In his sweepingly beautiful novel “The Lonely Polygamist,” writer Brady Udall explores the many problems of Golden Richards, a Mormon polygamist living in 1970s Utah with four wives, 28 children and a failing contracting business. Golden also has the misfortune of falling in love with a violent client’s wife, endangering himself and his family.
The book is a darkly comic work laced with tragedy. Golden’s life is a mixture of a warped “Father Knows Best” and “King Lear” at the same time, where the patriarch is deluged with requests to unclog toilets, give time to unhappy wives and provide for his family. Golden Richards comes off as an extremely sympathetic character, doing the best he can, facing death and dealing with his overpowering responsibilities.
Writing an epic novel about polygamy was rooted in Udall’s family history. “I am descended from polygamists, though I was raised in a nonpolygamist Mormon household,” said Udall in a telephone interview from Philadelphia, where he was on a book tour. “My great-great-grandmother was my great-great-grandfather’s second wife. Without polygamy, I am not here.”
The seed for the actual book came from a magazine writing project. “I was asked to do this Esquire piece in 1998,” said the 40-year-old Udall. “They wanted to have me write about my religious background as a Mormon, but it was more interesting to write about polygamy in a modern context. I found it to be a fascinating and vibrant subculture, and something that hadn’t been written about in fiction.”
As his distinctive name indicates, Udall is a scion of the political clan that has had a strong presence in Colorado, Utah and New Mexico for many years. His great-great- grandfather David King Udall started the dynasty, with the children of his first wife becoming Democrats, and children of his second wife becoming Republicans. Arizona Congressman Morris Udall ran for the presidency in 1976. His son Mark is a U.S. senator from Colorado, and Brady Udall’s distant cousin.
Though polygamy was banned by the Mormon Church so Utah could become a state in 1896, small offshoots practice “the Principle,” which means adding new wives to please God. Golden Richards can barely afford his four wives, but the church elders are pressuring him to take a fifth.
“(The Principle) is an almost ironic way of punishing oneself, learning to live in a very difficult way, where this sanctifies you and makes you better,” said Udall. “The poly- gamists, both wives and husbands, learn to be more God- like by taking on more responsibility. It’s very American — if we have problems, we add more land, more assets.”
Golden is the product of a non-Mormon con man and a woman who is paralyzed by her husband’s abandonment of the family. Reuniting with his father as a teenager, Golden finds himself pulled into a polygamous sect.
“I wanted someone who grew up outside ‘the Principle,’ ” explained Udall, “who wasn’t prepared for the responsibilities and obligations. I saw Golden as the quintessential American dad. We are all unprepared to take on the responsibility of fatherhood, but multiply his problems by six or seven times.”
Despite the gigantic family, Golden must contend with loneliness. “In his situation, his wives live in three separate houses and not one of them belongs to him in a real way,” said Udall. “He goes among these houses like a traveling salesman, leaving no trace. He’s the figurehead, the patriarch, but has no safe place.”
Udall’s novel finds both the humor in Golden’s frantic lifestyle of meeting the demands of 32 family members, but also explores family grief.
“I think my book is equally dark and comic,” said Udall. “One of the tasks I set for myself was making the novel extremely comic and extremely tragic at the same time, pushing the limits of that. Even in the most heart-wrenching moments, like the funeral of a child in the book, you have to be ready to look for that comic moment. Humor and comedy give perspective to everything. I have little use for books without comedy.”
Golden is also still contending with the loss of his young daughter Glory three years earlier. “It’s the driving force of the novel, which is the grief parents face when they lose a child,” said Udall. “For me as a father of four, it’s playing out my own fears in fiction. Literature is a safe place to face the death of a child, where the reader can make sense of it in an intimate way.”
Hanging over the events in the novel are the nuclear tests in Nevada that the U.S. government inflicted on the residents of the western United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
“I had to set the novel in the 1970s,” said Udall, “for I wanted Golden and his first wife, Beverly, to get married during the nuclear bomb tests.” The newlywed couple gets enveloped in a cloud of toxic hell, foreshadowing the birth defects and cancer to come.
“All that material, the downwinder stuff, is important to the novel,” said Udall. “People were killed, maimed and harmed in all sorts of ways by our government testing our bombs.” In Udall’s research, he came across the horrifying decision that the government picked the sparsely populated area of small Mormon towns of Utah.
“These people — polygamists and regular Mormons in these small towns in Utah and eastern Nevada — were called ‘low-use populations’ by the government,” said Udall. “If the wind was blowing towards Los Angeles or Las Vegas, they would not have let off the bomb. When the wind was blowing towards these people, it was acceptable.”
At the end of the novel, after much farce and several tragedies, Udall examines the meaning of family happiness for Golden, his wives and offspring. ” ‘Happy’ is a relative thing,” mused Udall. “In the end, I think, all that you can hope for in a family is that you can rely on each other.”
Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
FICTION
The Lonely Polygamist
by Brady Udall, $27.
