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3.52 AVERAGE
3.52 AVERAGE
There were a lot of things I liked about this book. However, it was hard to believe these characters would put themselves through what they did (most everyone was miserable most of the time) without having a very strong religious commitment to their lifestyle. That never really came through in the story.
Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist chronicles the life of Golden Richards, polygamist, as he tries to navigate his increasingly intricate life with 4 wives and 28 children. Golden’s construction company is failing which forces him to take a somewhat less than righteous job building a brothel, while his Church and family think he’s building a senior citizens community; he has a minor insurrection on his hands at home, splintering factions and infighting abound, not to mention the fact that he’s never home; oh yeah and he just might be embarking on an affair. Not really living The Principle there Golden.
The Lonely Polygamist is more than just a tale about a polygamist family struggling and a polygamist father failing; it’s about love and grief and desperation; it’s about finding your place in a family, searching for attention and love, to feel needed and wanted.
Udall’s writing is fantastic and he really makes you feel for the characters (and there are a lot of them, what with Golden, his four wives, his children, and all the other players). Really it seems that Golden should be a very unsympathetic character, with his failings as a father, husband, and righteous member of the Church, but there’s a particular incident we hear about that just breaks your heart and suddenly so much of his absences and seeming uncaring for his children and wives comes into perspective. The characters are so complex and real it’s wonderful. There are some extremely poignant and heartbreaking points in the novel and then there are laugh-out-loud funny parts.
The Lonely Polygamist is more than just a tale about a polygamist family struggling and a polygamist father failing; it’s about love and grief and desperation; it’s about finding your place in a family, searching for attention and love, to feel needed and wanted.
Udall’s writing is fantastic and he really makes you feel for the characters (and there are a lot of them, what with Golden, his four wives, his children, and all the other players). Really it seems that Golden should be a very unsympathetic character, with his failings as a father, husband, and righteous member of the Church, but there’s a particular incident we hear about that just breaks your heart and suddenly so much of his absences and seeming uncaring for his children and wives comes into perspective. The characters are so complex and real it’s wonderful. There are some extremely poignant and heartbreaking points in the novel and then there are laugh-out-loud funny parts.
The Lonely Polygamist is a novel that looks at the lives of those living in modern polygamy and I think does very well for such a difficult subject. Udall creates very believable characters and though their experiences are pretty unique, what I loved about this book is that as you get to know them you discover they really are struggling with all the same things that make us collectively human. They aren't that different from you and me. Just trying to do their best in a difficult world. This book is part tragedy and part comedy, but is pretty heavy on the tragedy. I wasn't sure if I was going to like the ending, but when I got to it I was much more satisfied than I expected. I loved watching the characters grow and progress through the book.
Now that I've read this book I'm kicking myself that I didn't take a class from Udall or at least talk to him while I was still a student at BSU, because he teaches creative writing there. Ugh! Major regret. I was so impressed with this book and there were so many things I could have learned from him! I really enjoyed this book. It made me think, it was very unique, and it also made me just a little bit sad the way we tend to totally disavow our fundamentalist 'cousins.'
Now that I've read this book I'm kicking myself that I didn't take a class from Udall or at least talk to him while I was still a student at BSU, because he teaches creative writing there. Ugh! Major regret. I was so impressed with this book and there were so many things I could have learned from him! I really enjoyed this book. It made me think, it was very unique, and it also made me just a little bit sad the way we tend to totally disavow our fundamentalist 'cousins.'
So. This book was incredibly entertaining and funny and really detailed. I don’t know how to feel about this book quite yet. I think that this book was very sad at times and also incredibly funny at others. I loved the point of views in this book and think that this is probably my favorite young character I’ve read about in a while. It took me a minute to get through this book. I think that it was a light hearted book for the most part but also was really heavy at the same time? it’s hard to explain. I think the different point of views were what made this book the most entertaining. It was like an omniscient reality TV show for the most part. I didn’t like the redeeming part of this book. After all the stuff that Golden did, I don’t think that the ending should have just let him off the hook. I think the reason that everything happened the way it did was very good and well written and it makes you feel trapped just like the entire family. I will probably think about this book for a million years now though. When I was reading this book I constantly thought about it when I wasn’t reading it, so now that it’s finished I don’t think I’ll stop thinking about it for a while.
It's the mid-1970s and Golden Richards, with his four wives and twenty-eight children, is struggling on many levels. His construction business has fallen on hard times and he has been forced to take a job building a brothel in Nevada. This means, of course, time away from home, not to mention a conflicted soul, since he can't admit to any of his wives or spiritual leaders the truth about what he's building. The lies are compounded when he recognizes, and begins to act on in very mild ways, an attraction to Huila, a Mexican woman married to the man who hired him to build the house of ill repute.
Relationships are complicated, and polygamous relationships seem to be even more complicated than most. Right at the beginning of the book - first paragraph - Mr. Udall states, "The life of any polygamist, even when not complicated by lies and secrets and infidelity, is anything but simple." At one point in the story, Mr. Udall expresses this from the perspective of Rusty, who's about to turn 12: "Like everything else in this family, birthdays were complicated. In this family, you were never free, you couldn't do anything on your own, because there was always somebody who had a dentist's appointment or volleyball practice or Deeanne would have one of her epileptic seizures and there went everybody's Labor Day picnic down the tubes. It was like they were all connected by the same invisible string, this was how Rusty thought of it, and when one person wanted to do a certain thing or go a certain way, they yanked on all the others, and then another person tried to go in another direction, and so on, and pretty soon they were all tangled up, tied to each other, tripping and flailing, thrashing around like a bunch of monkeys caught in a net."
Polygamy is not an easy lifestyle choice, not for the husband, not for the children, and not for the wives. Trish, the most introspective of the characters, explains: "The life of a plural wife, she'd found, was a life lived under constant comparison, a life spent wondering." And later in the book: "This kind of life was for those with the conviction and discipline to obey without question, those who could make themselves believe that their suffering and uncertainty were for a reason yet to be fully revealed. And where, she wondered did that leave her?"
Read more of this review on my blog Build Enough Bookshelves
Relationships are complicated, and polygamous relationships seem to be even more complicated than most. Right at the beginning of the book - first paragraph - Mr. Udall states, "The life of any polygamist, even when not complicated by lies and secrets and infidelity, is anything but simple." At one point in the story, Mr. Udall expresses this from the perspective of Rusty, who's about to turn 12: "Like everything else in this family, birthdays were complicated. In this family, you were never free, you couldn't do anything on your own, because there was always somebody who had a dentist's appointment or volleyball practice or Deeanne would have one of her epileptic seizures and there went everybody's Labor Day picnic down the tubes. It was like they were all connected by the same invisible string, this was how Rusty thought of it, and when one person wanted to do a certain thing or go a certain way, they yanked on all the others, and then another person tried to go in another direction, and so on, and pretty soon they were all tangled up, tied to each other, tripping and flailing, thrashing around like a bunch of monkeys caught in a net."
Polygamy is not an easy lifestyle choice, not for the husband, not for the children, and not for the wives. Trish, the most introspective of the characters, explains: "The life of a plural wife, she'd found, was a life lived under constant comparison, a life spent wondering." And later in the book: "This kind of life was for those with the conviction and discipline to obey without question, those who could make themselves believe that their suffering and uncertainty were for a reason yet to be fully revealed. And where, she wondered did that leave her?"
Read more of this review on my blog Build Enough Bookshelves
Something really didn't sit right with me in this novel. Obviously, coming from a Mormon background, polygamy is a touchy subject with me, and I have a knee jerk reaction to sympathetic portrayals of plural marriage. I hated the main character of this book until the very last page, but I also felt sorry for him. Now that I'm thinking about it, I really hated every character in this book for who they were or what they represented. Mostly I hated how realistically none of the characters could ever take control of their situation in ways that I could relate to. Miserable in your marriage and see no way out?: get a job. It was just frustrating. But entertaining and interesting at the same time.
I think this is the longest book I've ever read voluntarily. It doesn't feel like it though. Okay, at the beginning the story is slow. It takes awhile to get into it, especially because the narration starts switching around before you have a chance to latch onto any of the characters. And I was concerned - I knew that I couldn't keep track of 20-some children and all the side characters. But somewhere everything falls into place and you get invested.
The memories and back stories are painted vividly, and each wife and her family are drawn clearly enough that you can see them. Some of the children are just shadows and generalizations, and some characters are more compelling than others, but that reflects their importance in each of the narrator's lives. Seriously, if we got details about everyone the book would be thousands of pages.
However, a failing in this book IMHO is that Golden, the patriarch, is easily the weakest character, despite the fact that he gets the greatest number of pages. I know he is supposed to be weak and small despite his stature, and I get that, but his feelings are pretty much just self-pity and self-hatred. I saw more strength and intrigue with Rose-of-Sharon (Golden's emotionally troubled wife whose perspective we never see) than from Golden. I felt him most when he reflected on Glory (his deceased daughter), and sometimes when he was with Huila, his quasi-mistress. But mostly he seemed flat, pathetic, unintersting. Without being bolstered by the characters around him, he wouldn't have been worth reading about at all.
Rusty's narrative was my favorite, but I liked Trish's too. I liked that Udall switched between the three (Golden being the third) to show us how similar they are, though they really don't know each other at all. I found the climax compelling and worth reading for.
I may read this again to see how I feel about the slow start now that I understand the characters more. I also plan on reading Udall's other works.
Despite personal background, I think there is something here for everyone who's ever been part of a family and wondered how the heck they got there.
The memories and back stories are painted vividly, and each wife and her family are drawn clearly enough that you can see them. Some of the children are just shadows and generalizations, and some characters are more compelling than others, but that reflects their importance in each of the narrator's lives. Seriously, if we got details about everyone the book would be thousands of pages.
However, a failing in this book IMHO is that Golden, the patriarch, is easily the weakest character, despite the fact that he gets the greatest number of pages. I know he is supposed to be weak and small despite his stature, and I get that, but his feelings are pretty much just self-pity and self-hatred. I saw more strength and intrigue with Rose-of-Sharon (Golden's emotionally troubled wife whose perspective we never see) than from Golden. I felt him most when he reflected on Glory (his deceased daughter), and sometimes when he was with Huila, his quasi-mistress. But mostly he seemed flat, pathetic, unintersting. Without being bolstered by the characters around him, he wouldn't have been worth reading about at all.
Rusty's narrative was my favorite, but I liked Trish's too. I liked that Udall switched between the three (Golden being the third) to show us how similar they are, though they really don't know each other at all. I found the climax compelling and worth reading for.
I may read this again to see how I feel about the slow start now that I understand the characters more. I also plan on reading Udall's other works.
Despite personal background, I think there is something here for everyone who's ever been part of a family and wondered how the heck they got there.
Beautiful writing that entrapped me and drew me into this family's story.
I had heard so many good things about this book that I couldn't wait to read it. Luckily it lived up to my expectations. Golden Richards is married to four wives and has twenty-seven living and two dead children. There's no way that a books could look at the point of view of everyone in this huge family, but the author did give us insight into Golden, the four wives and one of the chidren, Rusty. I was especially taken with the story of Rusty showing the toll that this kind of life takes on the children. And although I don't agree with the choices made by these characters I did feel and care for them. A wonderful story, beautifully written.
This is about as three and a half as you can get. At times there's staggering beauty and Udall nails the visuals and laughs at our human existence with perfection... and then I'm left looking at a couple of characters that seem like cheap silhouettes or composite characters. I have some serious admiration for Udall's vision and structure but his book did not make me cry.