Book #71: Dispensation

Title: Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction
Editor: Angela Hallstrom

I like to think I know what I enjoy reading. I like stories that are artful, thought-provoking, challenging. I like stories about faith and inner struggles. I like stories that give me insight into the culture from which they derive. I like stories that are readable. Most of all, though, I like novels. I'm a binge reader (you're not surprised by that if you've read the blog for long) and I want a story that I want to keep coming back to, one that will go with me from the carpool line to the doctor's waiting room, to the kitchen counter while I chop vegetables, to my bed at the end of the night. As a result, I read a lot more novels than short stories. In fact, I've probably been known to say that I don't really like short stories.

But I do like Dispensation. And it's not because Angela Hallstrom, the collection's editor, is a friend. It's because even though it's a collection of short stories, which forces my novel-loving brain to switch gears, reset, and reboot when I finish one and start another (I still read the book as if it were a novel, one after the other after the other), Dispensation is, at its heart, a collection that contains all of the other stuff I talked about up there when I talked about what I like. I love that there are great short stories coming out of my culture, my people (literally-- some of these people are professors, colleagues, friends), that the Jewish synagogue down the street is mentioned in one story, that the exact route I run in the Avenues when I want to hit the hills so hard that I'm afraid I'll throw up by the time I'm done is referenced in another, while a third takes place in the back garden of a house in South Africa.

What I liked most about Dispensation is that while the stories come out of a Mormon faith and a Mormon culture, they exemplify the idea that there are lots of ways to be a Mormon in this world. I had no problem seeing the characters in these stories as the people I see next to me on the pews of my ward building on Sunday, looking clean-scrubbed and generic, giving the right answers in Sunday School, but still having rich and complicated lives. I felt this most profoundly with Margaret Young's "Zoo Sounds," where a bishop's wife mourns for her son who is in jail, and with Helen Walker Jones's "Voluptuous" where the protagonist, a teenage girl, could be one of the faces in my Sunday School class.

While there were individual stories I didn't love, those few stories are far outweighed by really great ones. I was particularly impressed with the stories by women. In addition to the stories by Jones and Young, I was very moved by "Obbligato" by Lisa Madsen Rubilar, "White Shell" by Arianne Cope  and "Clothing Esther" by Lisa Torcasso Downing. There are just too many good stories to name each one.