Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

by Karin Anderson

Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened Utah mother traveling an evocative route through the sites of her arid Western ancestry. As her narration fades, the dead speak their stories: a ragged Mormon boy; a hoarder’s queer son; descendants of British squatters. They give no answers, but conjure vivid moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.

328 pages, ebook

Published May 14, 2019

About the author

After a magical Utah childhood (horses, mountains, apple trees), Karin Anderson still managed to overcomplicate her adult relationship to home roots. Utahn to the worrisome core, she came of age in the season of Cold War, Watergate, Ted Bundy, Gary Gilmore, the Sagebrush Rebellion, and organized community resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment.

Currently, Karin Anderson resides in Salt Lake City, the place her grown children call home even while they scatter toward their own futures. For this author, writing is a deliberate, possibly reverential, mapping of the stratified landscapes of cultural memory.

Reviews

[Angela M]

Giving up at 20%. Praised by critics but I just am not connecting.

[Charlie Quimby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before Us Like a Land of Dreams took hold of me unlike any fiction I read this year.

I’m writing this review six weeks after finishing the book, only because I needed to work through pre-election campaign commitments. I wanted a fresh brain and time to give the novel its due. Fortunately, its experience is with me still, my devotion undimmed.

In full disclosure: My publisher, Torrey House Press, produced Before Us Like a Land of Dreams, and I added Karin Anderson’s novel my to-read list when it came out in early 2019. It sounded to me like a historical family saga, the sort of fiction I have trouble connecting with, regardless of who wrote it (I’m looking at you, Serena and Barkskins). So I let it languish in the queue for more than a year. Now I feel obligated to make up for lost praise.

Before Us Like a Land of Dreams evokes the faithful misfits and fellow travelers who were drawn West—or propelled from other lands—by something other than gold. More specifically, these people are the author’s own Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ancestors whose suffering and survival leapt out at Anderson as she sought to untangle an urgent genealogical mystery for her devout LDS mother. More than six years ago, as the first story cycle that now ends the novel was about to be published, Anderson wrote about the discovery and her urge to “bring those actual people back to a kind of vivid life.”

I don’t anticipate meeting them all in Heaven for hotdogs and potato-salad-saturated reunions. I think dead is dead. But I needed to access them, deeply, as real people in the froth of their own murky, beautiful, perplexing lives. I needed to ponder the reasons an educated, respectable, well-established family would defy comfortable social status and choose a new philosophy. I needed to scrutinize hints and traces of people who incorporated the irrevocable shock of death. I wanted to consider what it meant to depart from a landscape of rivers and lush greenery to set up residence on the stark shores of the Great Salt Lake.

Anderson culls actual names, places, events and tragedies from the bare record of obscure people. These form mere bones of the novel. The rest, like the revelations in the Book of Mormon itself, must be summoned, imagined, embellished and borrowed to craft a greater story, compelling but unverifiable.

Anderson (the author and character) journeys to particular haunts where she can conjure her ancestors to account for themselves. Instead of dragging along all the trappings and tropes of historical fiction, Anderson sheds them like household furnishings loaded on a handcart to Zion. Following the guidance of St. Ignatius—who found that with the proper reflective mindset he could inhabit New Testament scenes, walk around in them, smell the air and start up conversations—Anderson leaves her twenty-first century reality to resurrect the non-genetic material of her ancestry. The ghostly voices don't so much distinguish the characters as make the storytelling family members sound part of an ancient, cliddering aspen grove—a single organism that outlives its individual trees.

Anderson is present as a fellow traveler and guide, treading between fiction and non-fiction, a descendant who has forsaken the religion but remains imbued with the culture. Their tales are full of memorable images: A father-to-be extinguished by a horseback lightning strike; a boy climbing high in a tree to evade teachers and proclaim the secret of where babies come from; a starving step-son banished to protect grazing livestock from starving Shoshones; elephants leaping into the Snake River. Some of these can be established as family lore. Other tellings are based on real events. The truth of any tales is less important than their effects. Running underneath is an interest in how we consume balderdash, tell lies and collude in fraud, along with how we need stories to maintain hope, fashion relationships and console each other. Anderson incorporates the metafictional without leaving the reader feeling experimented upon by a feverish MFA.

If you want a more concise literary judgment of this, let’s call it a Mormon Lincoln in the Bardo.

It’s not necessary for the reader to be LDS but some familiarity with Mormonism will deepen appreciation. Anderson’s evocative observation of the western landscape is both familiar and fresh. The writing is consistently beautiful, a Deseret honey that released new flavors to me. Believers will likely find it over-populated with apostates, like Ruth, who is a bit of a seer.

They were all here in America because some half-cooked seer said he could translate Egyptian signs into Mormon visions. Sure Smith was on to something but he thought it was all true simply by virtue of it falling from his blessed mouth. Here's something I learned early: people are constructed to make stories. We can't help ourselves. But stories are mostly just fancy lies the mind stirs up to make itself feel at home in strange circumstance. If you're in the business of perceiving truth, it comes in limited rays and cryptic clues. You have to sort between your brain’s natural fabrications and what those fabrications are made of. You have to loosen the fitted parts.

That's what Mrs. Sanchez told me, but Joe Smith never took the time to do that. He'd grab a smidgen of this, pinch of that, sprinkle it into old stories everybody already thought were true. He ran with old Mrs. Morgan’s rummed-up snippets of Masonry. He snatched the easy parts of the old grimoires, waved that dowsing stick and appointed himself prophet, seer and revelator of the Latter Days. If he'd written dime novels he would have made a fortune instead of getting shot in jail.

In that passage, Anderson packs history and critique into Ruth’s comic and affectionate regard for a fellow charlatan. In a later visitation with Ruth’s husband Steven, we glimpse how different they are; we hear him groping after peace of mind in his own way.

Ruth could plumb a soul for deep character—at least for hidden malice or the lack of it. She could sense a particular darkness or unusual light, and as the years went on she learned to discern qualities embedded in flesh-and-bone contours. On the other hand, I was limited to the plain discernments of the five human senses. Eventually we come to realize that's not much to go by. Sure, like any reasonably smart person I learned by trial and sometimes bitter error to spot an outright liar. I recognized a shifty bastard as well as the next guy, but if somebody makes a point to be deceitful there's no surefire way to know it.

Words explain entire worlds, not one of them reliably true: Ruth was an earnest fraud. Ruth was a witch who picked us out, malevolent, driving us to sorrow for sins we didn't commit. Ruth could see a few things darkly in the cosmic glass that other people could not. Just like she said. The fact is, all I could really know of her was what she told me and what I saw. We have to take the people we love as they say they are, or the world explodes into sparks and we burn out alone.

Faith in a particular story is one way to “feel at home in strange circumstance,” and the Mormons have a doozy of a saga. Not just Joe Smith’s Golden Plates, but real oppression and struggle and dreams of empire and canny political and capitalistic success, not to mention wholesome family life and a better than average reason for interest in genealogy. And of course, a super-patriarchal Heaven that promises the ultimate happy ending.

We need to create stories because there is so much we cannot know or explain for sure, even in daily life. We visit one land of dreams that occurred before us in time, as well as another that seems evident before us in the present, fleeting moment. Are these random events and lost tribes truly part of one arching and eternal narrative? The book leaves open the possibility that the previews of coming attractions are all we shall have of heaven, but that building and upholding a cultural edifice of family and faith is still worthy in itself. At least for those who buy into the story.

There’s no unimpeachable truth in Before Us Like a Land of Dreams, so it’s best for you to enter and breathe it in for yourself.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

St. Ignatius (I'm not sure which one) has a method of spiritual contemplation where you imagine yourself in the sacred scene and describe as many of the sensations and accompanying thoughts to really immerse yourself in sacred works. I first heard of it this year while listening to Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Anderson uses this immersion technique to imagine what life was like for her ancestors. She makes them into characters with their own motivations and demons. Their stories span the last two centuries, and some of them are only connected with a loose frame story. It's kind of like a series of vignettes, except messier.

As far as I can tell, the historicity is pretty good. There was only one time where a pioneer woman was quoting the Book of Mormon and I wondered if pioneers were actually familiar enough with the Book of Mormon to quote it. Certainly I've read that early members in England did not have very many Book of Mormons and had not read it. I'd be happy to know more about that.

There was a good diversity in the ancestor stories. I hadn't read anything like it before. Anderson's word choices were often highly appropriate to the given time period (and sometimes inappropriate). I think it was difficult for me to emotionally connect with characters because they changed so often. I wanted there to be more commonalities between ancestors--to see more of what certain personalities passed down. Maybe that was there but it was just difficult to keep track of?

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in one day. Anderson's matter-of-fact introduction to the narrator's ancestral ghosts makes me, for a minute, believe in ghosts. Anderson weaves together familial history with history of the west that reveals the clashes and kindnesses, the evils and the goodness that come into specific relief when the idea of one's past slams hard into other's, even if those other pasts must be imagined. Anderson imagines them with such fullness that even the slamming is buoyant.

[Lauren Shelto · Rating 2 out of 5]

I almost abandoned this book a couple times but would get engaged in one of the “vignettes” and carry on. The parts of the book that were present day storyteller were sometimes beyond my grasp.

[Michael Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of the stories we have about the American West have transformed into myth. In breathtaking prose, Anderson focuses on the gaps in conventional narratives, creating something far more moving and memorable. By doing so, she turns away from the the myths, and renders the West with the texture it deserves. Both love note and eulogy, the book defies expectations throughout, while feeling inevitable by the end. I loved it.

[Lynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I became more and more intrigued as I got deeper into the stories. It was difficult at first for me to follow the families, even with the ancestry chart. But then I stopped trying so hard to keep track and settled in to the mythology of the landscapes. It was kind of a spiritual quest at the end. The themes around Peter's life, both as a boy and young man, were the ones that resonated with me the most.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could see what Anderson was trying to achieve—a weave of family history, but a lot of it didn't work for me. It wasn't until towards the end that I started enjoying the stories and mostly being able to keep track of the different characters. Maybe that's symbolic as that's how family history works, too. This book made me want to do some more digging into my own family history.

[Ryan]

Wonderful!

[Corey · Rating 1 out of 5]

What was that???

[Reb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous writing and engrossing stories. I loved this book.