Backslider

Frank Windham is a Mormon cowboy -- hard-working, trying to be honest, convinced he is going to hell for incurable lust, and convinced that he deserves to. He has an ultra-pious mother, a brother who is more than just a little touched in the head, and a comfortable Lutheran girlfriend who knows she has been saved. This is a story about sin and salvation, written with raunchiness and reverence. It is an extraordinary landmark in Mormon fiction -- the first novel to consider the ubiquitous tension between religious guilt and sexual frustration.Set against the backdrop of southern Utah's canyon country, the protagonist manifests exuberance and innocence that is constrained only by strict moral education. The sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic posturing required of Frank in concealing his humanity behind a mask of forced righteousness makes for comic, painful, and moving scenarios.For instance, he punishes himself for lapses of self-denial by fasting and tying his hands to the bedpost. He comes to see dating as an evil indulgence in sensual fantasy and his work on the ranch as a tool of avarice. His attempt to exorcise this hypocrisy and the confusion about how to atone for it result in an epiphany that restores equilibrium to the world.