The Lonely Polygamist: A Novel

By Brady Udall

Buy new $10.00

Add to Amazon Wishlist!

 The Lonely Polygamist: A Novel

Reviewed by DeWayne Hafen for the Association for Mormon Letters

When this book first came up for review I considered myself the ideal candidate to write a review. After all, I share many of the advertised traits of the hero of the novel. I am a practicing polygamist, husband to at least four wives and father to at least 28 children. I am living alone with only an old red dog for company in an 8,000 square foot house. Surely I would be able to relate to The Lonely Polygamist. At least that is the way it seemed to me.

I now realize that I am the worst candidate to write a fair review. Too many facts get in the way.

A novel is after all, a novel, a fantasy contrived in the author’s mind. Considerable latitude is given for any relation to reality. Still, when the author uses real places, people and situations, he should get his facts straight. Brady Udall definitely didn’t do his homework very well.

I was raised in southern Utah and Nevada with relatives in all the fundamentalist groups. Reading this novel I soon began to suffer from an overload of twisted facts about people, places, and dates that are pulled into the story for bit appearances.

For example it appears that the author based his rendering of Ervil Lebaron on the mostly nonsensical movie PROPHET OF EVIL: THE ERVIL LEBARON STORY starring Brian Dennehy. Brian Dennehy is a fine actor and can appear real mean, but he is a small, barrel-chested man compared to Ervil LeBaron who stood at a muscular 6 feet 4 inches. Hardly one to be completely intimidated by the 6-foot-6-inch hero of the story. Also the dates are all wrong. Ervil’s brother Joel LeBaron was killed in August of 1972. No Brother supported Ervil in any way after 1971. Still we have Brian, AKA Ervil, showing up in Ervil’s post 1974 trademark green LTD Ford driven by a brother.

Also, what about highway 19. It doesn’t and didn’t exist. Is it an inversion of highway 91? Highway 91 used to run from St. George to Las Vegas, where one would turn north on highway 95 to Nye county. He describes a ride though the Virgin River Gorge on Interstate 15, but it didn’t open through the gorge until December 14, 1973. Facts are such stubborn things.

And the partially polygamous community of Virgin, Utah. I remember it in the 1960’s as a very small town that has grown since then. Did the author ever visit there? Did he even Google it for basic demographics? As of the census of 2000 there were 384 people, 102 families residing in the town and get this... approximately 10 percent more marriage age men than women living there. Big enough to have a beauty shop, a full time sheriff, a mortuary, and a furniture store? Sure.

The hero is also a member of the twelve apostles who rule his church. Most of the fundamentalist groups that have apostles have seven, not twelve and they call them High Priest Apostles, the few exceptions being the LeBaron and TLC groups and perhaps some few others that I do not know of.

I don’t know if there was ever a test bomb named Roy, but the description is pretty accurate for a real blast named Harry -- “Dirty Harry” who rained radioactive debris on the St. George area for several hours and rained radioactive gas and debris over the US and Canada. I suppose it was necessary that Golden and his first wife, trying to consummate their marriage apparently somewhere in the Kaibab Forest, should get doused with this debris and breathe and drink their fill. They and his future wife Nola needing a good dose of radiation to account for birth defects and other health problems.

I suspect that the author. Brady Udall, learned about polygamy by watching Big Love. Both Big Love and The Lonely Polygamist put a lot of emphasis on the sexual aspects of polygamy. Only a non-polygamist would think that polygamy is all about sex. Believe me, it’s not. At least the writers for Big Love, both homosexuals with no personal experience with polygamy or even monogamy for that matter, did their homework.

Since the story has nothing to do with polygamy I wondered about the need to pull it into the story. At first I thought it might be just to pose the question of why a man with more women than he could handle would want another woman?

Later it dawned on me that the exaggerated chaos in his family was really what it was about. Golden had literally procreated himself away from a place at the table. He was having trouble sleeping with his wives because he feared another pregnancy. His boss’s wife represented sex with no pregnancy risk since he was going to use a condom with her. Once he bought into the use of condoms, he became a sexual powerhouse with his wives, especially the young and beautiful one who had cheated on him out of loneliness and desperation to have a child. God bless the leaky condom theory of pregnancy. Of course no real polygamist would ever practice birth control, but then again, this story isn’t about polygamy.