The Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Swenson
Like bottled fruit, can memory and experience shelved from another time be taken out and savored as if it were fresh? The preserves on the cover of Levi Peterson's new novel visually tantalize us with the question.

But the fruits of secrecy and regret for Durfey Haslam and his boyhood sweetheart Aspen Marooney are bittersweet at best 40 years after the fact. The unsolved ambiguities of Durfey's coming of age resonate in the rural, small-town Utah setting. Durfey is returning for a long-postponed reunion with his high-school class, including Aspen.

It is also a return for novelist Peterson to the topic of Mormon guilt. He broke ground on the subject in his poignant The Backslider. A shade darker, but laced with the mordant humor of Peterson's uniquely conflicted characters—Aspen Marooney is piquant and painful—its multigenerational love story is unlike anything in the genre. Peterson's writing is informed by a harsh lyricism. Durfey's bland, comfortable life is better than anyone predicted for the son of a poor dirt farmer, whose lineage is tainted by incest and self-recrimination. He works as an insurance investigator in a California suburb, and is married to an attractive, respectable woman who has given him numerous children and grandchildren.

Under the placid surface of his passionless marriage is the odd psychological bargain with his wife, Elaine, that he is to keep his protestations of love for her to himself. She, meanwhile, protects their children and reputation from Durfey's confessed premarital love affair over the course of a youthful summer with Aspen Marooney.

Aspen is married to the successful chief counselor for Deseret Industries, the string of LDS Church-owned thrift stores up and down the Wasatch Front. He is a man to please her controlling parents, and an antidote to her guilt for her youthful indiscretions with Durfey. Peterson's characters—especially during this reunion trip to their youth—exist in a sort of rural Mormon time warp. Raised to be scrupulously honest, they stretch to reach difficult terms with the gap between their impulsive, passionate past and their painful, unresolved present.

Peterson does not distance his characters from their dilemma by sugarcoating the emotions or sanitizing the sex. When Durfey and Aspen part a second time, they have not only failed to lay to rest their romantic ghosts, but are left to muse about another layer of confused physical expression, "their fervent, sweaty near copulation among the trees and grasses high in Koosharem Canyon." Already, for Durfey, the memory of "that remarkable aberrant deed" seems "hallucinatory and unreal." In its aspect of journey into the dreamlike personal landscape of memory and its collision with current events, Aspen Marooney's odyssey of an aging everyman looking for a clue to the trail his life has taken is reminiscent of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's classic motion picture Wild Strawberries.

Levi Peterson's penetrating honesty, his ear for speech, and his instinct for the bone-deep cultural enigmas of rural Mormon life clothe this tale in a raiment both strange and familiar for those of us exposed to its wearing.

Ogden Standard Examiner, Janelle Biddinger
Aspen and Durfey were high school sweethearts. And, beneath leaf-filtered sun in Utah's mountains, they shared a summer of that brand-new, artless passion known only to 18-year-olds. It's now 40 years later. And Aspen and Durfey have met again, uncomfortable sitting thigh to thigh on a parade float riding down Richfield's Main Street to mark their 40th high school reunion. These past four decades have been taken up with mandaneness. Marriages. Then children. Years of routine work—Durfey's in insurance, Aspen's a housewife whose husband works for the LDS Church. And each day, both have been unfaithful in their hearts.

Author Levi S. Peterson wanted to explore this idea of lost first love in his newest novel, Aspen Marooney (Signature Books, $15.95). Most of us hold fond the memories of our high school affairs, but we move on to more mature relationships. Why, Peterson wondered, do some people cling to the image of childhood boy and girlfriends, never able to fully love another person?

"For some years following my high school days, yeah, I had deep feelings about the girl I loved and didn't get," Peterson said. "But I don't preserve that. But why then for a few of us does it not fade? It may be instinctive." It may even be, he suggests, "a kind of gift." And for Peterson, one of the best known of the small cadre of writers who explore Mormon themes, Durfey and Aspen's bittersweet memories hold an additional layer: guilt. Peterson, an English professor at Weber State University, sees guilt as a universal phenomenon, but it's that furious spin on guilt Mormonism inspires that has intrigued him throughout the 20 years he's been writing. He's returned to it in such books as his novel The Backslider and Night Soil, a collection of stories. "The story started out as a love story, and I hope it comes across as a love story," Peterson says of Aspen Marooney. "But it's also a story about guilt. I'm very attracted over and over to the dissonance, the tension between Mormon conscience and the human sex drive. I just can't get away from that in my stories and novels."

Peterson doesn't pretend to know what motivates women. But men? Their nature, he believes, is more often than not "imnivorous" and "polygamous"—and at odds with civilization's standard that a man and a woman will marry and remain faithful to each other. "Lucky people can do it," said Peterson. "You see a lot of happy marriages. But there are lot of people who can't." And when those wandering eyes belong to a believing Mormon, the tension that results is tremendous.

Peterson takes a look at the Mormon sitting around him in sacrament meeting. "And I wonder, 'What sinners are there here among these good people?' Probably quite a variety," he says. "I don't know who they are, but I know human nature." That explains Durfey. But Aspen? Her sense of guilt is so mountainous that, says Peterson, "she sees no retreat. She doesn't expect redemption, she doesn't work for redemption. It is irrelevant to her."

The book began as Durfey's story. Peterson had been working on a collection of wilderness essays in 1991 when he attended his high school reunion in the small Mormon community of Snowflake, Arizona. "It was a very intense two-day experience, and I came back with a lot of things on my mind," he said. The short story in Durfey's voice soon became a novella. And, later, Peterson added the voices of Aspen and others. But the finished novel belongs in many ways to Aspen. Peterson paints a poignant picture of an 18-year-old Mormon girl, in love with the son of a dirt farmer who doesn't live up to her parents' social standards. She'd hoped for pregnancy—then she'd have to march up to her parents, she figured, and insist that she and Durfey marry. Both Durfey and Aspen bear their lives with resignation. They're not profoundly unhappy people. "But the tragedy occurred when the Marooney parents said to Aspen, 'No, he's not for you.' And Aspen didn't have the strength of character. I don't condemn her at all," said Peterson. "I sympathize with her."

Western American Literature, Jane Reilly
In his latest novel, Levi Peterson uses the tableau of a forty-year high school class reunion to explore the tension between how we would like to live our lives and how we actually do. Where, between passion and morality, do each of us exist and how comfortable are we in the world we have, over the years, created for ourselves and our loved ones? Have we been able to learn the lesson of life, which, according to Aspen, is "to get the better of ourselves"? And, finally, when ourselves get the better of us, to whom are we accountable?

As with other Peterson works, Aspen Marooney offers a realistic portrait of rural Utah life—but this time the backdrop is as colored with classism as it is with religion. During their high school years Durfey Haslam and Aspen Marooney were forbidden by her parents to date—"`When the Haslams marry . . . their wives sink to their level. I've never known of a case where it was the other way around'." But they did much more than date. Ultimately, though, they don't marry. Instead they wonder about what might have been. For forty years. And when they finally reunite, the years have washed the passion and intimacy away . . . or have they? It's hard to guess what might happen.

Since Levi Peterson doesn't create main characters who can ignore their moral consciousness, the only question that remains is "How will each of the characters face the past and continue to live in the present?" Peterson's characters answer this question in honest, thought provoking ways.

When Durfey rejoins his family in Cedar City (where they are attending the annual Shakespeare festival) he sums up his class-reunion experience by saying, "I've been surveying the earth from the perspective of the Class of '51 . . . It's a strange angle to see things from." It may seem strange to Durfey, but for Levi Peterson's readers it will seem oddly familiar.

Publishers Weekly
Set in 1991, the main action of this novel takes place 40 years earlier. The Richfield High School Class of 1951 has gathered for its 40th reunion, and there are going to be some major revelations before the weekend is through. Durfrey Haslam, a man obsessed with his memories of high school, was supposed to have married Aspen Marooney, but she broke his heart those many years ago by breaking off their wedding plans. The two have much to talk about when they meet, not the least of which is that despite their respective spouses, they are still very much in love with each other. Straightforward enough, but Peterson's (Canyons of Grace) handling of it is a curiously mixed bag. On the one hand, the story jumps from viewpoint to viewpoint, providing too much background information and occasionally jolting the reader out of the narrative. On the other, Peterson's characters are interesting, and the leisurely pace is perfect for this tale of love, memory, regret and guilt. The ambiguous ending will also please some while alienating others beguiled into expecting a straightforward love story.

The Deseret News
What does Levi Peterson want? In books like The Backslider, Canyons of Grace and Night Soil he gives us dozens of fictional misfits from Utah's outback, simple folk living in fear of the law and the Lord and forever fretting about sin and guilt, spirit and flesh.

Often, out of sheer cussedness, they do terrible damage to each other and themselves. Gritty realism is one thing, but why does he need the Mormon context? Doesn't he know national publishing houses shy from books with a Mormon perspective, while the local core audience shies from such over-the-top, rebellious tales? Couldn't Peterson save himself—and the rest of us—a lot of grief by going mainstream? Why doesn't he cut his losses and run?

The answer to that question can be found on the cover of Peterson's latest novel, Aspen Marooney (Signature, $15.95). There, two bottles of "home-canned" peaches and pears flank a third jar containing Eve's infamous apple. Levi Peterson, it seems, is into preserves. He's a preservationist—even a scavenger. And what he salvages are the marginal lives and peripheral points of view he fears may drift to sea on history's tide.

Years ago a Mexican novelist named Mariano Azuela looked around at his country and saw the Mexican ideal embodied in a select few, but he also saw the legion of faceless, struggling souls with no voice. So he wrote a novel. Los de Abajo (The Underdogs), now a classic, delves into the life of a Mexican farmer turned soldier, a book written when no one was left but Azuela to write it. Peterson is like Azuela. In his writing, nothing is counted as dross and refuse. He frames what other writers reject, hands it on the wall and calls it art. And Aspen Marooney is the latest picture in his exhibition. What's more, for a Peterson novel, it's an amazingly generous piece of work.

"People have responded well to the novel," he says, "Perhaps it is more generous. That may have to do with the fact it is a love story." A star-crossed love story, anyway. The book is a pastiche of Romeo and Juliet, with a touch of the old song Down in the Boondocks added for good measure. It is about two families and two people who get torn between them.

In the opening chapter we meet Durfey Haslam, a likable Utah farm boy who has carved out an easy suburban life for himself in California. He and his wife Elaine are en route to Richfield, Utah, for Durfey's 40-year high school reunion. But by page two, Aspen Marooney—Durfey's high school sweetheart-on-the-sly—is already stirring things up. Aspen will be at the reunion as well. The story that follows is a comedy—and tragedy—of errors, a rustling of old ghosts that threatens to ruin several lives.

What also follows is a full dose of famous Peterson story telling: chapters laced with telling details, tangy dialogue and enough down-home philosophy to please Sheepherder Sam. Plot-driven novels—not character-based novels—usually make readers ask "What happens next?" But Peterson's touch is deft and his own affection for his characters becomes our own. We want to read ahead. The little exchange between Durfey and hiw wife on the opening page sets the tone:

Across the Nevada border she said, without provocation, "Nobody but you would spend his honeymoon at his sister's house." "A mistake," he admitted. "All I remember is we had a picnic at the Green River, which was brown and muddy." He said, "People expect too much from honeymoons. For example, they expect the Green River to be green." He mulled over the elusive reference to that old fiasco, their honeymoon, and concluded that she has Aspen Marooney on her mind.

She does, of course. As does Durfey. But then Aspen has been there for 40 years. Needless to say, it wouldn't be a Levi Peterson novel without plenty of regret, rumination and pain. But as the characters are made to deal with their sins, the author must deal with some literary transgressions of his own.

For one, Peterson's knee-jerk impulse to shock has returned. He gets an inordinate amount of pleasure from pistols near the reader's ear. In one scene, for instance, several small-town women take a few minutes to discuss circumcision, though the conversation feels more like frat house prattle or the "blue material" from a Vegas comic than a conversation these particular women might have. And Peterson's years in the academy have made him enamored of symbols. When the symbols develop or explain character they work fine, but more often than not they seem to have been tucked into the narrative to give literary scholars something to do. By book's end, readers may vow to give up apples if Durfey takes another bite out of one, or if any more physical scars are made to stand in for spiritual scars.

But if some of the flaws are familiar, so are the virtues. Just as Peterson has lifted himself by his bootstraps from "local colorist" to the level of legitimate American author, he has also taken a stance that in lesser hands would look like a man reacting against his parents' training and turned it into a personal vision. Peterson has rescued a generation of lost souls; if not for God, at least for art. And he displays them in all their unvarnished beauty. That is his accomplishment and his legacy. Sadly, the effort has generated little fame and money, and even less debate. By and large, Peterson's work goes unnoticed.

Another Latin American novelist—Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa—once wrote a novel called Mayta, the story of a young revolutionary grown weary of waiting for change. He and his cohorts decide to start the revolution by themselves. If they can get some grassroots support, they reason, it will create a groundswell that will eventually usher in a new era. The groundswell never comes, of course. Mayta and his rag-tag army of friends end up firing their rifles in a wild ride that lands them in the hands of the authorities. Levi Peterson is a brilliant and sensitive writer. Down inside, he knows he's on his own.

The groundswell isn't coming.