Douglas Thayer (1929–2017)

Not what you'd expect from Signature Books

If you're like me, you've come to expect the books published by Signature to promote the revisionist agenda of LDS dissidents. (Their recent fiction has, in particular, an unusual number of oppressed Mormon homosexuals who end up dying by strangulation.) Well, in spite of themselves, Signature has published a wonderful book in _The Conversion of Jeff Williams_.

The plot summary that Signature prints on the back cover (and that Amazon has reprinted show more above) really seems to miss the point of the book. This is classic Thayer, with strong messages of redemption, grace, and love, conveyed by a story that is honestly told in simple, uncontrived language. It is so easy to take cheap shots at various types of characters perceived to be pervasive in the LDS community, but in _Jeff Williams_ Thayer adamantly refuses to do so. There isn't a character in this book who isn't portrayed with sympathy--a sign, I think, of Thayer's belief in the ability of grace to touch the most unlikely people.

In a fireside talk he gave shortly after he wrote his first novel, _Summer Fire_, Thayer opened my eyes to the beautiful message taught in Moroni 10:32-33, a message he said he tried to convey in that first book. Through his fiction, Thayer continues to teach me wonderful things. show less

I enjoy memoirs, so I wanted to like this book. The title was intriguing. “Hooligan” makes me think of the McCourt lads, and some boys I knew in my childhood--the ones our parents used as Bad Examples, because they were always in some kind of minor trouble that pre-disposed them to entanglement in the bigger and more dangerous kinds. “A Mormon Boyhood” suggested I would learn things about growing up Mormon in Utah that would be different from growing up Methodist in Pennsylvania. Not show more only did the book fail to live up to its title, it failed almost completely as a memoir. Yes, it is full of recollections, in general terms, of boyhood in Provo, Utah, in the years just before World War II. But most of these recollections, far from being in any sense personal, enlightening or unique, could have come from the memory of my brother, whose boyhood was spent at the other end of the country, 3 decades later.

Hooligan is not a story, in a narrative sense, and it lacks a main character. This memoir’s biggest failing, for me, is the total absence of the author as a person. I didn’t know who Douglas Thayer was when I began reading, and I still had no idea who he was when I finished. I did know there was very little of the "hooligan” about him. Life events that must have been critical to the boy Doug, and that could have been moving or revealing to the reader are treated as asides; his parents’ divorce, his father’s death, the accidental shooting death of another boy, the coming of the war are mentioned, but in a detached and general manner that gives us no insight into their formative effect on the author.

For a teacher of creative writing, Thayer has a peculiarly spirit-less style. His childhood is often reduced to laundry lists of activities, foods, and common mothering expressions without particular context. (“You’ll put your eye out,” was funny in A Christmas Story. Here, it’s just another cliché in a basketful.)

Only in rare passages does the child of this narrative come alive, and these few instances are remarkable. Thayer’s description of riding his bicycle out of town to go fishing alone (in Chapter 10) made me catch my breath and wonder if I just hadn’t been paying attention up to that point. Most of the book is written in the first person plural, as if the author were part of a collective, or in the second person, which distances him even further from his own life. When Thayer lapses (and it does feel like inadvertence) into using “I”, there is a suggestion of potential brilliance in his writing, and I got the feeling he might be capable of conveying so much more. But in a little under 200 pages, I marked less than half a dozen paragraphs for their lasting impact. Here’s one of them: “All summer in our trips down to the fields we’d watched for pheasants, especially after the hay and grain were cut and you could see the flocks along the edges of the fields in the early evening, maybe twelve or fifteen hens and three or four roosters. If the setting sun was just right and the rooster turned, his whole breast shone like fire. Riding our bikes down the lanes, we heard the rooster cackling, the sound sharp, sudden and thrilling.” If only he’d given us more of that and less of this: “Pick-and-shovel work was considered the least skilled and hardest of manual labors, and you were warned that it was what you would end up doing for the rest of your natural life if you didn’t get a good job, the rest of your natural life being somehow longer and worse than just your life. Working on the railroad as a section hand laying track was also considered quite limited…You were constantly told you needed to amount to something, but you were never told what…”

When I read, I sometimes hear a voice in my head speaking the words. In this book, it was Andy Rooney’s voice I heard. I realized that the style of Thayer’s memoir reminded me of Mr. Rooney’s style in the short pieces he does at the end of “60 Minutes”, where it works quite well. Over the course of full-length book, it wears very thin.

A blurb on the back cover of Hooligan asserts that Mr. Thayer is “known in some circles as a Mormon Hemingway.” Another touts him as “One of the finest writers the LDS Church has yet produced”. I don’t much like Hemingway, but I don’t see the parallels, either. I can’t dispute the latter claim, because I don’t know of any other writers “produced” by the LDS church. In a genre that includes works by Annie Dillard, Bobbie Ann Mason, Rick Bragg, Russell Baker, Robert MacNeil, Pete Hamill, Joan Didion, Elie Wiesel (I, too, can make lists), Hooligan falls far from the standard of excellence. Read An American Childhood or A Drinking Life. You’ll learn something, you’ll feel something. You’ll wish you could meet the author. That’s what reading a memoir should do for you. show less

This memoir is truly a boy's story. The narrator told the story from a boy's point of view with vivid details and wonderful vignettes. From the first page, where he comments "We were to be seen and not heard.", the narrative is filled with moments that resonated for me even though my own boyhood was much different than the author's. I found the episodic style another aspect that made this like a boy's story for it seemed more natural that he would tell it in this, somewhat unorganized, show more manner. Nevertheless I looked forward to each chapter and the new events and information that it would bring. The characters and events seemed real even when we learn few details about them.

The memoir provided sufficient detail to bring a different place and time alive. The accumulation of episodes and events led to a rich picture of another era when things were truly simpler. Again this rang true to me based on my own boyhood. The narrator includes changes in his life like the separation of his parents and his school experiences that provide an additional layer of meaning for the memoir. While there was a certain detachment of the narrator from all of this, the result for this reader was that the memoir took on a dreamlike quality that enhanced the feeling of difference in this particular place.

Through its presentation as an episodic boy's story the overall effect was one that made me feel that I was a participant in this story. I was satisfied as the narrative ended that I had shared some part of this interesting boyhood. show less

I am enjoying this book when I take it at face value.

The book isn't a linear narrative, nor does it press on the reader an earnest message; instead, I read it as a collection of Douglas Thayer's memories, like the transcription of an oral history. It repeats, it loops back on itself, and it idealizes the past -- just as a story-teller will do. Within this framing device, however, the book also reveals a lot about the author: pride in his home, warm regard for his community, and a knowing show more reexamination of his growth in faith.

I knew very little about growing up in the West, and nearly nothing about the author's church -- which I will confess initially attracted me, a Midwest Catholic, to the book. As I read it, I felt a resonance with other stories of growing up at the time, and I also recognized a little of my own childhood developing awareness of religion, morality (I was tweaked when the author writes that membership in the Boy Scouts required him to be moral), and the world around me.

Another interesting aspect of this book was Thayer's attitude toward World War II: he and his friends were eager to go off to war as soon as they were old enough. Contemporary attitudes condemn war out of hand, but that denies the validity of feelings like those the author expresses.

I like the Thayer's voice, too. It captures a real boy's focus on fighting, fishing, and play, but there are grace notes in an adult's knowing tone that save the book from being purely naive.

There's no shortage of (auto)biographies about growing up in the same decades, and I have read quite a few of them. This one fits in well with the others because it tells about a community -- Utah's Mormons -- that's not often discussed, and so it will stay on my bookshelf. show less