So I have one more short but positive review to add to the list. This one appeared in last Friday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, in a book column titled “Worthwhile midsummer fiction from Midwest writers.” You can follow the link to the article by clicking here, but there’s no real need to bother since I’ve reproduced the two paragraphs about No Going Back below:
Archive for the ‘Reviews of Other Books’ Category
St. Paul Pioneer Press Notice
Monday, July 26th, 2010Thoughts on Kushner, Angels in America
Thursday, February 25th, 2010Several years ago, prompted by a non-Mormon friend, I read Angels in America, a set of two plays set in New York City in the mid-1980s, written and performed in the early 1990s, that won multiple awards (including a Pulitzer). The play is largely about homosexuality, AIDS, and political conservatism. Several of the characters are Mormons, though Tony Kushner (the playwright) is not.
My reaction (which I initially posted on AML-List, and which was later published in more polished and expanded form in Irreantum, the journal of the Association for Mormon Letters) was that despite the Mormon characters and some Mormon iconic symbology, I didn’t really feel that the play was about Mormons or Mormonism in any meaningful way. At the time I wrote my reaction (2003), that was a perspective I didn’t see reflected or even much addressed in discussions of the work — bafflingly so, considering that 3 out of 9 main characters are supposedly Mormon.
So I wrote my response, which I’ve decided to repost below, in the hopes that perhaps this will prompt a little more discussion or at least awareness on this issue.