Presented to: John Bennion
For: A Court of Love; A House of Order; Dust
In three finely-honed stories -- each appearing in a separate journal and one of them the 1986 D.K. Brown Fiction Contest winner -- John Bennion squarely confronts the age’s challenges to the Mormon world view and way of life. Whether themselves transgressors and uncertain believers or their distressed kin, Bennion’s protagonists reflect both the conscience of sensitive, good people and sophistication and vulnerability of real twentieth-century human beings. As in much significant fiction, the common objective correlative and concrete occasion of their inner struggle -- till now largely skirted by Mormon writers -- is sexual distress. The world of insular communality, agrarian values, strong family and marital ties, an accepting if narrow view of sexuality, dogmatic convictions, and individual sacrifice is -- in each of their minds -- arrestingly opposed to one of rootless personal autonomy, self-centered professionalism, guilt-ridden hedonism, cosmopolitanism, and underlying dread of nuclear destruction (closely paralleling the conventionally religious anticipation of Armageddon). This juxtaposition, dynamic and kaleidoscopic, creates a refracting lens in which Bennion’s Mormon readers can easily discern their own uneasy ethnocentric selves. His portraits urge that the choices before us were never more subtle, all-determining, or difficult. In its culturally informed context, Bennion’s psychological realism should enhance Mormons’ self-understanding and others’ recognition of their intrinsic humanity. John Bennion’s is a talent of great promise -- one to be watched with thanks and applause.