![]() ![]() If falling back on the language of scholarship is one way “The 19th Wife” stifles interest, using a divided time frame is another. Far from bringing him closer to his characters, it muffles his novel’s drama. What he has replicated just as powerfully as the turbulent history of polygamy in America is the exhaustive, arid scholarly process of looking things up. ![]() Ebershoff’s way of comprehensively addressing his multifaceted subject, it winds up having the opposite effect. (From this transcript: “He’s after another.” “It was only a matter of time.” “Guess who the new one is.” “He never knows when his eyes are popping out of his head.”) Ebershoff has fractured his narrative into texts, memoirs, depositions, letters, newspaper articles, an ersatz Wikipedia entry and even a supposed approximate transcript of conversation between wives of Brigham Young, the 19th-century Mormon patriarch. There are many indications that David Ebershoff conducted prodigious research to write his novel about polygamy, “The 19th Wife.” The main evidence: Mr. ![]()
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