in on Jordan. He's out trying to find his father's murderer and free the mom who let him be abandoned as a sign of God's plan when he hooks up (platonically) with Johnny, a fellow castout from Eden who has his own baggage. (The length of time it takes Jordan to realize that the desperate homeless kid close to the polygamous compound and roughly the same age as Jordan was when he was kicked out is, in fact, another "lost boy" explains much about why Jordan isn't a professional investigator.)
Working with pro-bono cipher attorney Mr. Heber (the name is clearly inspired by Heber Kimball which I kept thinking would be significant, but to give a spoiler that there's no spoiler, nope- it's just his name) to free mom, he meets a bunch of people in the desert with ties to the compound. The plot thickens.
Meanwhile in another novel, we're treated to a seemingly never ending dozens of pages of purple prose from a self loathing bigamist who died generations before Johnny was born. In plodding florid first person stream-of-consciousness rambling said dead bigamist describes in more detail than anyone could need for the occasion desert sunsets (this book must have a record for the most desert sunset descriptions per chapter- seems desert sunsets in Utah are red and majestic, and that Ebershoff's thesaurus has more synonyms for red and majestic than you'd ever guess existed) to descriptions of his little girl's crying to the descriptions of his emotions where his wives are concerned, all of which seems a bit odd considering this particular piece of writing is A LEGAL DEPOSITION IN HIS SISTER'S DIVORCE TRIAL! (Undoubtedly the only legal deposition ever to mention that a cat slept peacefully on the deponent's chest as he reached a major life decision- twice- thank the gods the deponent didn't have a fisting story).
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So back to Jordan. Now he has a boyfriend, sort of. And there's stuff about his dad's murder. So just how did Jordan grow into such a well adjusted person when there are literally serial killers have come from happier and less destructive youths? Well, if Ebershoff knows, he ain't tellin', just take for granted that he did.
Now let's go back to a story that has nothing to do with him, doesn't even take place in the same city or family, and is set 130 years before. And it's about real people... or, at least, real names. And it's eventually going to converge with the modern day plotline... isn't it?
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Before going further I should perhaps admit my own bias: I am a (non-Mormon) historian who has studied Brigham Young, including his marriages and divorces, in depth and in fact have even researched his divorce from wife number 19/27/55/whatever Ann Eliza Webb Dee in some detail- I first read Wife No. 19 when I was younger than the character of Jordan Scott in the book. I've also read pretty much every book and article on the subject of modern day polygamous sects (there are many besides the Jeffs' sect and the incestuous Kingston sect that the fictional Mesadale [I wonder if the similarity to 'Masada' is intentional] is clearly based on). My favorite writers on the subject include memoirist Dorothy Allred Solomon and, of course, Jon Krakauer, both available on Amazon- check 'em out if you haven't already.
That said, I also agree with the sentiments of Lorenzo Dee in this novel: the historian and the memoirist and the novelist all tell truths, or at least the good ones do. I even believe that at it's best historical fiction can be a fantastic asset to "real" history: the census can tell you a person's state of birth, a novelist can tell you their state of mind. When using the gifts of a novelist to write about a historical figure the novelist should, as Gore Vidal did with Burr and Lincoln or Herman Wouk did with FDR and Stalin, try to contradict the historical record as little as possible, though a fib or stretch or alteration here or there won't hurt so much as it can be used to impart a greater truth.
I was thrilled to learn there was a novel about Ann Eliza coming out, and I didn't expect it to be 100% accurate (I don't believe her memoir was), and for a character as complex and multilayered as Brigham Young really only fiction CAN help peel some of the layers.
That said, one shouldn't take too many liberties with history. Making Lincoln the child of a runaway mulatto slave or FDR a secret Russian agent who can really walk, for example, those would be bad. Yet, either of which would have been no less ridiculous than Ebershoff's reimagining of Ann Eliza Young and her family, reinterpretations which are just, in a word, bizarre, or if another word may be added, pointless.
It is not that Ebershoff has changed the historical facts of the lives of Ann Eliza and her family members, or even that he has changed them drastically- true she was a superstar for a season in her own time but today's she's enough of a historical has-been than nobody's going to be the wiser and so tangential to history that the details of her life would not have greatly altered world events had they been as Ebershoff depicts. What is frustrating is that he so drastically changes the events of their lives and in so doing makes them... less interesting!
Examples:
The real Eliza Churchill Webb (Ann Eliza's mother) was 15 year old foster child in upstate New York who'd never traveled more than a few miles from home when she converted to Mormonism and worked her way hundreds of miles to Kirtland, not the world weary riverboat Magdalene with illegitimate child in tow from the book. (If she HAD been a former prostitute it is hard to imagine her daughter would have known it or revealed it, so if anything should be from a sealed Archive it should be Eliza's memoir of this time, plus Eliza's memoir would have perfectly counterlevered her daughter's- polygamy from the aspect of one who was there at its creation and grew old in it v. the daughter who grew up with it as the norm and left it.)
From what is known of her she was every bit as devout as Ebershoff's depiction, which makes her ultimate apostasy and siding with her daughter against the church all the more dramatic, and this true sequence of events Ebershoff barely mentions. (Dude, that's one of your moneyshots!)
Now consider Eliza Webb's shared husband, Chauncey, also a historical figure. In addition to the completely fabricated back story (he was not an orphan) and a plodding sealed archive exposition on said Liverpudlian horniness that has nothing to do with Jordan Scott, Ebershoff overlooks an epic irony of the real Chauncey's last days: he was an old wizened man who once had 8 wives and fathered dozens of children, yet in his last years he was a monogamist simply because living so long has caused him to outlive all but one of his wives (Lydia, also a character). And who took care of this ancient couple- was it some of Chauncey's hundred children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren brought about by his polygamy? Nope- they were cared for by his surviving wife's spinster niece- yep, an unmarried woman in a land of harems was their caretaker rather than the tribe he had founded. This would have been a poignant true injection into a fictional autobiography, yet it is not mentioned.
And then comes the most maligned and most whitewashed of all: Ann Eliza's brother Gilbert. Far from being the baby born in exchange for a boat ticket he was actually Chauncey G. Webb, Jr., and he was far more zealous than his brother Aaron (who did not exist) from the novel. Gilbert, who was real, was actually suspected of participation in the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre (an event vital to understanding the history of the church yet tossed aside like an "everyone knows what happened there" [no, they don't]; Gilbert was actually under investigation for this at the time of his sister's divorce when his counterpart in the novel writes his romance-novel/deposition hybrid IN WHICH HE TALKS ABOUT HIS ZEALOUSNESS FOR THE CHURCh, and yet Mountain Meadows isn't mentioned.
And know what the real Gilbert did next? How's this for a novel: after his own apostasy (which really was, as in the novel, borne mostly of his fallings out with Brigham over his sister and business dealings) the real Gilbert Webb along with some of his many sons was suspected of staging one of the greatest train robberies in western history- the theft of $28,000 in gold from an army payroll no less- and using the money to found a polygamist compound in Mexico when the LDS banned polygamy the following year! Gilbert died on this commune as a very old man- never came back to America- now THAT'S an interesting story- does Ebershoff, who mentions the apostate brother's commune, mention this? Nope. But he has time to mention that cat on the chest in a deposition twice. Oy.
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Meanwhile Jordan's playing house and getting closer to finding the murderer and stuff.
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Weirdest of all about this novel, to me anyway, is that I bought it because of my interest in Ann Eliza Young and more especially her husband (a man who had dozens of wives, 57 biological and at least as many step and adopted children, and yet whose private life was about the least interesting thing about him; undeniably brilliant, he was a near complete non-entity until middle age when he exploded like a genie, a man with 9 days of formal education in his life who suddenly became one of the greatest city planners/organizers/religious leaders/military strategists/businessmen/etc. in American history all while being simultaneously perhaps the most beloved and the most hated man in the nation- I mean, there's no way to make him boring, and his divorce from Ann Eliza and the brilliant legal trap he set was one of many codas at the end of his life. (One of Ebershoff's best moments in the book, and he does have some good moments, is his prison diary of Young- it's actually the only one of the 19th century sections that I wished had gone on longer.)
But instead I found myself wishing the Ann Eliza/Brigham part had been completely cut. Jordan Scott is a unique character who can more than easily fill a novel of this length with only bits and pieces of exposition on church history and dogma ever needed (perhaps use clips from Kelly's dissertation if you must, though frankly I don't see why Ann Eliza was necessary at all).
Again, how did Jordan- the inbred scion of a hellish zion cast into the wilderness and forced to debase himself sexually before he was even grown, become so well adjusted? Was he taken in by people who cared about him? Is this Roland figure he mentions but who's never seen a buck-fuddy Jordan's own age or is he a middle aged queeny father-figure? Did Jordan ever finish high school or at least get his GED? How'd he get the van, or even learn to drive? Does he have any ambitions- anything he wants to be? We know he reads and he questions, but what insight into life in general has his acid-trip nightmare of a past brought him? And what are his feelings for Johnny- clearly it's a platonic protectiveness but strangely there's not a whole lot of evidence in the novel that he even particularly cares about the child, let alone has some sort of brotherly/avuncular interest in him. And Tom... has there been a more one-dimensional clingy character in recent literature? (I completely agreed with the reviewer who said Jack McBrayer/Kenneth Percells and couldn't believe someone else had envisioned the exact same person.)
Anyway, Ann Eliza could easily star or at least play a major role in an outrageously good novel. Hopefully she will at some point. Jordan Scott--- I would like to see Ebershoff revisit him, though I doubt it will happen, as he was many times more interesting and no less fictititious than the "real" characters in this novel, and his journey needs to be addressed much more. Most irritating is when you learn the connection twixt Ann Eliza's tale and Jordan's- and you're "That's it?" It would be almost like writing a dual fictionalized biography of Sally Hemings [in which incidentally she's revealed to be the daughter of Louis XVI and a Haitian voodoo queen in a 38 page mortgage document that also describes the smell of magnolias on an unseasonably cold summer morn] that keeps cutting back and forth to a bio of a modern day biracial University of Montana student having an affair with a widowed doughnut shop manager and finding out the one connection is that the doughnut shop is insured by an agency owned by Sally's great-niece's brother-in-law. It just simply doesn't work- even though Sally and hypothetical UM student are both beautiful biracial women having affairs with widowers, they're hardly Plutarchian in their parallels.
There's just enough actual talent and originality here that Ebershoff hits the target with both plotlines, but only the outermost ring with Jordan's story and only the big white part with Ann Eliza's, nothing anywhere near a bullseye either one. If Jordan's plotline had bee majorly expanded and Ann Eliza's omitted altogether or reduced to a minor sideplot (sole exposition an interweaving from Kelly's thesis, perhaps) it would have been an incomparably better novel.
Ultimate grade: Modern plotline C, 19th Century Plotline D-, a pity as both had the potential of A+.
But this is just my opinion.
The 19th Wife December 2, 2008
This was a most enlightening and interesting read. Though the book is fiction, it draws on the memoirs of Anne Eliza Young who was purported to be Brigham Young's nineteenth wife(I say purported because it appears that he had quite a few and she was probably not really #19 but may have been somewhere around #25) to weave a tale that will captivate you almost from the first page. The story merges the life of Anne Eliza in the past with that of Jordan Scott in the present. Anne Eliza's fame/infamy sprang from her decision to divorce her husband in so public a manner for what she saw as his abandoment and mistreatment of her. She took him to court and wrote a book to discredit him and his polygamous practices. Obviously by so doing she became persona non grata with her former church members and their families. She fought an extensive battle with Brigham Young both in the court of law and in the court of public opinion. Her battle would prove to be instrumental in dismantling polygamy as a major belief system of the Mormon church.
The parallel and present day story that is told alongside Anne Eliza's is that of Jordan Scott whose mother is herself a 19th wife and accused of shooting her husband to death. Years before, Jordan had been abandoned on the side of the road because his father had caught him holding hands with his step sister and the prophet considered this behavior to be inappropriate(by the way he was 14 when this happened). It is important to mention that Jordan's family was considered fundamentalist and not part of the Latter Day Saints(Mormons). His community was headed by a prophet and almost every family was polygamist or soon to be. When Jordan returns to help his mother after her arrest, he is now 20 and still carries with him the scars of his earlier abandonment and ostracism.
Both stories are told side by side with Anne Eliza's story occupying most of the book. Though I found the modern day story interesting, I was not blown away by it. The real genuis is the way in which the author used Anne Eliza's two books, church documents, newspaper reports and people who may have known her to create a portrait of a woman who must be admired for her spunk. I imagine that women's rights were not what they are today and getting a divorce during those times for a woman must have been a difficult venture. With that in mind, I cannot begin to comprehend the guts it must have taken her to get such a public divorce from the leader of a powerful church. Her books, lectures and later works where all driven by what she saw as the unbridled male lust that was manifested in polygamy and the women and children held hostage to this practice.
In my opinion, this is a very well written book that gives you a look into the early history of the Mormon church. Obviously you need to do your own research to find out what is factual and what is fiction. Anne Eliza though very informative on the practices of her church at the time was also a biased author whose anger toward Brigham Young clouded some of her writing. I would highly recommend this book.
 Enjoyable and thought provoking November 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I listened to this book on my Ipod. The characters are all multidimensional. Their stories are well developed and very interesting. The narration is well performed. I highly recommend this book for either a read or a listen.
Just ok. November 22, 2008
While the book was ok, it was nothing beyond that. I am usually the type who picks up a book and finishes it in a couple days.... but this one took me MUCH longer because it just did not engage me.
 It was like a Lifetime movie November 22, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This was one of those books I couldn't wait to be done with, as I had to read it for my book club. The writing is just okay, nothing overly literary, and at times the narrative is so cliche, or at least doesn't feel real, like the author is stretching a limited imagination. It tells two stories in two separate narratives that the author is trying to somehow relate to one another.
One is a historical fiction about Brigham Young's 19th wife, who divorces him and sets about on a crusade to end polygamy in the late-19th Century. That part of the book I really liked. It's fairly well researched and feels authentic. The other is a modern sort of murder mystery about a 19th wife in a cult-like sect that split of from the Mormons after 1890 who is accused of killing her husband. Her estranged gay son returns to the small town and proceeds to investigate the case, and I don't want to ruin it for you, but the author would like us to believe that the mother's innocent, and her son, the hero is trying to prove it.
But I had some real problems with that part of the book. First of all, the solving of the murder comes abruptly and totally from left field. There's no building of the clues, only a bit of meandering around them. The explanation of the murder is less than a page, and the motive isn't fully believable, especially given that the climax is the first we've heard of it. Also, the confession comes after a totally contrived scene where the main character is captured and seems to be threatened, but again, it doesn't feel as real as the author had been hoping to make it.
My biggest problem was with the main character, Jordan, who as I mentioned, is gay. Why? Because I guess that would make the story more interesting? The author tells us that Jordan spent a little time selling his bod, and on more than one occasion mentions that he was paid by a dude to let him put his "arm in a place where no arm should go." Ew. Ultimately though, I didn't get the feeling that the author knew thing one about being homosexual, that he was basically working with stock stereotypes, and overusing them at that.
And then, about 2/3 through the book, Jordan meets a guy, Tom, who falls in love with Jordan and wants him to stay, make a commitment after ONE NIGHT TOGETHER,. The author tries to kind of make a case that it's hard for Jordan to do that because of how he was raised in the polygamist sect. He can't love, you see. But I felt like -- well, he did just meet the guy. Frankly, the love interest comes off more like a creepy stalker than a sincere life partner. (I pictured him as Kenneth Parcells from 30 Rock, only you know, as a creepy stalker. If they ever make a movie of this book, Jack McBrayer should totally play the character of Tom.)
But I kept turning those pages, because I wanted to find out what happened to Ann Eliza Young, Bringham's 19th wife. Sadly, I was disappointed in that there was no resolution, nor was there any more mention of the son she had left behind but lamented over on several occasions.
The worst part of the book was the last paragraph, where Jordan, Tom, their precocious ward, and even their dogs are sitting on a bed contemplating the future. One man puts his arm around the other, and Jordan imagines his mother where he had left her, and again, I don't want to ruin it for you, but the writing here was particularly cheesey. I could almost here a swell of violins in the background.
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