The Lonely Polygamist

Sometimes when I recommend a book that I've enjoyed, I worry about talking it up too much, getting people's expectations impossibly high, but that's not something I worry about with Brady Udally's The Lonely Polygamist. This book really knocked my socks off--it was a book I couldn't put down while I was reading it, and can't stop thinking about now that I've finished it.

The novel is about a large polygamist family (redundant?) circa 1978 that is spiraling out of control. The narrative mainly focuses on three characters--Golden Richards, the patriarch of the family who is secretly working on the construction of a brothel in Nevada, but telling his family it's an old folk's home; Trisha, the fourth and newest wife, who has recently lost a child; and Rusty, the one kid in the family who can never do anything right, who has tragically smelly feet and a secret penchant for trashy romance novels.

When I heard that Brady Udall was working on a novel about polygamists, I was skeptical. I enjoyed his first book, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, but thought that a novel about polygamists would either be really creepy or really condescending. This book is neither. The characters are sympathetic and endearing, in spite of their many flaws, and the polygamy thing ends up being a really smart, backdoor way to write about Mormon experience--families, faith, and belonging to a socially weird religion all taken to their most extreme manifestation. It also has the gravitas of a Great American Novel--at six hundred pages, it covers a lot of ground, from nuclear testing to disco fever.

In the way it was structured, the book reminded me a bit of Catch-22. The first half of the novel is very, very funny. I laughed out loud in parts. The second half of the novel, though, becomes more and more serious as it progresses, without becoming heavy-handed. The book ends up being heartbreaking in the best possible way, with just a hint of hope.

I highly recommend this book. It was an immersive, captivating reading experience. This is a book on par with such 21st-century masterpieces as Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.