Michael Fillerup

I bought this book from the BYU Bookstore at half price. I had heard some LDS author--I can't remember which one--saying that he wished he could write like Fillerup, so I thought the book was worth a try. Among the endorsements on the back cover is the following from Brian Evenson: "Fillerup understands that the world is not black and white, that moral decisions are never obvious, and that yoked to the joys of human life is an irreducible amount of pain and doubt." Moral decisions are *never* obvious? Really? I guess, in particular, this means that the decision of BYU administrators to give Evenson a hard time about his writing was not obviously immoral! When defending his book Altmann's Tongue, Evenson said: "My attempt . . . was to paint violence in its true colors and to let it reveal for itself how terrible it is." If the world is not black and white, what color is violence? If moral decisions are never obvious, who says violence is terrible?

When I started reading Beyond the River, I wondered if maybe this cover had been glued on the wrong book. It starts out with the feel of a teen novel about an unlikely pairing: high school football hero Jon Reeves strikes up a friendship with bookworm Nancy Von Kleinsmid, plain and tall, who is assigned as his tutor.

After a while, you see why Signature Books might have been interested in the manuscript, as Nancy spends a lot of time trying to get Jon to see the absurdity of his LDS beliefs. Things turn dark, as Jon and Nancy's friendship ends suddenly on the night of their high school's Preference Dance. A year later while Jon is away at BYU, Nancy is found dead (in the river of the book's title)--whether by accident or by suicide, no one knows.

Twenty years later, Jon has been on a mission to Mexico, is married, and has three kids and a midlife crisis. He drives back to his hometown alone on a weekend to exorcise some of the ghosts that haunt him, to learn more about Nancy's death, and to revisit the river that took her life.

This book is an interesting read and is fairly well-written. At times, it is hard to keep track of whether the events being described are happening in the present, are flashbacks to the past, are spiritual manifestations, or are just Jon's imagination. Jon and Nancy are both writers, and writers will probably enjoy reading this book more than non-writers will. I've often thought that show business was the subject of way too many movies and TV shows, and I feel similarly that there is something a bit too self-referential about books about writers.… (more)