By Levi S. Peterson
At 80, Douglas Thayer goes on writing impressive fiction, as this latest novel shows. Cast in short, simple sentences and concentrating on the concrete instead of the abstract, The Tree House not only captures the rhythms of Mormon life in Provo during the mid-twentieth century but also figures forth the tensions inherent within the Mormon concept of testimony.
Having a testimony—a witness of the Holy Spirit confirming the truthfulness of Mormonism—is more or less obligatory among the Mormons. Members assume there’s something wrong with anyone who doesn’t have a testimony. Nonetheless, anecdotal experience tells us that a considerable number of earnest Mormons don’t have one. Furthermore, these less fortunate Latter-day Saints will often be found keeping the commandments just as carefully as do their more self-assured confreres. Some will even get up in testimony meeting and say they hope to get a testimony sooner or later. Mormons of this sort lack the comfort of being certain there is life after death. But they hope there is. And that kind of hope is the essence of faith. It causes doubters to live as if they do know. That’s what The Tree House is about—the benefits of living as if Mormonism is true even without knowing that it is.
This novel is a considerable mingling of autobiography and fiction. The experiences of Harris Thatcher, its protagonist, parallel a good many experiences Thayer attributes to himself in Hooligan (2007), a memoir of his boyhood. That fact should come as no surprise. Numerous authors acknowledge an adaptation of their own experiences to their fiction.
Furthermore, Thayer’s characterization of the youthful Harris—he is an exceptionally obedient, dutiful boy—is to be found in many of Thayer’s stories and novels. Over and over, Thayer has written about life in Provo as seen through the eyes of an innocent Mormon adolescent during the late 1930s and 1940s.
When I speak of an innocent Mormon adolescent, I mean innocent in both naïveté and conscientiousness—the first term implying freedom from the care and worry that come with experience, the second implying a vigilance against wrongdoing and sin. Furthermore, I mean an exceedingly innocent Mormon adolescent. Any one of Thayer’s adolescent characters would stand out even among a whole quorum of good Mormon boys.
However, Harris’s freedom from care and worry in The Tree House lasts only through the first chapter, which ends with his approaching high school in happy anticipation of the future: “He knew there were a lot of things he had to figure out, but he looked forward to his life and all the great things that would happen to him” (16). And many great things do happen to him as the novel advances. But many bad things happen, as well. By the time the first section of the novel ends with Harris’s high school graduation, he has been staggered by the deaths of his father and the girl he irretrievably loved. These losses intensify his need to know that Mormonism is true. That need becomes one of his major preoccupations throughout the remainder of the novel. Harris ardently desires a sure conviction, prays for it, envies his best friend Luke’s possession of it, and keeps the commandments meticulously in the expectation that someday his insecure faith will transmute into certain knowledge.
Hence, he responds to a mission call from his bishop and, in the second section of the novel, finds himself in war-torn Germany, where Thayer himself was stationed with the U.S. Army of occupation immediately following World War II.
Harris is a model missionary in all senses of the word, as Thayer must have been when, following his army experience in Germany, he returned as a Mormon missionary. But even as a missionary, Harris does not achieve the sure knowledge that he seeks. Undermining his search for the hand of a benign deity in human affairs is the immeasurable destruction everywhere visible in a war-destroyed Europe. His cynical German landlady sees faith in Christ as a cop-out, a refusal to accept the grim fact that human nature is inevitably violent and warlike. “I do not believe a Christ can pay for all of this evil,” she says bluntly. “Forty, perhaps fifty or sixty million people died in the war. There were so many that no one knows. Think of the suffering, the wounded, the families destroyed, the vast destruction of whole cities. How can a Christ pay for that?” (143–144). With war’s devastation around him, the closest the innocent, idealistic Harris can come to a conventional Mormon testimony is to tell his fellow missionaries: “The gospel does change lives. It gives people hope. It teaches them how to love each other. I know my testimony is growing. I am grateful for that and grateful to serve in Germany” (147–148).
The final third of the novel rounds out Harris’s perception that mortal life is a series of tragic losses—and that warfare is normal and peace only intermittent. As Thayer frequently points out in The Tree House, that is a perception that the Book of Mormon reinforces well. Returned from his mission, Harris is drafted, sent to boot camp, and then assigned to combat duty in Korea, where he kills Chinese and North Korean soldiers, mourns the death of his best friend Luke in combat, and is himself seriously wounded.
Although his body slowly mends, his spirit atrophies. Amidst the horrors of combat, what little belief in Deity he has evaporates entirely. Like his German landlady, he finds untenable “the idea that Christ took upon himself all the suffering, pain, and sorrow of mankind down through all the ages.” Hard on the heels of that thought comes his recognition “that he had no faith, perhaps never had, that he’d been fooling himself” (345). Moreover, as if the post-traumatic stress disorder from which Harris now suffers were not enough, he returns home to Provo only to suffer a severe additional loss when his mother and brothers are killed by a fire that guts his childhood home. Although he resists thoughts of suicide, Harris quite understandably falls into long-term despondency. He has lost the incentive to live according to even the as if factor.
Nonetheless, the novel ends with a glimmer of hope. During the final few pages, Harris is salvaged by the love of a nurse, Jennifer, who cares for him when he undergoes an emergency appendectomy. Considering the Job-like losses Harris has suffered, some readers will find this an abrupt and unconvincing ending. However, Harris and Jennifer marry in the temple and plan on having children. It is apparent that Harris will live the life of an active Mormon and therein will find a kind of contentedness. His incentive to do so has been restored. Encouraged by his believing wife, he will continue to live, as he always had, as if he possesses a sure testimony of the truthfulness of Mormonism.
In fact, the as if factor is reinforced eloquently when Harris and Jennifer attend a memorial service for Harris’s buddy Luke, whose body has been shipped home from Korea. Luke’s mother says passionately, “Oh, Harris, we’ll see him again on resurrection morning! Our boy will be so beautiful, so beautiful. We’ll all be here together once more, won’t we, Harris?”
After a moment of hesitation, during which he thinks of war, destruction, and the universality of death, Harris answers:
“Yes, yes,” he said, which was what he had to say, wanted to say, had enough faith for. Otherwise there was nothing, and there could not be that. And the suffering and pain had to be paid for too, somehow, the incredible loss, the waste, the incalculable stupidity, the hate, the greed. And there had to be mercy, justice, grace, redemption, but mostly redemption because, oh, sweet Jesus Christ, how the world needed to be redeemed! (371–372).
I for one respond to Thayer’s desire for redemption with much greater emotion than I could ever respond to an expression of his certainty of it. The as if factor means a great deal to me. I predict many other readers will respond to The Tree House in the same manner. It may not appeal to those who “know beyond the shadow of a doubt.” But for the uncounted numbers of those who just wish they knew, it should be a solace and strength.
