The characters in Falling toward Heaven carry the novel. Howard resists easy definition or categorization. On one hand, he is deeply melancholy, doubting "even his doubts of God." On the other, he is witty, engaging in coquettish banter with the more liberal Allison. The moral complexities of the situations he encounters develop from interactions with his "apostate" mother and Allison. These three characters and their intertwined relationships are the centerpiece to the novel. Of the three, however, the most complex and intriguing character is Allison.

Bennion characterizes Allison as an irreverent "lone wolf" who is intent on following a job offer to work for a software company in Alaska. She leaves her intellectual, sex-therapist boyfriend Eliot and invites Howard to go with her. He concedes on the condition that she spend a few days in his hometown, Rockwood, a fictional Utah ranching community founded by his ancestors. Rockwood is also home to four of the seven tales in Bennion's earlier short-story collection, Breeding Leah and Other Stories. This scenario becomes the sounding ground for larger questions about life, love, happiness, and faith.

Bennion's descriptions of the days the couple spend in Rockwood are among the funniest and most endearing—from a fervent ride on a creaky chastity bed to an awkward meeting with Howard's old fiancée, to Allison's brief stint at the local speakeasy, Bennion paints a comic picture of Mormonism's foibles and fixations. But the story doesn't stop with bucolic representations of LDS idiosyncrasies. The novel explores potent issues of patriarchy, priesthood, and personal revelation in a changing church. The story is open, honest, and plain-speaking about problems and relationships and doesn't offer pat answers to probing questions.

The relationships between the women in the novel prove to be the most enduring and complex, asking that we look more closely at how people communicate—particularly men and women. The second half of the novel shifts its focus onto Allison and Howard's mother. The two discuss a Rockwood male propensity toward ownership and control. Rockwood's mother encourages Allison to keep Howard away from the ranch, to have a different, less traditional life. And they do. Howard follows Allison to Alaska to live with her on her own terms, and he gradually comes to accept that he can't exert dominion and control over her. But even as their relationship breaks some traditions, it upholds others. Howard and Allison feel themselves pulled toward a nuclear family in which their happiness is tied to a monogamous, interdependent relationship and a desire for children.

As a whole, Falling toward Heaven is a delightful read, one that would appeal to individuals all along the spectrum from conservative to liberal. A reader looking for easy, feel-good Weyland-esque resolutions will be disappointed. But someone intent on asking larger questions about life, faith, and understanding in Mormon culture will find plenty to please the palate. Bennion's style is rich and flavorful, his dialogue and descriptions crisp and delightful.

Bennion's work complicates and adds life to common "Mormon" issues; he truly pushes the envelope of several major ideological questions: how should LDS society deal with sexual abuse? Is it wrong for a woman to use the priesthood? What does it truly mean to believe? The novel's characters, whose lives reflect our own human weaknesses and problems, may not have definite answers to these questions, but they do point to some interesting possibilities.

Falling toward Heaven serves up a peculiar slice of life that will resonate with any serious observer of LDS culture.

Irreantum, Christopher K. Bigelow
My favorite Mormon novel-reading experience is when I'm held in some suspense about whether the author believes or disbelieves Mormonism. It's perhaps an unbalanced way to read, with too much emphasis on the author pulling levers behind the curtain rather than on the work itself, but something about our Mormon emphasis on conformity encourages that way of reading. We can't help asking, Is this author true to the faith, on our team, a temple recommend holder? Unfortunately, that kind of suspense is not available very often, since most Mormon fiction is published with battle lines already drawn by virtue of the publisher's reputation, if nothing else.

John Bennion's novel Falling toward Heaven offered me some delicious suspense related to what the author's real motives were in exploring Mormon characters and themes—and I'm afraid it's impossible not to have ulterior motives of either proving or disproving Mormonism when dealing with such charged material. I commenced this reading experience knowing that Bennion is an English professor at Brigham Young University—but he's in BYU's most troublesome department, where several cultural wolves in sheep's clothing—real or imagined—have already been ousted. In addition, I was fully aware that the publisher is Signature Books, which is not known for publishing fiction as propaganda to affirm the faith.

Bennion's novel is basically a love story between Howard Rockwood and Allison Warren, whose conflicting beliefs about religion, homeland, and gender roles complicate their relationship. Their last names could be symbolic: Rockwood is a Mormon tied to the Utah ranchland and Mormonism of his polygamous forefathers, while the rootless Warren functions spiritually in an unpredictable, unmappable maze of passageways formed by human caprice, especially her own. For me one of the novel's central questions is, How extensive a warren can the heathen, clawed Allison carve into the solid elements of Howard's beliefs, culture, and family? While reading, occasionally I feared the rock and wood would slow Allison down and eventually freeze her, but she manages to keep scrabbling to the end, though with increasing consciousness of a possible ultimate destination. For me, she's the novel's most interesting and compelling character.

The first seventy-odd pages take place during the final weeks of Rockwood's mission to Houston, starting when he meets Allison at an outdoor public event and ending when he ditches his homeward flight moments before departure and shows up at her apartment to commence a relationship which includes premarital sex. Rockwood's faith at the tail end of his mission is typified by his telling a neighbor a few weeks before his mission ends, "Never pray. It's like the monkey giving three wishes: you always get something you don't want." Then, full of confusion about Allison and troubling news from home, he slips alone outside to sit by a "festering bayou" and ponder his challenges: 

He felt as dazed as a stunned deer—knocked on the head first by a woman who had no place in his universe, then by his mother who had quietly become an apostate, and finally by his father's failing body. He imagine God as an ancient patriarch, so hassled by all his heavenly wives and children that he turned anarchic, actively culturing chaos on earth. God should not leave his children in doubt. The universe should be sure and safe. If he could just stop believing, he thought, his confusion would disappear.

In Richard Cracroft's paper titled "God-Finding in the 21st Century: Alan Rex Mitchell's Angel of the Danube and John Bennion's Falling toward Heaven," which he delivered at the Association of Mormon Letters annual conference on February 24, 2001, he says the following about the novel's first portion, with which I agree: "I'm afraid that for many Mormon readers this will be the end of the book—or of any book that begins with the sexual transgression of a Mormon missionary. But walking out at this point is like exiting the Passion Play in protest at the heinous crucifixion of Jesus. As in any Salvation Journey, the fall is only the beginning of the story."

The novel's middle portion takes place in Rockwood, Utah. Howard and Allison stop to visit Howard's parents on the new couple's way to Alaska, where Allison has taken a job as a computer programmer in the oil industry. In Utah they face pressures stemming as much from Howard's family traditions and desires to make the family ranch his life's work as from religious conflicts. In phantasmagoric scenes of imagination and hallucination brought on by his ancestral home, Howard faces down ghosts of both ancestry and theology and, to paraphrase his own words, rebukes the stern patriarch god of his youth and drives a stake through his heart.

Later, on a return trip to Rockwood during which Howard undergoes church discipline, God takes on new characteristics in his mind: 

He pondered the being (imagined whisper, impulse, psychological force?) which he had named Grandmother God. ... Her voice was nothing like the voice of guilt which he could only name patriarchal, after his stern male ancestors. But both were imagined voices, he knew. He hoped that the sporadic gifts of spirit which had swept uninvited through him would some day add up to a truer voice.

After acknowledging to himself that the Grandmother God is "the voice of his mother made larger," Howard realizes she has taught him

that church was not a room of answers, but a pathway of questions. Answers fell like sloughed-off skin behind him. He hoped that he could next learn that Grandfather God was not an impossible mix of modern businessman and Old Testament patriarch. Howard knew that prayer was a form of eternal calculus, a way of making closer and closer estimates of God's person-ness. But for the first time since he was a child, he had faith in the process.

Talking to Allison later about his evolving concept of God, Howard says, "Since seeing that the God I had imagined had flaws of my own making, of my culture's making, I started to feel that God might be more like my mother's father, a wise and kind man. My mother say that he never raised his voice to her. He had a round Danish face and he grew apples." Howard's efforts to understand God are in the same vein as Frank's in Levi Peterson's The Backslider, which are rewarded by a Cowboy Jesus.

Howard wants Allison to give up Alaska, marry him, and ranch with him, but she wants nothing to do with it. While visiting Rockwood, she encounters a natural spring where archaeologists are removing the bodies of long-dead Goshutes, including a mother and infant. The burial pool becomes an image and symbol of Allison's spiritual journey, as well as a foreshadowing. One of the archeologists tells her: "We can't find a bottom to this pond, the roots go so deep. They may have thought of the pool as a passageway to the next life. Reborn in this heavy mineral water, salty as the ocean." During a subsequent trip to Rockwood, Allison returns to the pool: "Rimmed by gray alkali, containing water hot enough to melt the snow, the pool looked like an evil egg, an eye. Babe, she said to herself, don't get superstitious on me. Death was no channel to anywhere. The heart stopped beating. Consciousness and identity were illusions of evolution." When Howard finds her bathing in the pool, she tells him it's the only baptism she'll ever agree to. Later, after Allison faces a burial pool of her own in Alaska, she seems more open to Howard's ideas that there is more to this sphere than what is physically on the surface and that death is not the end. Over the course of the novel she gradually allows herself to become entwined with Howard and, while stopping short of embracing his religion, she seems to realize she doesn't have anything better to offer. Even still, she refuses to let him ever slip into the old patriarchal mode of his ancestors.

This is a novel for those who seek spiritual adventure in their fiction rather than spiritual security—in other words, it's a literary novel as opposed to a popular novel. Readers of faith-affirming popular Mormon fiction have their reward, but in both word and deed Bennion champions the moral value of more complex, challenging, open-ended fiction. In a 1997 BYU Studies article, he wrote: "The literary novel is an experiment in existence, in being. It is moral, not because it spells out answers and defines abstract principles, but because it requires moral decisions in a fictional universe that approaches the complexity and ambiguity of the universe we find ourselves in." Bennion is a believer in Mormon doctrine, but he is obviously not a believer in the aspects of Mormon culture Allison helps save Howard from.

In an email exchange, Bennion shared some insights about the novel's background. He started writing it during his Ph.D. program at the University of Houston, and it became his 950-page dissertation novel. "The germ of the novel was probably my longstanding unhappiness about my father's alcoholism," Bennion says. "Because he was still alive I couldn't use that subject matter, so I chose another sin, adultery. Sounds silly, but that's how my mind worked. Originally I experimented with a young man returning from his mission to find that his father was having adultery with a woman he home taught. I then thought, Why not put both the goodness of the young man and his father's sin in one person? Then I had Allison converting, but one of my teachers suggested that having a non-Mormon in the book would give me the opportunity to explain Mormonism to her and to non-Mormon readers. I gave her the name Allison after the lusty woman in the "Millers Tale" by Chaucer. I gave Howard a traditional Bennion family name. The question for the novel then became, Could these two people, so different from each other, grow toward a true marriage?"

When I followed up with Bennion about why information related to Mormonism seems to be woven into the narrative as if it were written for a non-Mormon audience, he said: 

I sent the book in its various drafts to about twenty national publishers before Signature was good enough to take me on. I revised it for Signature through a couple of drafts, but I'm happy that it still has that general tone, because we assume too much about ourselves. As Pauline Mortensen has said, the audience of a piece is determined by the blank spaces in the work, what is assumed. When we assume too much, we as writers offend those on the fringe and outsiders, which I want not to do.

While this is probably not the literary novel that will finally crack into the Mormon fiction mainstream currently dominated by Deseret Book and Covenant, I hope it's another step in the right direction. A believing Mormon can walk away from this novel with inspiring, even faith-promoting ideas about how life's excruciating dilemmas allow us to fall toward heaven, like Adam and Eve did. Though "literary," the novel is a pleasure to read, with swift, economical prose, lively pacing and dialogue, and colorful images and events. My only quibbles are with some comma usage and with some dialogue that seemed a little too self-aware and elliptical. Frankly, I wish a publisher as culturally polarized as Signature hadn't published this novel—I wish it had been published by some new Mormon publisher carving out territory for intelligent, faithful readers dissatisfied by both the foregone conclusions of popular Mormon fiction and the excessively nonplussing fiction of the literary elite. Irreantum Books, anyone?

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Paul Guajardo
One afternoon while eating my sandwich in the faculty lounge of the English Department at the University of Houston, I couldn't help but notice a 1989 dissertation that was nearly a foot thick: Court of Love. I was surprised to learn that it was about Mormon culture. I took it back to my office, reclined my chair, and became engrossed. I read throughout the night and most of the next day until I finished it, exhausted and depressed—exactly the kind of book I love. I wanted to call the writer and find out more about his work and his characters, especially because the novel ends somewhat ambiguously, allowing readers to decide for themselves. Bennion, in fact, had two possibilities in mind: "One was that Howard and Alison would find a way to live together again, the other was that Howard would end up absolutely isolated from human contact" (p. xxv). The ending he gives perfectly allows for either possibility.

This was my introduction to the prose of John S. Bennion, now a tenured BYU English professor known for the award-winning collection, Breeding Leah and Other Stories. Falling toward Heaven is a revised version of Court of Love. His work now in progress includes a novel, "The Burial Pool," a nineteenth-century polygamist mystery novel, "Water Killing," and "Desert Women," a collection of essays about women in Tooele County, Utah.

Falling toward Heaven begins with Elder Howard Rockwood serving a mission in Houston while his "soul was in a waning phase, narrowing to a sliver" (p. 3).

His mission was like thermal underwear, useful for safety and warmth, but hampering his free movement. ... He had thought that, because he was a doubter, he should leave his mission, but he knew that would break his mother's heart. He had decided to muddle through to the end. His prayers seemed superficial. ... God had always seemed to Howard to be a stern teacher, one focused on obedience to rules. (p. 4)

Then, at a 4th of July concert, Elder Rockwood meets the wispy, free-spirited Allison Warren, who holds a degree from MIT. For her he not only considers breaking mission rules but also risks a dishonorable discharge.

Although doubt is a recurring theme, the novel's major conflict is the result of the mismatched pairing between the atheist Allison, who writes software for oil companies, and the idealistic Howard, who wants to restore his father's ranch to its former glory. Allison questions Howard's religion and culture. She struggles with marriage and her desire for a career, and Howard struggles with his faith, his heritage, and his roots in the town of Rockwood (modeled on Vernon, Utah). Howard "nearly leaves the church for the aggressive, careless, independent, powerful" Allison, described as a man-eating pagan, who is the liberal daughter of a Rice University professor and, at the outset, the lover of a man who does sex research at the University of Houston (p. 177).

On their way to Anchorage, where they will live together without matrimony, Howard and Allison make a stop in Howard's hometown. The visit lasts just long enough for Allison to learn that she has serious questions about small-town life and Mormon culture. Later, just before Howard is called into a church court, Allison reluctantly agrees to marry him, and as a result, he is disfellowshipped instead of excommunicated. Gradually these two work out some of their differences through compromise. Although they ultimately endure a family tragedy, the novel still ends somewhat hopefully, as positively as a novel with these themes can. As much as I like and recommend Falling toward Heaven, however, I simply love the greater emotions evoked by the more tragic Court of Love. In this earlier version, Howard and Allison actually stay in Rockwood, where increasingly Allison feels trapped by her boyfriend, his family, his ancestors, his church, and by small-town insularity—all of which leads to heartwrenching and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to deal with differences.

For me, the beauty of Bennion's fiction is his faultless writing with apt use of metaphor and figurative speech, yet sufficient plot, humor, and insight to keep readers interested. His dialogue is perfectly peppered with lines worthy of the wittiest sit-com banter, yet his characters would do Thomas Hardy proud. Reading Bennion's work, I can't help thinking of another odd couple, Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. Indeed, what Bennion does best is to portray couples in conflict. Bennion is also particularly adept at depicting oddball characters, religious mystics, fanatics, Jack Mormons, and other varieties of doubters and back-sliders. He is superbly gifted at rendering the internal workings of an anguished mind.

Most of Bennion's minor characters are vivid, and his women are especially strong and well-wrought. Howard's mother has the gift of healing and counseling. She starts a reading group where women discuss their pet peeves: "The power structure of the church or the ways men think they own women's bodies ... authority ... patriarchal attitudes toward land and work" (p. 207). Allison laments, "It's sad. Your mother's made to be a preacher, a healer, and she's born into one of the only churches in the country that won't let her do either" (p. 208). Indeed, one of Allison's functions is to help us see the church and Mormon culture through an outsider's eyes. She calls Rockwood "Howard's tight-assed Mormon town" (p. 85).

In this arguably feminist novel, traditional male/female roles are inverted. Allison works; Howard stays home or looks for work. He is something of a homemaker who cooks the dinners: "'We've got apple pie and ice cream.' He was Mr. June Cleaver" (p. 251). She is the more educated one; he continually borrows money from her and is dependent. There are references to his biological clock; he is the one who wants children. She "rejected all wifeliness; her pill, which he wanted to flush down the toilet, kept her from motherhood" (p. 176). She states, "I'm not going to give up my job for him" (p. 206). The narrator frequently describes Allison as wolf-like. Ironically, Howard reads romances of the American West, where the "roles of men and women were clearly defined" (p. 205).

Howard's recurring doubt serves as a leitmotif: "All his life he had been taught that the universe was simple and unitary; now he knew it was not. Opposites were true, paradoxes were as commonplace as stars" (p. 110). Sometimes he wonders if "his fresh desire for faith was merely a retreat from a fear he could not endure" (p. 146). While in church, "Howard felt like a foreigner, seeing the meeting with new eyes. He wondered at the simple faith. His own was so tangled that it hardly existed. Instead of a stern and unforgiving patriarchal father, he tried to imagine a distant and pure god, one who didn't traffic in any kind of power" (p. 139). Nevertheless, part of Howard's development concerns his growing belief; he wonders "if he could do the same with his faith, reconstruct faith out of the flashes of light he had felt since meeting Allison. Could he embrace hope by choice, giving it priority over fear?" (p. 148). Eventually he learns "that prayer was a form of eternal calculus, a way of making closer and closer estimates of God's person-ness. But for the first time since he was a child, he had faith in the process" (p. 184). Howard's faith waxes and wanes, and ultimately Allison is able to offer more consolation and understanding of grief and loss.

I must confess my initial surprise at how candidly Bennion, a BYU professor, writes about sex, feminism, hypocrisy, patriarchy, and polygamy. However accurately he may depict the diversity of the church, at first I came away with somewhat negative images. Call me simplistic. In spite of my overwhelming enthusiasm for Bennion's writing, I fist naively questioned its suitability for non-members or the weak of testimony. What I might call negative depictions, however, Bennion would call realistic. These aspects of his fiction are placed in perspective on second reading. Yes, his characters make mistakes, criticize Mormon culture, and honestly harbor considerable doubt, but all this adds to the strength of the writing and the ideas. I believe that Bennion's candor is ultimately beneficial to anyone who has struggled with testimony, obedience, or matters of faith.

John Bennion has thought carefully about what it means to be a Mormon writer and about the purposes of fiction in the essay "Popular and Literary Mormon Novels: Can Weyland and Whipple Dance Together in the House of Fiction?" For the sake of simplicity, literature can be classified as literary or popular; similarly, Mormon literature has been divided into literature of faith and belief versus what Karl Keller once called "jack-fiction." In discussing orthodox Mormon fiction that reverberates with heart-warming conclusions, Bennion writes, "My academic training makes me want to mock this kind of extended plot, but Weyland's books sell like peanuts at a circus." Elaborating on the distinctions, Bennion comments that

in popular fiction, truth is easily understood; good and evil are clearly marked. But in literary fiction, outcomes are uncertain and characters ambiguous. The reader is invited by literary fictions to judge between relative truths and to question former truths. The focus is not on a didactic outcome but on the experience of the character, the career of their lives. (p. 8)

Bennion acknowledges that many readers, including some of his students, are not interested in fiction "that deals ambiguously with good and evil" (p. 7). Nevertheless, he argues, the value of this literature lies in requiring "moral decisions in a fictional universe that approaches the complexity and ambiguity of the universe we find ourselves in, [thus] ... careful readers can still grow morally by being forced to decide in the world of the literary novel" (p. 9). Ultimately, Bennion calls for a balanced narrative diet, and that is exactly what he gives us in Falling toward Heaven, a decidedly literary work about the complexity of relationships and religion. Go forth and read.