Review: Under the Cottonwoods follow up

Now that Sunstone has put its earlier issues online, I thought I'd check for a review of Douglas Thayer's Under the Cottonwoods and other Mormon stories. Sure enough, a review by Roy R. Bird appears in the Summer 1977 issue. Sunstone doesn't provide direct links to articles so you'll have to scroll down to read it.

In his review, Bird picks up on some of the same things I did. For example: "[Thayer] candidly examines the conflict that inevitably arises between LDS cultural expectations and the challenges of individual experience."

Like me he thought the ending of "Rabbit Hunt" was "overly dramatic."

I'm not sure about what he admits is a "pretentious" comparison of the collection with James Joyce's Dubliners. Yes, both are short story collections that exude a strong sense of place -- Provo, Dublin -- and what's more a place that is at the center of a particular culture. But the stories in Dubliners add up to a broader portrait, I think.

I always find it a strange to see how others experience a work that I've read. Doubly so when it's one that I've written about.

For what it's worth, this is the best part of the review:

"Skillfully employing understatement, Thayer generally resists the temptation to make his characters' epiphanies overtly didactic. Instead, like Joyce again, he maintains a deceptively calm narrative surface to his stories. This apparent calm, juxtaposed against the internal turmoil of his characters, enables Thayer to generate considerable intellectual energy in his stories."

Source: Roy R. Bird. "Provo, Front and Center!" Sunstone. Issue 6: Summer 1977, page 41.