Dancing Naked
by Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner
|
Signature Books (Salt Lake City): 1999. Hardcover: vii, 364 pages. ISBN-10: 1-56085-130-9 Suggested retail price: $20.95 (US) Tags: homosexuality; Mainstream; Mormons; Salt Lake City; University of Utah Tactical strength: [7/10] |
After reading Marion Smith's Riptide and Robert Van Wagoner's Dancing Naked you might think that modern Mormon fiction from Signature Books must follow a formula. In the first chapter a character dies. The subsequent chapters use the death as a pivot point, delivering in parallel the past events that led up to the death and the development of the protagonist's emotional state in the present. In the final chapter, the protagonist comes to an emotional denouement, a reconciliation with the the death. Fortunately, even with the similar plot structure, Van Wagoner provides a far more satisfying experience.
Dancing Naked starts with Terry Walker, a University of Utah math professor, coming home to find his fifteen-year-old son, Blake, hanging by a belt from the shower-curtain rod. The coroner lists Blake's death as an autoerotic asphyxiation -- a technical way of saying that Blake accidently hanged himself while simultaneously masturbating and choking himself. While the medical examiner explains his conclusions, Terry repeatedly insists that his son isn't queer. Often Terry's responses to situations such as these seem too extreme, but Van Wagoner, over time, builds a fairly thorough and convincing psychological profile for Terry. For example, Terry's extreme homophobic response become clearer once you read the the intertwined story about five-year-old Terry. Terry's father caught Terry examining an erection while bathing. His father toted naked Terry off to the basement workshop and started to lecture:
"Only homoes play with their own dicks!" he hissed at Terry. "Fairies and sissies! Believe me, boy, there's no place for such in God's or this man's kingdom!" He gave the child's wilting penis a tug. Terry knew from the look on Father's face that whatever homoes and sissies and fairies were, to be one was as bad as it got. (32)
And that just begins to explain Terry's multiple personality complexes. Even before losing his son, Terry dealt with a slew of problems. Terry's father served in the navy during World War II, and Terry turned five before he met his father. As a child, Terry desperately tried to please his father, but Terry alway failed: Terry refused to go on a Mormon mission, couldn't serve in the military because of abnormal bowel physiology, and married a non-member. Terry also worries constantly, usually in spite of evidence to the contrary. For example, Terry worries about spending money even though he has a huge savings account. Ultimately, Terry wants to live in a stable an controlled environment of his own making, but he must come to accept that he cannot control others or even certain aspects of himself.
The title "Dancing Naked" refers to several aspects of the story line. Explicitly, it refers to the peak of Terry's happiness. At one point just after Terry delivered his Master's thesis, he felt unburdened from worry and he took his wife, Rayne, on a spontaneous vacation to the coast of Maine. There in a private bungalow, Rayne dances naked on the deck:
Rayne's wild motions tempered, became smooth and constant like the ocean behind her. She seemed not Terry's wife, but a ghost, a specter of fundamental form and energy. Watching her placed Terry on the edge, almost within reach of an equation universally profound, a new Law of Relativity. A seduction was in progress. She offered him serenity and security -- things more alluring than her body. Like her clothing, she had stripped away the superfluities, the conveniences she might at other times offer. What remained was a denser substance, like dark marble. Rayne was outside and Terry was inside and she was inviting him into her world. (212)
"Dancing naked" also describes the pivotal event that starts Terry's descent to his lowest emotional point, when Terry finds Blake.
He knows now what has happened -- and he's determined to save his boy before it's too late. He . . . begins pulling on his son. He lifts Blake to relieve the pressure from his neck, to allow him to breathe. Terry wonders, with strange clarity, why he insisted on installing the finest of shower curtain rods, the strongest, the one that wouldn't break or tear free if, say, a mischievous teenager were to swing on it. (18)
Blake's death causes such a shock to Terry and the other characters that they can no longer maintain their typical emotional distance from each other. Thus, "dancing naked" implicitly refers to the dance between the characters as they deal with each other's naked emotions.
Van Wagoner so successfully portrays both the history of Terry's emotional state and his interaction with the other characters in the present, that he has created a psychological novel that resonates as deeply as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment yet deals with modern issues such as the effects of generational prejudice.
