A Lost Argument Review

A Lost Argument by Therese Doucet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked the dramatic, traditional narrative trajectory of Part I. It pits an innocent, college-aged Mormon woman against real arguments to her faith. I was also riveted by the love story. At first, I felt tricked by a particular scene toward the end of Part I, but I have since thought that it had the appropriate effect of emphasizing in the reader's mind just how much Marguerite longed for being loved and wanted. The author handles the characters and scenes in Part I well, maintaining a balance between all the philosophical ideas Marguerite learns about and the pace of the narrative.

Initially, I thought the episodic structure of Part II causes the work as a whole to flag, because the momentum of Part I is lost. The narrative is built up in Part I based on certain cause-and-effect situations that come to a climax (no pun intended). Part II, conversely, seems to wander. There is more analysis-like writing in the form of journal entries than there is mimesis of actual events. But that idea of wandering may be the author's point with Part II. Marguerite’s life back at BYU is a kind of wandering through a literal wilderness. In the end, it was a pleasure to be privy to Marguerite’s journal entries and to follow her in her quest to learn about and ultimately define what faith means to her.

The diction of the work is straightfoward; sometimes poetic, sometimes breezy. The latter is appropriately characteristic of Marguerite. Her mind races with thoughts. Perhaps what I appreciate the most about Marguerite as a character is her unbridled honesty. The poetic descriptions of the various settings in the work are fresh and reinforce the mood of the scene. I’m partial to works with a lyrical style and intertextual depth. This work had lyrical moments, certainly, moreso in Part II than in Part I, but is rather matter-of-fact as a whole, the very thing that Marguerite complains about of her poems. The title tends to give away what direction the story will go, but that may be all right, because discriminating Mormon readers often want to know what they’re getting into.

As I neared the end, I fully expected Marguerite to sustain her faith in Mormonism with the faith quest she had begun, with Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, or his idea of infinite resignation. Indeed, I was surprised while reading Part II that she has so much faith in the idea that she can find her own faith through researching its history in human communities. It was, in itself, a fascinating trajectory. Marguerite’s decision to leave Mormonism comes somewhat sudden to me, but considering that before that point in the story, her feelings of alienation in Mormon communities are based on thinking from lived experience rather than knowledge of the religion's history, it's no wonder that once she discovers the latter, all arguments against leaving are soon overthrown. She can choose to stay only if she, Kierkegaardian-like, resigns herself to the Mormon way of life. Some hands find the glove of Mormonism a comfortable fit, others rather tight. I wish Marguerite and her creator the best.

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Weekly Writing Report

I completed my "final" draft (there's always hope) of "Moving On," a short story about a return missionary who comes home to find that he must deal with some choices his father has made that he doesn't agree with. It's a story about marriage, tolerance, and dealing with change.

I also wrote some more for the first draft of my novel, NSG. I found that I need to add the philosophers Kierkegaard and Sarte to my reading list, because a thread running through this work is the idea of "authenticity," and what that means to the characters.

Finally, I made some more notes on a short story I'm titling, "Inversion." I've started it, and I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Well, that's it.

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Photo by Denise Krebs

Noticeable Themes In My Scribbles

When you write long enough, you begin to notice themes or patterns surfacing in your writing. My scribbles over the years have taken the Hmong and the Mormon cultures as their subject, respectively, and with that, I can't help but be aware that there are certain things that I obsess about.

Hmong

An ethnic group from Southeast Asia, the Hmong emigrated to America, as well as to other countries, after Laos fell to the communists in 1975. Between 1953 and 1975, thousands of Hmong helped the United States fight a secret war in Laos against the North Vietnamese Army and the Pathet Lao.

I learned the Hmong culture and language by working with them for two years in the Sacramento area as an LDS missionary ("the Mormons"). Since that time, I have kept up on the language and culture. My Hmong fiction has tended to explore aspects of the culture that I find worthy of change (e.g., women's rights, youth gangs, commercialization of New Year's, Christians v. Animists, etc.), as well as to emphasize the cultural loss and connectivity the Hmong have experienced as they have become assimilated into their host Western society, despite their best efforts not to be.

Some may think that as a "white skin" I should not point out flaws in the Hmong culture. I would answer that until the Hmong have a literary voice of their own that produces serious fiction about their experience, it may be a benefit to have someone who understands both cultures serve as a bridge between them. (Some of the Hmong youth and young adults have made and are making artistic efforts to present their own story, like in the literary magazine, Paj Ntaub Voice. I applaud that and hope that it continues.)

I have drafts of several Hmong-themed stories, but most are not quite ready. In the past, there haven't been many outlets to publish fiction about the Hmong, but with the coming of the e-publication age, this has changed. Look for my story "Cocked" as an e-publication soon.

Mormon

The other domain of my fictional creations has been that of Mormon culture. While at BYU, I studied creative writing under Douglas H. Thayer and, if I learned anything from him, he taught me that serious Mormon fiction is possible, and that writing about Mormon culture and Mormonism doesn't have to perpetuate the Pollyanna worldview of much of mainstream Mormon fiction (i.e., Deseret Books). In Doug's words, serious Mormon fiction is "Fiction that explores contemporary Mormon life as it is lived, not as we pretend that it is or should be."

In my efforts to write serious Mormon fiction, I find myself looking to Dostoevsky for inspiration. I have always liked the way his characters struggle with faith and doubt. In The Brothers Karamazov, he has the faithful Alyosha and the doubting Ivan dramatize that veritable Yin-and-Yang connection between the two extremes. This struggle and the relationship between the two is definitely a theme in my fiction, for better or worse. (Faith and doubt grapple, tumbling through darkness.) My novel-in-progress, No Sacred Grove, explores this dialectic. If your faith survives a "long night of darkness," it's the stronger for it. Sometimes faith wins out, sometimes doubt, but the wrestling is a process.

I hope to take up other subjects for my fiction in the future, but we'll see. These are the worlds I know best so far.

Photo by Julie Jordan Scott

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Weekly Writing Report

The week's writing went well. I prepped the text of "Cocked" for e-publication on Smashwords. I'm just waiting on my cover, which a graphic-artist friend of mine is going to do. I also rewrote most of "Moving On," my short story about an LDS return missionary who returns home to find the family he left broken up, which events teach him something about marriage, commitment, and change. I'm still working out the details. That story has been difficult to write. Finally, I'm 1,300 plus words into my novel NSG.

Also, I purchased Scrivener for Windows and love it! I guess I hadn't looked at it before since it was exclusive to Mac in the past, but it is a great tool. It's now the "word processor of the moment."

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Reading List 2014

Yes, just as I've put some writing goals out there, so must I list what I intend to read this year. You may follow me on Goodreads to see some of what I have read and what I am currently reading. Here are the thirty books I want to read this year, not necessarily in this order:

1. Aeschylus, The Oresteia
2. Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle (Ethics, Politics, Poetics)
3. Cervantes, Don Quixote
4. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
5. Colette, Break of Day
6. Dante,, The Divine Comedy
7. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
8. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
9. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet
10. Henry James, Notebooks
11. Henry James, Roderick Hudson
12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
13. James Joyce, Ulysses
14. John Hawkes, The Lime Twig
15. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
16. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
18. Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
19. Plato, The Collected Dialogues (Timaeus, Symposium, Republic)
20. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
22. Sir Thomas Browne, Urne Burial
23. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
24. Steven L. Peck, The Scholar of Moab
25. Therese Doucet, A Lost Argument: A Latter-day Novel
26. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
27. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
28. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
29. Virgil, The Aeneid
30. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West

Certainly, this represents more pages than I can flip through in a year, but even if I succeed in reading only half of it, I'll be that much farther toward my ultimate goal of reading William H. Gass's 50 Literary Pillars.

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New Year's Writing Aspirations

Goals. I set myself up each January with writing goals. By the end of the month, making a living usually encroaches upon my writing time, causing me to settle for cantatas instead of symphonies, so the past few years I've set goals have been only moderately productive.

I have gotten some words on paper.

But here I am doing it to myself again. This year I will:

• Publish my stories "Cocked" and "Moving On," as well as some others I have in mind;
• Continue working on my novel No Sacred Grove; and
• Help my wife write her memoir about escaping from communist Laos as a child and her experience in the States so far.

There. Three worthy goals. Now it's time for discipline.

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