The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

This is a very tricky book. On two levels. First, it is about a deeply polygamist family, which is bound to raise some hackles. The other is that it is deceptively funny, and you just don't expect to laugh that much in a tale about a man, his multiple wives, and his 28 children. It seems like it would be all about the complications or the joys, and not so much about the foibles. But that is what Udall has given us, in a 600 page tome about the pitfalls, and the book is a pleasure to read from start to finish.
Golden is the patriarch of this sprawling clan. Much like the story in 'Big Love', the wives all come from polygamist families. No one has to be trained in what the drill is. All the women are church-going folks, and have had mothers who have lived the lives that they are embarking on. Even the youngest wife confronts the reality that she is likely not the last. And they are all hoping to have te most children, so as to have social value, both within their home, as well as within the church. So we are already into pretty foreign territory for the average reader.
The lonely polygamist is Golden. He doesn't have an intimate relationship with any of his wives, and that leaves him isolated and vulnerable. One of the story lines is his gradual descent into an affair with someone he actually falls in love with--so on that level it is an old-fashioned love story, just with an unusual back story. But Golden isn't the only story we follow. The other story is that of Rusty, the scape-goated child in the clan. The polygamist family is a complicated social structure and Rusty allows us to see how it works and how it fails. The book allows the reader to think about what 'family' is, what would be the ideal, and then what is really unworkable. And we get to do that outside the usual paradigm in fiction. Bravo, Mr. Udall. This is a unique work of fiction.