UTAH!

In this debut literary novel, a young family begins a wildfire-inspired road trip across the Beehive State.

Seasonal wildfires continue to decimate the Western United States, and the town of Logan, Utah, is in danger of being consumed. Young married couple Lee and Becca Smith are about to hit the road—not a moment too soon. Lee has his mind on the Yellowstone supervolcano, which is apparently getting quite fidgety, while Becca doesn’t know if she can stand any more time alone with their infant daughter, Analise: “The two of them walked outside and Lee locked the front door of their tiny duplex behind them, Becca sarcastically thinking that the imminent destruction of the planet via a volcano or earthquake or wildfire seemed more pleasant to her than marriage or motherhood.” As they make their unhurried way across the state of Utah to a family wedding at Zion National Park, the couple fret about the parenthood that forced them into marriage and the many untaken roads in their separate lives. Along the way, they encounter a gaggle of friends, relatives, and strangers, including both Lee’s and Becca’s mothers and an unhinged veteran–turned–domestic terrorist. Rogers’ plainspoken prose deftly depicts ordinary life interspersed with images of personal and societal doom. Lee’s dreams feature “images of the bubbling caldera under Yellowstone,” its yellow and red lava “hissing, creeping, slowly making its way to the surface of the earth. The wolves and mountain lions and grizzly bears all fleeing from the impending disaster in the area in their mammalian omniscience.” The story is a bit too long and a bit too slow, with the human drama taking a back seat to the ominous climatic and volcanic imagery and literally apocalyptic conclusion. (Readers learn, in the introduction, that this volume is meant to be read as a manuscript found beneath the rubble of the former state of Utah.) While the title, premise, and Tolkien-inspired state map at the book’s beginning all suggest a work of levity—or at least satire—the actual novel is a largely dreary tale of people enacting the Freudian death drive. As pressures build in their own lives, so too do the pressures beneath the ailing Earth’s crust.

An intriguing but meandering volcano tale with little to balance its bleak worldview.