Reviews -- Love Chains



	Love Chains Stories

Exponent II, Guenevere Nelson-Melby
Margaret Blair Young, in her collection of fiction entitled Love Chains: Stories, looks for truth in the ambiguous parts of Mormon experience. Her bishops' wives, vagrant ministers, missionaries, and unbelievers fumble, uneasily seeking comfort, light, and sometimes truth. It's a powerful collection because of the raw struggle of its characters.

Young's characters probe their own uneasiness, looking for redemption through the honesty of the search. It's no accident that Joseph and Utahna, in the story "God and Donahue," earn their marital peace by working out their religious and sexual quirks on a talk show. Joseph gives a public blessing to a hitchhiker he believes is God; in the process, he sees his own imperfections clearly enough to desire his imperfect wife. That these two find each other in a public place—on a talk show—points to where the strength of this short story collection itself lies. The confessional talk show format serves as a metaphor for the collection: both make space for the untidiness of people's private lives rather than focusing on their public faces.

But these stories probe in a way that a talk show never could. Their untidy and strange truths sometimes echo Flannery O'Connor. And yet, the book has a modern and distinctly Mormon tone. Whether they are in or out of the Church—or halfway in between—the people in these stories see their lives set against a Mormon standard. Some encounter a goodness born less of rectitude than of compassion, while others find truth in a church they have abandoned. People seek peace and connection with others in unexpected encounters. The luckiest are able to find their wings. Jane, a teenager angry at her father's abandonment of her multiple sclerosis-stricken mother, handsprings away from the nursing home. "I see Mom's head, yearning up. She's watching me fly through the night. She's loving it. She's loving me."

Young sprinkles such unexpected moments of love, insight, or peace sparingly throughout the collection. Her characters are conflicted, working their way sometimes blindly through singlehood, marriage, parenthood, and selfhood. But this confusion makes the moments of peace and understanding all the more powerful both for them and for the reader. The unbeliever confronted with signs, the woman saddened by an inactive husband, and the virgin gringa dealing with her sexual values and needs all look for insight as through a dark veil. As do we all.

This richness makes Young's introduction seem distracting and overly apologetic. She justifies her need to write about real conflicts and to include swearing and sexuality as part of her stories. Anyone who would need that introduction probably would not appreciate her fiction. Her stories are for people who flinch at the tidy endings and superficial solutions of some Mormon fiction and who want stories that explore a more complex world.