The Lonely Polygamist
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From a luminous storyteller, a highly anticipated new novel about the American family writ large.The Barnes & Noble ReviewThe size of the cast means that Udall, like his protagonist, must make some tough choices. The smartest one he makes is to ignore the children as individuals (there are plenty of funny descriptions of them as a faceless hive), except for one, Rusty. Going on 12 years old, boyishly spazzy and misunderstood, prone to conspicuous behavior like trying on his sisters' underwear or blowing up a cherry bomb in the dryer, Rusty has been separated from his nervous mother, wife #3, to live in another house under the sterner guidance of wife #1, Beverly. Rusty's plight is to be a kid looking for attention when there isn't nearly enough to go around. "If there's anything you learned as a plyg kid," he thinks, using the shorthand for a child of polygamy, "it was that you were not the center of the universe." The one family member who offers him substantial sympathy is Trish, wife #4, who lives with her daughter from a previous marriage in a duplex on the other side of town from the rest of the clan, "like some exiled daughter of a Prussian czar." Though Golden gives the novel its title, he, Rusty, and Trish all form its yearning heart.
