Presented to: Franklin Fisher
For: Bones
According to the awards committee, "Bones skillfully weaves numerous colorful narrative strands into an intriguing whole. In Lorin Hood, Franklin Fisher has created a complicated protagonist with a rich mystical, sensual, and artistic spirituality that meshes only uneasily with traditional Mormonism. His character develops sympathetically and deeply as he moves from adolescent doubt through phases of faith and self-discovery. This complexity is illustrated in descriptions of Lorin's paintings, such as this one of a crowded pod of peas: 'The peas themselves were of various densities. Some were solid and rough, with irregular bumps and knobs like asteroids, others were hard and smooth like pool balls, still others were shimmery and indistinct, and occupied the same spaces with the solid ones, overlapping like a double exposure. It had been an experiment in mixing modes of reality--how many peas from how many planes of existence could cohabit in the same canvas, much less the same pod?--and he made it an experiment in simultaneous perspectives as well' (243).
"The narrative starkly contrasts passages of straightforward description of common objects and events with dreams and visions that render all experiences uncommon. Fisher also succeeds in juxtaposing different emotional and intellectual approaches to Mormonism and in creating characters with varying levels of maturity in encounters with issues of universal spiritual significance. The novel is splashed with evocations of Mormon culture and folklore that are both frankly comic and insightful, as when Lorin sees himself as a thirteen-year-old Joseph Smith: 'he watched himself creep down the wooden steps with their curls of green paint, cross the yard and push open the wagon wheel gate and follow the dirt path up past the stock-dam, and then he joined himself. He was looking for a quiet place to pray for a revelation' (218). Lorin Hood's rites of passage as an artist, a Mormon, a sensualist, and a mystic are fascinating, controversial, disturbing and rewarding."