Presented to: Wayne Jorgensen
For: "Who Tarzan, Who Jane"
Marriage plays a central role in Mormon culture and religion, yet the complexities of marital union remain relatively unexplored in contemporary Mormon letters. Wayne Jorgensen charts new literary territory in his poignant, playful depiction of married love, "Who Jane, Who Tarzan." Told from the perspective of Jensen, a forty-ish academic with a buxom wife--Broad Bottom Betty Barrett--the story narrates Jensen's jealousy of Betty's handsome cowboy kissing-cousin. Jorgensen masterfully creates a narrator's voice that races, halts, sputters and tumbles on, mimicking the workings of Jensen's own consciousness as he wrestles with self-doubt and sexual desire. Mormon fiction involving sex--what little there is of it--typically focuses on illicit desire and congress; Jorgensen, conversely, details the perplexities and allure of lawful intercourse. Sensuous in its imagery, frankly carnal in its themes, "Who Jane, Who Tarzan" celebrates "immortal beauty's bodily moment" within a conventional Mormon marriage. Jorgensen, in perfectly controlled prose, returns the corporeal body to its rightful--its central--place within our chaste culture and in so doing champions husbands and wives as lovers, no small achievement for a Mormon writer.