Those left hanging

The contemporary part of Ebershoff's novel, told in alternating chapters with Ann Eliza's, is the story of a young man named Jordan Scott. Raised in a polygamist settlement tucked into the desert of southern Utah (called Mesadale in the novel but a stand-in for the real community of Colorado City, Ariz.), he was expelled at 14 by the elders of the sect who brook no competition for the teenage girls. It's his mother who dumps him by the side of the road one night, ordered by her autocratic husband to expel him from a family that includes about a hundred kids (Jordan isn't quite sure how many siblings he has) in a moment of tough polygamist mother-love.

This aspect of the novel is really a murder mystery. Jordan, gay and in his early 20s, now lives in Pasadena, and as the story opens he learns that his mother, also a 19th wife, has just been accused of killing him. Jordan feels compelled to return to St. George, Utah, in his derelict van, dog Elektra in tow, to visit his mother in jail and, once convinced of her innocence, to try to unravel the mystery of who really killed his despised old man.

In Utah, he meets a homeless 12-year-old named Johnny Barlow and quickly realizes he is also a "lost boy" who's been expelled from Mesadale. Soon, Jordan is taking care of Johnny, a foul-mouthed, homophobic little urchin who tries to flee when he learns Jordan is a "pervo." Still later he meets Tom, a clerk at a motel where he's staying, a clean-cut Mormon ex-missionary type, now excommunicated because he too is gay. Jordan, Johnny and Tom make a wounded trio, all estranged from the religions that formed them, cut off from and yet immutably trapped in their pasts. Ebershoff is very good at evoking the terror the boys feel when they attempt to return to Mesadale to question old friends and family members, just as he conjures in vivid detail the way violence has always been a part of the Mormon experience, as both the persecuted and the persecutor.

Ebershoff makes little effort, really, to connect these two stories -- the story of Ann Eliza Young and her defection from the prophet's harem and subsequent rise to fame as the nation's most outspoken anti-polygamist crusader, and that of Jordan and his little circle as he revisits his past and attempts to solve a murder. Instead, the stories lie side by side, past and present coloring each other. It's a technique that enables the author to explore the entire history of a religion and the divine revelation that nearly caused its downfall. Ann Eliza Young, in her time, was one of the most famous women in the land, and the embarrassment she caused the prophet and his religion, as Ebershoff notes, can't be underestimated. Polygamy and slavery were considered in Ann Eliza's day "the twin relics of barbarism." Yet after her brief flurry of fame, Ann Eliza, who lived to usher in a second and largely ignored edition of her book, came to a mysterious end. No one knows how or where she died.