The Scholar of Moab

Feb 27, 2013 Tatiana rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporaryfiction, written-by-friends

This novel is undeniably imaginative and like nothing you've ever read before. It's taking me a while to get my head around it. It's quite puzzling, but I think I'm starting to see what it's about.

The reason I love Steven Peck's writing (what I've read of it) is that he engages with and illuminates some really big, really deep ideas. This novel is funny, also touching, confusing, and intellectually engaging. It's had me puzzling over it for days after finishing it.

(view spoiler)...more This novel is undeniably imaginative and like nothing you've ever read before. It's taking me a while to get my head around it. It's quite puzzling, but I think I'm starting to see what it's about.

The reason I love Steven Peck's writing (what I've read of it) is that he engages with and illuminates some really big, really deep ideas. This novel is funny, also touching, confusing, and intellectually engaging. It's had me puzzling over it for days after finishing it.

(view spoiler)[I think it's deliberately meant to be rather undefinable, but if there is one theme that runs throughout it's the nature of truth, of belief, of understanding the world. How do we do that? What constitutes truth? Is it established by science? By majority rule? By personal testimony and spiritual witness, as in Mormonism?

First of all, there's Dora who's been kidnapped by aliens. Nobody believes her but Hyrum, and possibly the reader. The redactor doesn't seem so sure. (But one and maybe both of the two conjoined twins, the two-headed cowboy -- another quite memorable character, seem to be convinced before the end.)

Then there are the twins, who are two heads who share a body. In addition to William and Edward, the two heads, there's a third person they call Maurice, a neural mass, who decides which twin gets control of the legs, and who in one case is almost certain to have noticed or understood something that neither twin did. One twin is gay and the other is straight. One is a believer and the other is an atheist. They have the same genes and the same experiences, except for one is on the left and one is on the right. How can the nature of the whole universe be so different for one than the other?

There's Hyrum himself, who believes in God but acts in very duplicitous ways. He's good and bad inextricably. We like him but see him for a total con man and someone untrustworthy. His scholarship is not much use in overcoming his profound ignorance about the world. Yet he's quite canny in many ways. He figured out how to rid himself of a tiresome coworker, for instance, and played on the fears and beliefs of the townspeople very cleverly.

There's Mormonism, a religion the author and I share, which establishes truth by revelation and the testimony of the spirit in a unique manner. That's being made fun of, but in an affectionate way by someone who gets it.

There's science, another religion/body of belief the author and I share, which establishes truth in its own way. The bumblebee experiments make fun of science, also in an affectionate way, and yes, by someone who gets it. Far too many researchers do exactly as Hyrum did and build their own assumptions into the experiment itself, then use the experiment to prove their assumptions in a way that's actually completely circular.

In the end we have no idea what actually truly happened. Who was the redactor? I kept thinking it was Hyrum himself, but then why would he need the witness of the twins to tell him about a scene at which he himself was present? And why would he give away his own secret to Adam, his affair with Dora which he didn't even record in his journal? And how could he interview Sandra at the end without her recognizing him? The redactor must be a friend of all the actors, though -- someone well-known. Yet there's just nobody for him to be. (Edit: see spoiler in the comments for my new theory on that.)

Neither are there any corpses recovered for Hyrum, the baby, or Dora from their various mishaps in which they're presumed dead, that occur at different times. Did they run off together? That seemingly would have happened decades earlier, if that were the plan. Was Dora really psychotic? Were the aliens real? Did the trickster Hyrum fool Dora into believing her baby was kidnapped by aliens to get out of the consequences of his illicit affair? It's hard to believe he was evil enough to kill his own baby, though. I can think of a dozen different theories, but none of them really fit or ring true to me.

As a tangent, I once read a paper by Steven Peck, the author, about an episode he had of psychosis caused by a bacterium that got into his brain during a field trip to somewhere exotic and tropical. It was a terrible episode, and he nearly died, but was saved by a doctor recognizing the organism and giving him the right IV antibiotic. His description of what it feels like to be psychotic from the inside, coming from someone who is now well, is fascinating. As a scientist he was particularly interested in how absolutely sure he was at the time that his delusions were real. There was no hint of doubt possible for him in that state. So that brings up the question of how do we know what we know is real? What is the nature of truth? That philosophical and scientific question seems to me to be the main idea behind this novel.
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I've noticed that the people who are real scientists, like Peck and Richard Feynman, and so on, they always seem to have this playful and imaginative thing going on about reality. They are willing to entertain dozens of wild hypotheses that might sound completely nuts to non-scientists.

Other people, those who have learned about science but are not great scientists themselves, they all seem to be firmly sure of everything. They will argue you down and insist they know all kinds of things. They're very sure of all sorts of stuff we think we do know. They have no interest, really, in all we don't know.

But reality itself is far more capricious than that. Take quantum electrodynamics, for instance. Nobody can explain it in a way that makes sense because it doesn't make sense. It just is true. It fits experimental data to 15 decimal places, and nobody can get their head around it or understand how it can actually be that way.

So maybe having no idea what actually happens or happened is pretty definitive of all our human experience, in which we believe all kinds of impossible and mutually-inconsistent things for reasons we don't understand, that mostly evaporate on very close observation. What is truth? Perhaps, as Ursula K. Le Guin says, it's mainly a matter of the imagination.(less)

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Dec 10, 2012 Karen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: adventure, environmental, folklore-fairytale-legend, latter-day-saint, neopagan, philosophy, poetry, scifi-fantasy, science, spirituality, western-regional

Peck's novel is difficult to categorize because it blends genres, draws on several disciplines, and employs multiple narrators to solve a series of interconnected Whodunnits. The strongest voices in the novel belong to Hyrum (the self-taught scholar), Dora (a local poet), and William (the most articulate of the cowboy conjoined twins). Each narrator invokes the viewpoints of additional characters, who serve to simultaneously clarify and confound the evidence around the related mysteries.

Despite...more Peck's novel is difficult to categorize because it blends genres, draws on several disciplines, and employs multiple narrators to solve a series of interconnected Whodunnits. The strongest voices in the novel belong to Hyrum (the self-taught scholar), Dora (a local poet), and William (the most articulate of the cowboy conjoined twins). Each narrator invokes the viewpoints of additional characters, who serve to simultaneously clarify and confound the evidence around the related mysteries.

Despite this cacophony of perspectives, I was propelled through the novel because of its central question: What happened to the poet's baby, born in the La Sal Mountains outside of Moab? But the more I read The Scholar of Moab, the more I realized that the baby's fate was really not the knottiest problem to be addressed. Like the dingo-ate-my-baby movie, "The Cry in the Dark," the central mystery is really this: How do we as individuals and as communities construct and act upon truth?

In order to discover the truth of the baby's disappearance, a redactor presents a series of texts -- much in the same way that Stoker's novel Dracula assembles multiple documents for the reader. This device allows Peck to dismiss the truth-trumping single narrator. These various, sometimes conflicting documents dethrone truth and spread it around. Who has the authority to answer our questions about truth? The reader gleans information from the usual suspects: artists, scientists, philosophers, and mystics.

And in a manner that is partly realistic, partly satirical, we observe how truth gets played out by the people of Moab. They are a community who holds a largely common framework for constructing truth. An entire town of regular, salt-of-the-earth types combine church doctrine, folklore, and town gossip to make meaning out of the phenomena of their daily lives. We laugh at them, but they are really clownish stand-ins for the whole of the human race.

As this dark comedy unfolds, I was looking for a little comfort. One passage that provides comfort comes from Hyrum's quest to pinpoint the meaning of "Dickensian," a word that vexes him for a year as he reads the entire works of Dickens in an attempt to decode the word's meaning. He's rewarded finally with this epiphany: Dickensian for Hyrum means "a deep bleakness & poverty & misery suffered for a purpose that will eventually turn into Light" (p. 66). My own quest for making meaning of Peck's novel leads me to believe this is a key concept. The residents of Moab, its seasonal visitors, and even the main characters' far-flung colleagues and family members all suffer some form of bleakness, poverty and misery. Heck, we readers do, too. It's part of the human condition. But the novel also reveals moments of light that illuminate, comfort and bolster. Converging images, coincidental meetings, recurring themes, unexpected connections give the characters (and the reader) some hope that there is truth out there. Somewhere. (Cue music from X Files.)

If Peck offers any common ground, it's probably the landscape itself. Despite being a novel that explores a number of philosophical propositions, it's refreshingly vivid in its descriptions of the people and their environment, the beautiful landscape of the Moab area. So don't be afraid that you will be lost in a fog of philosophical statements. You get to take a tour of the red rock region of southern Utah with a brief side trip to Vienna. And on occasion there is a truck, a trailer park, a library, a parade, and a diner.

What the novel presents is a clash of competing paradigms at war with each other. Sometimes people fight with each other, as do Hyrum and Adam (a geologist), who quarrel over the question, "Is Dora sane?" Sometimes individuals are at war with themselves. The conjoined twins dramatize in a fantastical fashion the duplicity possible within a single entity. But as a single-headed person, this novel invites me to see such a war within my own multi-perspectival mind, my own multi-layered soul. And I was glad to have Peck unveil these conflicts, even if it means that I will never believe in "plain truth" again.
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May 04, 2012 L.M. Ironside rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: can-t-stop-thinking-about, general-fiction, literary-fiction, mormon-stuff, read-this-right-now, small-press-indie-and-self-pub, west-lit

It's been a long time since I've encountered a book that takes such a hold of me that I feel tormented by not reading it. Once my weekend arrived, I read this book in the bathtub, at the gym on two different pieces of workout equipment (I had to stop for a few minutes while I worked on my arms...have you ever tried to operate a Kindle while lifting weights? Not easy) and while folding laundry. I literally could not stop reading it.

Thank goodness for small presses. Thank goodness for adventuresom...more It's been a long time since I've encountered a book that takes such a hold of me that I feel tormented by not reading it. Once my weekend arrived, I read this book in the bathtub, at the gym on two different pieces of workout equipment (I had to stop for a few minutes while I worked on my arms...have you ever tried to operate a Kindle while lifting weights? Not easy) and while folding laundry. I literally could not stop reading it.

Thank goodness for small presses. Thank goodness for adventuresome souls willing to take a risk on books which are out-there, different, beyond the typical, and worthy of preservation. The Scholar of Moab is not the kind of book that would find its way into a Big Six imprint in this day and age. But that, of course, is not an indicator of quality. As the economy continues to flounder the usual publishers seem to grow more and more conservative in their acquisitions, and while perhaps ten or fifteen years ago a book like this one would have been grabbed immediately by a big publishing house, today there's just no way in hell. Not enough zombies, vampires, or tragic family sagas set on the Asian continent. I am so grateful that Torrey House and other discerning small presses are hunting down and acquiring and offering such under-represented voices and settings in fiction. Few authors are working with the contemporary American West, but Steven L. Peck proves it's a setting full of beauty, character, and mystery.

The Scholar of Moab concerns one Hyrum Thayne, a sincere and curious man who lacks education and worldliness but who manages to impact the lives of several interesting people in his small red-rocks world -- Dora Tanner, a poet who may or may not be unhinged; William and Edward Babcock, a pair of polyglot conjoined twins with a penchant for cowboying; the Babcocks' mysterious sibling Marcel; and the Redactor, the amateur historian who presents their stories in the form of recovered documents, letters, and transcripts of interviews. Bearing up the stories of these unforgettable people is a mystery that keeps the reader hooked until the end: who killed Dora's newborn baby? Or was the baby killed at all?

Interwoven throughout are bits and pieces of Mormon theology and mythology, and the text plays in intriguing, clever ways with the concept of a trinity, a theme that bears out to the poignant final lines of the book.

The writing itself is compelling and confident, and shows a good deal of impressive craft. Even without the Redactor's headings on each document, it's obvious from the distinctive voices which characters are "speaking." Peck is a writer with impressive chops, one to watch and one to follow.

The Scholar of Moab is literary fiction at its finest: evocative, haunting, gorgeous, and more than a little strange. In its weirdness and humanity it reminds me of Geek Love, and fans of that book will certainly love this one. Those who found Geek Love too overwhelming will find The Scholar of Moab to be a softer, more accessible, more lovable version -- but still bizarre and still unforgettable.

Read this book.(less)

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Jan 23, 2013 Barbara Richardson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Scholar is a butterball of a book! Rich, tasty, savory, silly and stuffed with oddball characters: an alien abductee poet, a two-headed Oxford-educated cowboy, and the irrepressible Hyrum LeRoy Thayne, screwy innocent, small-town prankster, strayed Mormon and willing servant of the Lord.

I highly recommend this book, so many voices and so much power of mind.

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Dec 20, 2012 Michael Austin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012

We cannot call Steven Peck's award-winning The Scholar of Moab a perfect novel. It lacks too many of the elements found in truly great literature. Like pirates. There are no pirates. Nor are there talking monkeys or Elvis impersonators. There may or may not be space aliens, but, even if there are, they do not appear to have cool weapons. And there is not a single scene in which somebody upturns a fruit cart. But mainly, there are no pirates.

But there are a lot of other things well worth reading...more We cannot call Steven Peck's award-winning The Scholar of Moab a perfect novel. It lacks too many of the elements found in truly great literature. Like pirates. There are no pirates. Nor are there talking monkeys or Elvis impersonators. There may or may not be space aliens, but, even if there are, they do not appear to have cool weapons. And there is not a single scene in which somebody upturns a fruit cart. But mainly, there are no pirates.

But there are a lot of other things well worth reading about, including two-headed cowboys, French post-structuralism, book-burning, communist Book of Mormon ghosts, magic amulets, medieval homunculi, "The One Mighty and Strong," and religious bees--not a bad assortment of literary fundamentals to compensate for the shocking lack of pirates in the narrative. And, ultimately, the critic must review the book that got written and not the book that he (or she) would have liked to have seen. We must make due with such as we have been given.

And we have been given much. The Scholar of Moab is an elegant novel by a writer who takes the craft seriously. It revolves around two very compelling central characters, either of whom could be considered the "Scholar of Moab" from the title. The first of these characters, Hyrum Thayne, is a charismatic high-school drop out who fancies himself a scientist but becomes a religious icon--a lovable cross between Danny Dunn, Joseph Smith, and Jethro Bodine. About 2/3 of the book consists of entries from Hyram's journal, which follows a narrative arc something like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, only without the Sorcerer. He tries to improve himself and become a scholar, but, in doing so, things go drastically awry. Hilarity (albeit a dark sort of hilarity) ensues.

Perhaps the more interesting story, though (at least for me) is the second "scholar of Moab," the unnamed Redactor a generation later who tries to piece together Hyrum's story from his journal and other fragments of the past: poems written by his wife and his (probable) mistress, interviews with the highly educated conjoined twins who knew him when they were Utah cowboys, newspaper articles, and Hyrum's one scholarly paper on the religious faith of bumblebees. Like Hyrum, "Redactor" sets himself a daunting task. And, like Hyrum, he comes up short. Consequently, his product (which consists of the book itself) identifies the key questions in Hyrum's narrative, but it never quite finds the answers. The source documents are too incomplete, to contradictory, and too perspectival to answer even the basic "what happened and why" questions that get raised in the process of telling the story.

But (as is so often the case) it's the questions that actually matter, and they are legion. Peck takes us effortlessly through explorations of art, theology, narrative, history, morality, memory, faith, sexuality, and the nature of consciousness. Both of the scholars of Moab grapple with these issues, almost always in vain, but there is both nobility and a fair bit of comedy in their attempts.

And, ultimately, the impenetrable mystery surrounding the Redactor may redeem the book from its fatal flaw. For, you see, the mysterious Redactor could be a pirate. There is certainly nothing in the narrative that proves conclusively that he is not a pirate, so I, for one, choose to believe that he is. And if my supposition can someday be proven correct (and I do intend to give it my scholarly best shot), then we will indeed be able to call The Scholar of Moab a perfect book.(less)

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Dec 16, 2012 Nancy rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you’re looking for a book full of conundrums, you’ll find in The Scholar of Moab by Steven L Peck. Through “letters” and “diaries” and conversations with the characters, Peck creates the world of Hyrum Thayne and his circle of friends. The setting is Moab, Utah, a beautiful part of the world if you haven’t been there and a bit of a town of revolution if you have.
Hyrum isn’t a scholar buy any means but sure would like to be. If we read his diaries that is the one thing that shines thorugh – Hy...more

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Sep 13, 2012 PJ Swanwick rated it 4 of 5 stars

Unforgettable characters and quirky story elevate Mormon literary mystery

(Rating: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars) One of the pleasures of reading spiritual fiction is slipping into a new belief system and wearing it for a while. Steven L. Peck's Mormon literary mystery settles you in Moab, Utah, where you can experience small-town Mormon culture even if you disagree with the cosmology. Peck's amazing cast of characters and mind-bending plot infuse this dark comedy with unexpected insight and laugh-out-lou...more

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Jun 02, 2012 Walt rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a novel to Peck at. Peckishly, perhaps. To cluck at, to cock a doodle do to.

Compiled by a Redactor, who is in a way, its Nick Carraway or Scout Finch, THE SCHOLAR OF MOAB is not the type of fiction that you want to wolf down. Savoring it is certainly the preferred method of consumption. In fact, as you try to digest it, you may want to eat gravel for your gizzard to make sure everything you've pecked up comes out ground down to a movable mass. You don't want it to get stuck in there. I...more This is a novel to Peck at. Peckishly, perhaps. To cluck at, to cock a doodle do to.

Compiled by a Redactor, who is in a way, its Nick Carraway or Scout Finch, THE SCHOLAR OF MOAB is not the type of fiction that you want to wolf down. Savoring it is certainly the preferred method of consumption. In fact, as you try to digest it, you may want to eat gravel for your gizzard to make sure everything you've pecked up comes out ground down to a movable mass. You don't want it to get stuck in there. I suggest you consume yourself some redrock for that.

The place to get your redrock is at Arches National Park, known for its multitude of natural sandstone arches --- something like 2,000 of them. It's a beautiful place. Arches is also, as I understand it, the home of Suelo, a guy who advocates living without money. Google Suelo and see what I mean. How can you beat that? The Arches National Park is located just outside of Moab, Utah, a quirky place on its own, which general area is the fitting general setting of THE SCHOLAR OF MOAB. Visit or vacation there, preferably, in the spring time or the late fall.

That area's where protagonist, Hyrum Thayne, the scholar of Moab, lives with his devout, sometimes clueless, practicing Mormon wife, Sarah. In the surrounding vicinity resides the very capable --- Is she cagey or crazy or both? --- poet, Dora Tanner. Tanner's poetic verse has been apparently quite enticing, you might say, to Hyrum. Read the book and you'll find out how. You'll also find out what makes Hyrum so enticing, not necessarily in the way Dora has been enticed. Let me just say this: Hyrum was hilarious. Dora describes Hyrum as "affectionate, passionate, caring, independent, brave, lovely, cunning, honest, blind, confused, visionary, thoughtful, ardent, worried, gentle, god-fearing, genteel, bright, exuberant, shrewd, Mormon, handsome, puppyish, deceptive, thankful, fresh, naïve, pagan, scholarly." That pretty much sums him up pretty well. Dora says of herself that she is a Wiccan, has agnostic leanings, might be considered by Hyrum as a "Jack Mormon." She says they never talk about religion but "it seems to haunt" their "conversation beneath the surface of things in telling ways."

The Moab and the La Sal Mountains area are also where the conjoined Babcock twins, William and Edward --- moderated by Marcel --- cowboyed in their younger years. The narrative sketches out their history, including their education, their exploits and professions, and the difficulties of living with a brother slipping into dementia.

The comedian, George Carlin, as I recall, became discouraged and depressed from the unequal treatment given UFO believers compared to religious believers by the media. He observed that media moguls termed UFO believers "buffs" to relegate them to mere hobbyists and enthusiasts. He thought their disparaging characterization by the media, given a universe comprised of trillions and trillions of stars and multitudes of possible planets suitable for habitation, was untenable when compared to the deference given to believers in supreme beings. This novel made me wonder if its BYU-evolutionary-ecologist-professor author didn't read him some Carlin, too. Maybe gain some inspiration there? It's just a thought.

This book is a pastiche of fun, pain, and entertainment. There is plenty of seed on the ground to Peck up and digest. Most of all, I found it unique and compelling. I recommend you read it and see for yourself and let me know.(less)

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Jan 03, 2012 Rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: western-am-lit

I love magical realism, and I have high hopes for the potential of LDS-written fiction, and this novel combines both this love and this hope. I reviewed this book for Deseret Connect, but I feel like I couldn't really describe how much this book impressed me (professional reviewers are supposed to be balanced right? Also I am plagued by my AP style incompetence). This is the kind of book I could have liked without being LDS, and I think we need more LDS fiction like that.

The unreliable narrators...more

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Oct 01, 2012 Austin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Really cleverly written book. It's the story of a lot of curious events that happened in the late 70s in Moab, Utah beautifully told from multiple points of view. The book is put together by a Redactor (one of the many not-overt-but-pleasant aspects that contribute to the Mormon-ness of it) who stitches together a number of source fragments, some written contemporaneously, some later on. There are wonderfully explored themes such as faith/skepticism, consciousness, rationality, portrayals of cou...more

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Feb 25, 2012 Kristin rated it 4 of 5 stars

A surprisingly charming book that examines the complexities of "beingness." Why surprising? Because one could easily dismiss the novel as merely a "regional" text or a "Mormon" text; however, to do so would be to miss the smart ways in which Peck uses these particular settings and people to examine challenging existential questions. Yes, bits of the Mormon culture satire may be lost to those outside of the culture, but the larger philosophical questions will be accessible to any reader. Indeed,...more A surprisingly charming book that examines the complexities of "beingness." Why surprising? Because one could easily dismiss the novel as merely a "regional" text or a "Mormon" text; however, to do so would be to miss the smart ways in which Peck uses these particular settings and people to examine challenging existential questions. Yes, bits of the Mormon culture satire may be lost to those outside of the culture, but the larger philosophical questions will be accessible to any reader. Indeed, the text could be set elsewhere with another cast of characters and still query what constitutes a "self" -- consciousness? community? creation? Yet, at the same time, the wildness found in this southern Utah landscape allows Peck to map out a parallel psychological wildness and openness for his characters and readers. In lesser hands, this unique cast of characters -- a would-be-scholar, a two headed cowboy, a romantic poet, townspeople looking for Communist conspirators -- could easily slip into a gimmicky "look how quirky these small town folk are" farce. What makes Peck's novel and these characters resonate are Peck's gift for voice (never do the characters ring false, flat, or forced) and the ways in which these various characters represent different avenues into the concept of "beingness" without becoming representative or "stock." Furthermore, the structure of the text -- it is a redactor's collection of documents compiled in order to comprehend the "scholar of Moab" and one particular event he experiences -- also mimics the ways in which beingness is comprised of different narratives and modes of interpreting such. Epistemological, ontological, aesthetic, and material questions of beingness arise in this text, but not because they are explicitly posed or blatantly obvious. No, these questions arise because the characters, landscape, and structure of the text make the reader more conscious of her own understanding of beingness, or lack thereof.

My only criticism is that the redactor's voice is less convincing at the novel's start; however, as the novel progresses, that too matures.

Finally, the novel's language is lovely, alternately wistful, tragic, ethereal, and hilarious. I highly recommend this text.(less)

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Jan 17, 2012 Mark Maynard rated it 4 of 5 stars

Peck's novel -- part Rashomon story, part epistolary -- is told from multiple points of view, including the summary narrative of the mysterious "Redactor," and the poems of the deeply affected Moab writer and free spirit Dora Daphne Tanner.

All of the characters revolve in the strange, almost mystical orbit of the titular and self-appointed Scholar of Moab, Hyrum Thayne.

The dark satire of the novel is not solely accomplished in the amusing and twisted plot, but also relies on the dramatic irony o...more

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Sep 04, 2012 Otter rated it 5 of 5 stars

Just after I read part of the book, I heard the same thing on my mother-in-law's stereo being read. Now if you had read the book you'd know why this make it True.

I bought the book because my son worked at a Scout camp near Moab last summer and my wife knew one of the reviewers. So after the book sat on the shelf for a month and neither one had started to read it, I started reading it in the car taking my son back to school. When I came to the Journal entry, I had to share, and started reading ou...more

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May 23, 2012 Todd Hansink rated it 4 of 5 stars

I discovered this book while planning our family vacation to Moab, Utah. Coincidentally, I found a review of this book on a blog that I read and so I decided to buy it.

http://bycommonconsent.com/2011/11/22...

I would recommend this book to anyone who is familiar with Utah culture, Mormonism, Charles Dickens, philosophy, consciousness studies (especially related to conjoined twins), synchronicity, emergence, alien abduction, and one of the most beautiful places on earth--Moab. If the reader is no...more

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May 29, 2012 Jeremy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Having just finished Steven Peck's excellent novel, The Scholar of Moab, I must recommend it once again, this time with a reader's full authority. (Based on the bits I'd read, I've been telling friends to pick it up for weeks.) I have found, though, that any time I tell anyone about it, I sound like the Stefon character from SNL who is always recommending freaky nightclubs: "This book has EVERYTHING. Alien abductions, library arson, insect torture, Wiccans, communists, Gadianton robbers, art for...more

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Jan 19, 2013 Zoe Brooks rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: magic-realism

This book is unlike any of the other books I have read on this magic realism challenge. It is tremendous fun to read and definitely on the weird end of the magic realism spectrum. There are few books which have had me laughing out loud, but the Scholar's experiment - in which he measures the faith of bumblebees - had me guffawing.

The story is told through a series of documents drawn together by the anonymous Redactor. This allows the author the opportunity to write in a wide range of voices, fr...more This book is unlike any of the other books I have read on this magic realism challenge. It is tremendous fun to read and definitely on the weird end of the magic realism spectrum. There are few books which have had me laughing out loud, but the Scholar's experiment - in which he measures the faith of bumblebees - had me guffawing.

The story is told through a series of documents drawn together by the anonymous Redactor. This allows the author the opportunity to write in a wide range of voices, from the uneducated Hyrum, to the highly educated William (one of the conjoined twins) via the poetic and alternative Dora. It also allows us to see the story of the missing child and Hyrum's rise to status of Scholar and Moabite hero through conflicting eyes, even Hyrum's account is not all it seems. Peck gives a virtuoso performance in writing in these different voices. I got the distinct impression that he was enjoying himself writing as much as I did reading.

The characters are slowly revealed through the course of the book. Dora at first appears to be a crazy poet, but by the end of the book we see her as probably the most trustworthy of all the characters. Peck's book is an object lesson in the use of dramatic irony.

The book's surrealism and multi-voice format allow the exploration of a host of themes, such as the nature of consciousness (a specialism of the conjoined cowboy scholars), religious and scientific belief, and the relationship between religion and science. The book is grounded in Mormonism. The book is set in the small-town mormonism and gently satirizes the faith and attitudes of that community. As a Brit, alas, I am sure many allusions escaped me. But it was clear that this is a world in which people can believe in alien abductions,communist conspiracies and all sorts of hokum. A world ideally suited to the magic realist treatment.

It is a tribute to the author's skill that despite the fact that the book is written in a range of voices and styles, I still got a strong impression of the landscape in which the book is set. The Hyrum works for a geological survey team and Dora is inspired by the area.

My only qualm about the book was the ending, which I find somewhat unsatisfying. I have been trying to work out why, but so far have failed to do so.

I was given this book by the author in return for an honest review.

This review first appeared on the Magic Realism Blog http://magic-realism-books.blogspot.c...(less)

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Apr 14, 2012 Alene rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

This was a very fun and extremely different kind of read for me, kind of a dark comedy, a cross between something Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Abbey would write. I really enjoyed it, but more than the story I enjoyed it just for the way it was told, the voice. I loved the funny references to Mormon culture and somewhat hilarious and bogus explanations for some of the way things are. I wish I could give half stars because I try to keep my 4's and 5's for books I really take some sort of message away...more

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Apr 03, 2013 Marlene rated it 4 of 5 stars

Seven Conclusions I Drew from "the Scholar of Moab"
1) This is a well-conceived book. Pun intended
2) It as easy to say there are aliens as it is to say Jesus was resurrected and that Gods appeared to Joseph Smith. Proof doesn't come from "scholarship".
3) What you devoutly believe/know may kill you: Hyrum, Edward and William, Joan of Arc, a plethora of Christian prophets, Joseph Smith, to cite a few. I'd rather die on the side of truth if I can.
4) Our actions are never independent. They always aff...more

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Sep 02, 2012 David Redden rated it 4 of 5 stars

There’s a kind of…I don’t know, let’s call it “craziness,” but it’s not quite that…that seems so pervasive in the desert southwest. Maybe it’s something about the desert, the mountains, the wide-open skies, or the type of people drawn to small towns in the middle of nowhere. Who knows. But if you grew up in the desert southwest, you probably know what I’m talking about. Steven L. Peck, the author of this funny, intelligent, and imaginative book The Scholar of Moab, knows what I’m talking about.

T...more There’s a kind of…I don’t know, let’s call it “craziness,” but it’s not quite that…that seems so pervasive in the desert southwest. Maybe it’s something about the desert, the mountains, the wide-open skies, or the type of people drawn to small towns in the middle of nowhere. Who knows. But if you grew up in the desert southwest, you probably know what I’m talking about. Steven L. Peck, the author of this funny, intelligent, and imaginative book The Scholar of Moab, knows what I’m talking about.

The Scholar of Moab follows Hyrum Thayne, an unlearned deep-thinking Moabite with a lot of time on his hands, who, after much study and contemplation to determine the meaning of “Dickensian life,” feels called to become a grand scholar. But Hyrum immediately runs into practical problems. He can’t quite keep up with the obscure sesquipedalian vocabulary of scholarly conversation, and he isn’t comfortable standing for as long as it takes to look up all the words he needs to learn from the library dictionary, which he is not allowed to remove from the pedestal and read on the couch. So, Hyrum concocts a flawless plan: break into the library early Sunday morning, steal the dictionary, and cover his tracks by burning half the library’s resource books and spray-painting communist graffiti on the wall.

This sets off a firestorm of rumor about town. Before church, the citizenry has already concluded that the communists have joined forces with the ghosts of the Gadianton Robbers--a gang of thieving and murdering baddies of Book of Mormon fame--to scourge their town. Not long after, the town folk also conclude through revelation that only Hyrum can save them from the inscrutable, bloodthirsty double-menace. This is the kind of “craziness” that I’m referring to—the arbiters of normalcy have a tremendous capacity for extreme certainty in facts and opinions that cut against all relevant probabilities, but at the same time possess an intense moral disapproval of people who are certain about facts and opinions that seem improbable to the arbiters of normalcy.

There’s a lot to enjoy about this book, including a diverse cast of interesting characters and philosophical discussion on faith and being. Several things are turned on their head. Instead of a two-headed cowboy, there are two cowboys conjoined from the shoulders down. While the seemingly sane townsfolk are caught up in believing Hyrum has been called by God to rid them of the phantom scourge, only the town poet who everybody thinks is nutters (she dances naked and wild in the desert and insists she was abducted by aliens) sees Hyrum for the shyster he is. Hyrum is an anti-hero who is fiercely loyal to his wife in all but some of the most important ways. Hyrum’s experiment to measure the faith of bumblebees starts with the premise that bumblebees’ wings are too small to allow them to fly, and that they therefore fly by faith.

It has a flavor of mystery similar to southwestern Native American fiction in that it doesn’t explore individual motivation too deeply, highlighting how little we really know about motives anyway. Hyrum speculates, “It seems that the stuff of life is like campfire Smoke. If you hang around it you start to smell like it & there is little you can do to get it off even if you want to.” In contrast, when one of the conjoined cowboys goes mad, his brother wonders, “Can the universe depend so thoroughly on who is on the right and who is on the left? Is it all chaos, and hung precariously on such tiny breaks in symmetry?”

Of course we have no answers now, but we want them, which dovetails very nicely into Peck’s extended exploration of faith, belief, and knowledge. The townspeople believe malevolent ghosts and communists in league to destroy their town. They believe that Hyrum can save them. Hyrum believes bumblebees can have faith. The town poet believes she was abducted by aliens. This kind of belief is employed to fill the holes in knowledge, to comfort, to smooth over the rough spots in our otherwise lucid-seeming reality. This type of belief, felt to a particular level of certainty, gives people license to stand before a congregation and profess that they “know” things; like that God and Jesus Christ live.

Contrast this belief with the faith one of the conjoined cowboys has in God: “[Edward’s] told me many times that ‘believe in God’ is not the right way to phrase it. He does not believe in God he claims, but he knows God. . . . He said, ‘God came to me. Not as a person, or a vision, or some manifestation of the senses.’ Rather, he explained, he became aware of His presence— an ‘other’ that he has formed a relationship with. A presence he has befriended in a mutual exchange of being-there-for-each-other.” Edward, like so many others, has certain knowledge of his relationship with a being he believes exists. Knowledge and belief are folded in on each other.

But don’t let me bore you out of reading this book. It was very enjoyable and will stay with me for a long time. And by the way, does it seem like there’s been a sudden influx of very well-written and intelligent Mormon-influenced literature of late? I hope it continues.(less)

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Mar 15, 2012 Larry rated it 3 of 5 stars

First I want to thank Steven Peck for sending me this great book. As a lucky Goodreads winner this ended up being a true prize to read. Mr Peck has a strange and colorful way of telling a story. Sort of a fictional biography of a man from the small Mormon Utah town of Moab. This one is chucked full of strange abstract wondrous characters you will love and and others you will love to hate. At first I was put off with the original documents pages thinking this is not going to be fun to read but Mr...more

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Jan 24, 2013 Stephanie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Stephanie by: Nikki

I'm finding it impossible to write a cohesive review of this wonderful book. Really, it's just so odd (and I mean that as a compliment) that I can't even begin to describe it. So instead, I give you...random thoughts!

1. This book is funny! The characters are especially hilarious, particularly if you are familiar with rural Utah. I know these people, just by different names. Also, bombus. I'm giggling as I type that. Bombus. Teehee.

2. I have no idea what happened to Dora's baby. Normally, this wo...more

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Mar 02, 2012 Therese rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Lovers of highbrow Westerns, fans of black humor, LDS/Mormon readers looking for something different

Shelves: books-by-people-i-know, mormonism-related, magical-realism

Set in the rural, heavily Mormon town of Moab, Utah, this is the story of Hyrum Thayne, a semi-literate Jack Mormon* who, though he didn't quite manage to graduate from high school, falls in love with the works of Dickens and decides he wants to become a scholar. With a collection of quirky characters to beat every prior notion of quirkiness you may ever have had, the cast includes an Oxford-educated two-headed cowboy, a mad poetess who believes she was abducted by aliens, a mysterious narrator...more

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Jan 03, 2013 Richard Downey rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love books that work their narrative via letters, journal entries, notes etc. It is something that is very hard to do well, and Steven Peck has succeeded admirably. He also captures the uniqueness of the town of Moab perfectly. I have always considered Moab to be Cicily, Alaska Sur, full of quirky but loveable people. How can you not love a jack Mormon who has th rid the town of Gadianton Robbers, a two-headed cowboy, and a feral poet woman whose lives are all intimately intertwined. It is as...more

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Mar 21, 2013 Kevin Jones rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a unique work. I didn't fully engage until after 80 or 100 pages, as it is short on action and long on a meandering approach to a mysterious set of events. Once the stories begin to unfold, Peck's creativity and irreverence are compelling and amusing. The characters are quirky and unusual. The story is rooted solidly in Mormon heritage and folklore and illuminates some interesting aspects of this singularly Utah culture.

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May 06, 2012 Enchilada Johnny rated it 2 of 5 stars

The hype on this one is a head-scratcher. I've heard this novel described as "magical realism" but to me, it was more akin to some kind of farcical ridiculism. Although Peck is a skilled writer and effortlessly switches among a multitude of voices, I found it over-wrought and downright goofy. I also suspect (maybe the Redactor can investigate this) that Hyrum Thayne is a weak imitation of Alex, the unforgettable Ukranian narrator, in "Everything is Illuminated." Is there anyone out there who can...more

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Feb 19, 2012 Shelli rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-literature

Steven Peck paints an entertaining picture of life in Moab, Utah (not unexpected since he lived there part of his growing up years) with a cast of unusual fictional characters and several unique events. At first glance of the summary, I wondered if this story would really appeal to me. Aliens? Gadianton Robbers? Disappearance of an infant? Not my usual cup of tea, but amazingly, the story drew me in and held me while I read the entire book in almost one sitting. If you like thinking about consci...more

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Oct 02, 2012 Mckay rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, mormon

I loved reading this book! It is a wacky, fun, and unpredictable adventure. You don't have to be mormon to understand it, but there are some funny mormon-isms hidden in it. Everything from aliens to Gadianton robbers to vandalism to two-headed cowboys. I will definitely read this one again someday.

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May 08, 2012 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

I can begin to describe the imagery in the book. The characters are very real and it is easy to care about them and want to keep reading. It is witty, clever and very moving. After reading it I sat for some time trying to come to grips that it was over and better understand all that I had read.

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May 31, 2012 Jenny rated it 5 of 5 stars

Stop whatever you're doing and read this amazing book. The story slowly reveals itself as we pass back and forth between various "source" materials—Peck's execution of the various narrative voices is flawless, as is his underlying charity for the human condition.

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Jan 12, 2013 Leslie rated it 4 of 5 stars

My first book of the year! Wahoo! Moab, Utah and the areas surrounding it are probably some of my most favorite places in the world. So colorful, so inviting, so hot and sweaty. I'm getting warm just thinking about it now in this Siberia of a place I currently live, brr.. So, truth be told I probably wouldn't have cared what the book entailed as long as it took me back to that beautiful place. And it did. The fact that the book happened to be quirky and fun, well that was just rust colored gravy...more

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