angelahallstrom.com
Bound on Earth
Portions of Bound on Earth have won awards from Irreantum magazine (2003); Dialogue's "Best of the Year Award: Fiction" (2005) ; honors from the Utah Arts Council (2006); and the Salt Flats Annual Emerging Writer Fiction Contest (2007). Selected judges' commentary:
"[The novel's] language is beautiful and transparent, evocative in its descriptiveness. Its characters are complex and well-rendered, its ambitions serious and sincere. A compelling exploration of one family’s struggles toward intimacy and self-awareness in a world that pulls people asunder, Bound on Earth succeeds on many levels."
--Utah Arts Council judge Rob Van Wagoner
"I chose this piece for its wit and tenderness, its fully imagined world. This author has an impeccable ear for dialogue and a fine sense of character and setting. The story's final moments of disillusion feel just right. Bravo!"
--Salt Flats Annual judge Karen Brennan
Review--Levi Peterson, author of The Backslider and editor of Dialogue magazine.
Review of Angela Hallstrom, Bound on Earth
In this novel, Angela Hallstrom demonstrates an admirable mastery of the art of fiction. In essence, it is the history of an extended Mormon family. Composed of vignettes—some of which have been published as stories—the novel advances from the present into the future, retreats momentarily to the past, or works laterally to include nearly simultaneous episodes. The point of view shifts deftly among a widowed grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law, their three daughters and their husbands. The style is strong and functional, unerring in its cadence and nicely balanced between the formal and the colloquial.
The subtle background to this novel is the Mormon world view, established without preaching or assumptions of superiority. But it presents a far from idealized vision of reality. By moments the members of this extended family writhe with conflict, tension, depression, self-pity, and misbehavior. The attempts of the strong willed mother to guide and intervene often disrupt rather than heal. Her husband nearly succumbs to the veiled allurement of a seductive sister in their ward. A teen aged daughter conceives a baby out of wedlock. Another daughter is distraught by the birth of a fourth son, deeply disappointed that she has not at last borne a daughter. Yet another daughter marries—and determines to stay with—a bi-polar husband who periodically lapses into abuse. Yet ultimately their underlying bond with one another—their willingness to affirm whoever claims a place among them—triumphs. Though bound on earth, this is a family that will endure in eternity.
In the final vignette, the dying matriarch of the family attends the celebration of the wedding anniversary of her son and daughter-in-law. She is greatly comforted just to be there, watching while “wives turn to husbands, fathers to children, and life keeps spinning forward, loose and free as a ribbon off a spool.” In heaven, she concludes, “there will be children there, and music, and cake, and husbands and wives and daughters and sons.” That is a picture of eternity that she can accept. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this novel, it’s that the pain and endurance required to create a family are worth it.
More commentary:
"Combining deep emotional candor and spare, elegant prose, Hallstrom's debut novel is a poignant exploration of family, faith, and the ties that bind."
--Kathryn Lynard Soper, editor of Segullah: Writings by Latter-day Saint Women
"Bound on Earth is a book in which the reader draws connections to the self; we see our own struggles, betrayals, hard loves, desire. It is a beautiful, honest chronicle of one family's journey through time."
--Sheila O'Connor, author of Where No Gods Came, Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection and winner of the Minnesota Book Award
Read an excerpt from Bound on Earth below:
Chapter 1THANKSGIVING
BETH: LISTENING
“Take care,” says my Grandma Tess. She is the first one to leave after Thanksgiving dinner because she can’t drive at night. She has two hours’ driving to do, north to Uncle Russell’s house in Logan. She’s worried about me. She wonders how I will bear up. She covers my hands with her own, and her skin is paper dry.
“Things seem hard right now, but you’ll see your way through. You’re my Beth. You’ve always been a strong one,” she tells me.
I’m lucky to have a grandmother like her. I don’t get the feeling she’s lying to me. I don’t get the feeling she’s telling me only what I want to hear.
We stand by the open door and sunlight streams through her thinning hair.
“I’m hanging in there,” I tell her. “Really, I am.”
“You can do this,” she says. “Yes, yes. You can.”
Today, no one has said Kyle’s name out loud. During dinner Aunt Christy said, “Do you think he’s well enough to be trusted around the baby?” Everybody knew who “he” was. But I didn’t look up from my turkey.
Finally my mom said, “Who knows, Christy,” in that great tone she gets when the subject’s about to be changed.
No one has said his name, but in his absence he seems just as powerfully present as he always has been. Everyone feels it. My sisters keep sliding the conversation around, trying to avoid topics like love and marriage, mental health and single motherhood. My dad keeps coming up behind me and putting his hands on my shoulders. Really, they may as well all just be saying, “Kyle, Kyle, Kyle.” A big family chant.
I keep listening for the door. I told him not to come. I said, “Kyle, it’s for the best. You know how my mom gets—it’s nothing personal, she just wants some peace—but you can spend time with your own mom. You can see Stella tomorrow. You can see me tomorrow. We’ll talk then, I promise, we will, but today is not the day. Today is not the day.”
He yelled at me. “Heartless,” he called me. “Homewrecker.”
I said, “Kyle, you are not yourself. Can’t you see that you are not yourself?”
KYLE: OUTSIDE
Kyle imagines the family inside the house, laughing, eating, Beth and her sisters teasing each other and telling their inside jokes. His father-in-law, Nathan, in his chair at the head of the table, his mother-in-law, Alicia, sitting just barely on the edge of her seat, tense as a cat, ready to jump up and get somebody butter or salt or more ice. All of them pretending they don’t miss him, that he never existed, that they’re better off now without him.
He knows the food they’ve been eating because he’s had Thanksgiving at this house practically every year for the last eight years and it’s always the same food, yams with the marshmallows on top, homemade stuffing with cranberries and pecans. Kyle always got a drumstick. He got one and Nathan got the other, because they were both dark-meat men. “A real man likes the dark stuff,” Nathan would say, and it made Kyle happy, knowing that his wife’s father thought of him as a real man. From the moment he first met the Palmers he’s been trying hard, doing his best to be the kind of man he should be. He’d be lying if he said all the effort to seem cheerful and focused and strong hadn’t worn him down a little, but he’d been willing to do it for her. For them. For all of them, the whole family. And what good has it done him? All they do is listen to Beth and her side of the story, her little tales she tells: Kyle did this, Kyle did that, like she’s Little Miss Innocent, like nothing’s her fault.
And now she gets to sit there at the table as if she never did anything wrong and he’s left alone, parked in his car two blocks from their house, abandoned on Thanksgiving by the family that said he belonged to them, the family that acted so charitable and kind but really they were just waiting for him to slip up. Waiting for a mistake so they could pull out the rug and watch him rattle to the floor and say, See, you never were good enough for us, we never asked for you, we measured you and found you wanting.
Like at Stella’s baby blessing last month, his own daughter’s baby blessing, he comes and wants to be a part, that’s all, but everybody’s so hung up about his clothes, how they’re not appropriate for church, but what do they expect when his own wife leaves him, abandons him to fend for himself in their little apartment, and he has nothing, no money, no love. Who wouldn’t show up in shorts and a T-shirt if not just to make a statement, so they could see what they’ve reduced him to? And then when he goes up to the podium to speak and keeps talking, pouring out his heart about his sweet little daughter and his wife who has left him, and her family which has betrayed him, the bishop takes him by the elbow in the middle of it all to lead him away from the microphone and he looks down and there’s Beth, sobbing, crying, holding his beautiful little daughter wearing her beautiful white blessing dress, and he’s thinking, what does she have to cry about? Why is she the one crying when she’s kept everything for herself and left her own husband with nothing?
She keeps telling him, “Just get back on your medication and then we’ll talk.” Get back on your medication and then, maybe, then, someday, then, then, then, but he tells her they’re poisoning him with it, he can feel it in his blood, eating at his cells, chewing little holes in his molecules to let the poison inside. Sometimes he thinks she’s in on it—Beth, her family, the doctors, all of them, plotting together to poison him with those innocent-looking pills. He’s even said to her, “Are you trying to kill me?” That’s what he said the night she left him. “Are you trying to kill me?” All she could do was say, “Kyle, please, Kyle, please,” the baby carrier hooked over her arm, Stella crying inside—and her father, Nathan, waiting for her in the car on the street so he could carry her away.
But they can’t get rid of him as easy as that. He’s earned his place. He has a right. They were there at the temple, they can’t have forgotten when he was bound to their daughter—and so, yes, to them, to all of them—eternally. Meaning: Forever. Meaning: Without end. They’re hoping he won’t show up, of course, hoping he just burns himself out and disappears like a curl of smoke up into the sky. But he is a father, a husband, a member of this family. They cannot cut him off like a dead branch on a tree and leave him out in the street. And he will show them. He will behave. He has ironed his clothes and brought flowers for his mother-in-law and he’s planned what he’ll say to Beth—“You look beautiful, as always”—and then they will see that they shouldn’t be afraid of him.
