Yet my father did as much as anyone among his white peers perhaps he did even more than most of them to hasten the demise of primitive Indian culture. As an amateur anthropologist, my father had great respect for the Apaches, Navajos, and Hopis who were his near neighbors. White settlement in northeastern Arizona lies between the Navajo and Hopi reservations on the north and the White Mountain Apache reservation on the south. His publications include two collections of short stories, The Canyons of Grace and Night Soil, a novel, The Backslider, and a prize-winning biography, Juanita Brooks. Peterson (Ph.D., University of Utah) is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Weber State University. More joyous than cynical, it sympathizes deeply with the plight of all of God’s backsliders.Levi S. Shifting from one to another, it builds suspense and elicitsĬomplex emotions, among them a profound sense of compassion. It can be read as a love story, a satiric comedy, or a dark and sobering study of self-mutilation. The story engages readers as it alternates almost imperceptibly between Frank’s naïve consciousness and the more informed awareness of its narrator. Along the way Frank encounters a closeted secular humanist, a polygamist prophet, a psychiatrist, a Mason, government employees, college professors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs-all drawn with heightened realism reminiscent of Charles Dickens or the grotesque forms of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Frank’s extended family is just a generation removed from polygamy and still energized by old-time grudges and deprivations. Of central importance is his Lutheran girlfriend, Marianne, whom Frank seduces, begrudgingly marries, and eventually loves. He is saved by an epiphany that has proved controversial among readers, either interpreting it as an extreme impiety or celebrating it as a moving and entirely plausible rendering of a biblical theme in a Western setting.įrank comes into contact with a host of rural and urban characters. He is a dedicated sinner until family tragedy catapults him into an arcane form of penitence preached among frontier Mormons. A young ranch-hand, Frank Windham, conceives of God as an implacable enemy of human appetite.

Recognized as a Mormon classic twenty years after its release,The Backslider features longstanding Christian conflicts played out in a scenic, sparsely populated area of southern Utah.

The Backslider by Levi S. Peterson