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Dominant Traits
Enslaved by their own fears, the characters in this riveting collection are straining for redemption. Their choices reflect the well-worn patterns we carve for ourselves through our idiosyncrasies—our dominant traits. A basketball coach teaches moral ambiguity; a divorcé clutches at sanity; a mother struggles with her son’s paternity; a childless man regrets his youthful onanism. Through their shared experiences these tangible characters undergo the sad, hilarious search for wholeness and security.
Set in the stark isolated landscape of Southern Alberta, Eric Freeze’s debut collection is a deftly-crafted study of desperate mortals careening through their liminal moments, grasping for certainty.
Set in the stark isolated landscape of Southern Alberta, Eric Freeze’s debut collection is a deftly-crafted study of desperate mortals careening through their liminal moments, grasping for certainty.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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June 28, 2013
The following is a review I wrote which was previously published in Irreantum, the literary journal sponsored by the Association for Mormon Letters (AML). The AML has interest in Mr. Freeze's work because of his religious background:
IN AMERICAN POLITICS these days, it’s common for politicians to cast themselves as the Washington outsider, insisting they are no different from Mr. and Mrs. Main Street back home. Their constituents seem to admire this attitude as an ideal, always hoping for someone who is rooted beside them in worldview and who will have the integrity to, as they say, “stay above the fray,” or not succumb to a political climate rife with the temptation to compromise, or much worse, sell out.
Many in the Mormon literary community have an interest in seeing writers with a Mormon background succeed outside our community, while remaining a fair representative of their worldview, someone who is, essentially, an insider. I know of people who have purported that it is impossible to write honestly about the Mormon life without being excommunicated, a thought that seems bizarre to me. And yet, we who have been watching the MoLit community have seen talented people leave the Church in pursuit of their art, among these is novelist Brian Evenson. In a 2006 interview with Angela Stubbs, Evenson remarked, “There's a lot of talk in Mormon artistic circles about ‘The great Mormon novel’ as being something on the horizon, but I tend to think that as long as Mormonism controls the dissemination of information about it so tightly, the so-called great Mormon novel will have to be an act of heresy.” (http://www.bookslut.com/features/2006...). He seems to argue that no insider (no faithful Latter-day Saint) can be a writer of “great” literature.
Enter Eric Freeze, a writer who describes himself as "a practicing, temple-recommend-toting, EQ president-serving, FHE-holding Latter-day Saint." Granted, Freeze is not a novelist—at least, he hasn’t produced a novel yet—but he is both an outsider, one who has never published in the Mormon venues, and an insider. And he writes great, heresy-free fiction. His first collection of short fiction, Dominant Traits, published by Dufour Editions, is comprised of twelve stories, most having previously appeared in literary journals like The Boston Review and The Fiddlehead, an impressive literary journal out of Freeze’s native Canada.
Four of the twelve short stories in Dominant Traits have characters, main or otherwise, who are identified as Mormon (“Wrong Time for Caution,” “Poachers,” “Goths,” and “Shoot the Moon”, while a fifth story, “The Beet Farmer,” gives us a family coded as Mormon via a reference to how the boy carried his lunch box “the way that the twelve-year-old deacons in his church carried the sacrament trays” (24). Freeze’s Mormon characters are not stereotypical, but deep, complex human beings. Some are believing Mormons, like the youth leader in who acts as gatekeeper at a Stake dance in the story “Goths.” Some are Mormon in name only, like Benny in “Wrong Time for Caution,” a man attends the Mormon church because it will cover his rent if he swears off smoking. Other characters range in between and, like us all, are imperfect in their faith.
But such imperfections provide the texture of Freeze’s fiction. Perhaps my favorite story in Dominant Traits is “Poachers.” The setting is a small Mormon community in southern Alberta. The family is troubled by an infidelity that produced a child, a rambunctious son who, at age twelve, has learned about dominant and recessive traits. He then openly questions why he has blue eyes when the rest of the family is brown-eyed. His parents feel he has the right to know the reality of his paternity, so they take their son on a camping trip where they plan to break the news that he is the product of his mother’s adultery. The story, while serious in topic, also pokes fun at Mormon problem solving techniques, though Freeze’s humor is subtle. For instance, Freeze classically delivers a self-help book (written by Dr. Laura of course) into the mother’s hands via the nosey neighbor across the street. Later in the story, he literally sends in the Boy Scouts to keep the problem child distracted and busy. The story’s humor is both Mormon-quirky and Mormon-deprecating without being condescending or pejorative. Originally published in The Antigonish Review, “Poachers” is not only a story of redemption, but clear evidence that fiction about Mormon life and values, when well-written, can stand on its own outside our niche market.
The seven stories in Dominant Traits that do not identify Mormon characters still carry a decidedly Mormon flavor. In “Writing on Stone,” Freeze introduces us to a young man whose family was rejected from the Hutterite community. The death (and possible suicide) of a female cousin whom he loved in childhood drives him back to the strange Anabaptist community even though he believes he will not be welcome. The thematic exploration of excommunication and patriarchy are uncomfortably familiar, but each is balanced by an overarching sense of love and forgiveness.
In “A Prayer for the Cosmos,” we meet a basketball coach who knows right from wrong like he knows black from white, and yet the shades of gray tempt him when the team faces a championship run. His star player is failing the coach’s math class, a fact that should render the student ineligible to play, but no one outside the coaching circle knows this. He wrestles with this moral dilemma: Should he follows the rules, sit the player out, and unfairly punish the entire team and community because of one student’s one failure? Or should he wait to enact a punishment for the grade, thereby ensuring only the guilty suffers? And how culpable is he, as a teacher, for his student’s lack of learning?
Interestingly, in this same story, Freeze runs a tangential plotline that portrays another moral dilemma. The coach and his wife live next door to her former brother-in-law and his lonely mastiff, Otis, an animal that has already injured their own small dog. However, an obligation has been established: The neighbor expects Otis to be invited to the other side of the fence for play-dates with little Zeke, a much smaller dog. Embedded in this nearly silly second plot are the shadows of important Christian doctrine: Our neighbor is our brother; We are our brother’s keeper; Do for him as you’d want him to do for you; Forgive. These doctrines, though seemingly simply, become complex, especially when applied to his coaching dilemma. Who does he forgive? The failing student? Himself, the inept teacher? If he is his brother’s keeper, doesn’t that mean he has responsibilities to the failing student, but also the team and community? How would he want to be treated . . . if he were the student? Or if he were another member of the team? Suddenly even the most obvious, rule-based moral decision is fraught with traps. The coach takes the high road in making one ethical decision and the low road for the other. In the end, he reaps regret.
The other stories in Dominant Traits are equally sophisticated, equally complex and thought-provoking. All are brutally—and playfully—honest. He turns staid scenarios upside down. Clichés fall by the wayside. The underdog abounds, but doesn’t necessarily win and doesn’t necessarily lose. In “Dummy,” a young man who is part of a theater company witnesses a mutiny among the company of actors and resigns himself to playing the fool in order to keep his job. In “Shoot the Moon,” a college student deceives an aged friend to save the old man from a painful truth, but the price the pays student is high. In “Francis the Giant,” a science teacher pairs a top high school athlete with an unpopular, unintelligent classmate. Instead of helping his peer complete their project, the athlete ridicules him into an act of vengeance. Freeze also tackles stories about mental illness, intimidation, and even sexual maturation and infertility.
Yes, sex exists in Dominant Traits, though certainly not gratuitously. Yes, some of his characters swear—and not just with words found in the Bible. Yes, moral consequences are explored rather than defined. And yes, Freeze is a practicing Latter-day Saint who passes his temple recommend interviews. Be assured that readers will face Freeze’s characters head-on, hear them unfiltered, and see into their hearts, their minds, and, in one story, into the bedroom.
“Seven Little Stories about Sex,” the last story in the collection, possesses a level of intimacy that might make some practicing Latter-day Saints squirm. His seven little stories are vignettes which chronicle the burgeoning sexual awareness of a character who is referred to only as “the boy,” even though the reader follows him into his adulthood. The character, however, is no Peter Pan, no man-child locked in his own myopic quest for groping self-fulfillment. Instead, Freeze cops a narrative voice that sounds as God-like as a limited, third person point of view can: We see the raw, intimate details of his sexual awakening, but understand his journey as bewildering. We watch as his innocent desire grows up and grows into a deep longing to do what he cannot, to procreate with the woman he loves. The culminating act of marital love is written with tenderness and affection and is as essential to the story as the page itself.
Some Mormon readers will still likely call foul, claim the very existence of the story is needless, voyeuristic, inappropriate. However, what I see in the story is a tender revelation of the struggle and the pleasure the human male encounters as he comes to understand the body God gave him and, ultimately, the highest purpose for which it is created. “Seven Little Stories about Sex” is art in the same way Michelangelo’s David is art. Experiencing each, I believe, is intended to be a discovery of the divine design of man. Fortunately, literature can move beyond the limitations of visual art; Freeze’s final story is not static in the way a statue must be. Instead, it highlights man’s God-given freedom to choose, to be tempted, and to ultimately gain a perspective that broadens understanding and improves the soul. The scriptures teach that God’s followers are to be in the world, but not of the world. Freeze has placed this story squarely in the world, but the soul of the story is clearly somewhere far removed.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that Dominant Traits is a moral treatise or some sort of Message Fiction. It isn’t, but it isn’t iconoclastic either, and it certainly isn’t heresy. While any given reader may be less than enamored with one story or another, taken on the whole, Dominant Traits, has the potential to become one of the dominant short fiction collections in the Mormon canon, provided, of course, Mormon fiction needn’t be defined as stories solely about Mormon characters. Of course, Freeze’s collection has appeal well beyond the niche Mormon literary market and may serve as a primer for Mormon writers who aspire to cross-over with their short fiction.
IN AMERICAN POLITICS these days, it’s common for politicians to cast themselves as the Washington outsider, insisting they are no different from Mr. and Mrs. Main Street back home. Their constituents seem to admire this attitude as an ideal, always hoping for someone who is rooted beside them in worldview and who will have the integrity to, as they say, “stay above the fray,” or not succumb to a political climate rife with the temptation to compromise, or much worse, sell out.
Many in the Mormon literary community have an interest in seeing writers with a Mormon background succeed outside our community, while remaining a fair representative of their worldview, someone who is, essentially, an insider. I know of people who have purported that it is impossible to write honestly about the Mormon life without being excommunicated, a thought that seems bizarre to me. And yet, we who have been watching the MoLit community have seen talented people leave the Church in pursuit of their art, among these is novelist Brian Evenson. In a 2006 interview with Angela Stubbs, Evenson remarked, “There's a lot of talk in Mormon artistic circles about ‘The great Mormon novel’ as being something on the horizon, but I tend to think that as long as Mormonism controls the dissemination of information about it so tightly, the so-called great Mormon novel will have to be an act of heresy.” (http://www.bookslut.com/features/2006...). He seems to argue that no insider (no faithful Latter-day Saint) can be a writer of “great” literature.
Enter Eric Freeze, a writer who describes himself as "a practicing, temple-recommend-toting, EQ president-serving, FHE-holding Latter-day Saint." Granted, Freeze is not a novelist—at least, he hasn’t produced a novel yet—but he is both an outsider, one who has never published in the Mormon venues, and an insider. And he writes great, heresy-free fiction. His first collection of short fiction, Dominant Traits, published by Dufour Editions, is comprised of twelve stories, most having previously appeared in literary journals like The Boston Review and The Fiddlehead, an impressive literary journal out of Freeze’s native Canada.
Four of the twelve short stories in Dominant Traits have characters, main or otherwise, who are identified as Mormon (“Wrong Time for Caution,” “Poachers,” “Goths,” and “Shoot the Moon”, while a fifth story, “The Beet Farmer,” gives us a family coded as Mormon via a reference to how the boy carried his lunch box “the way that the twelve-year-old deacons in his church carried the sacrament trays” (24). Freeze’s Mormon characters are not stereotypical, but deep, complex human beings. Some are believing Mormons, like the youth leader in who acts as gatekeeper at a Stake dance in the story “Goths.” Some are Mormon in name only, like Benny in “Wrong Time for Caution,” a man attends the Mormon church because it will cover his rent if he swears off smoking. Other characters range in between and, like us all, are imperfect in their faith.
But such imperfections provide the texture of Freeze’s fiction. Perhaps my favorite story in Dominant Traits is “Poachers.” The setting is a small Mormon community in southern Alberta. The family is troubled by an infidelity that produced a child, a rambunctious son who, at age twelve, has learned about dominant and recessive traits. He then openly questions why he has blue eyes when the rest of the family is brown-eyed. His parents feel he has the right to know the reality of his paternity, so they take their son on a camping trip where they plan to break the news that he is the product of his mother’s adultery. The story, while serious in topic, also pokes fun at Mormon problem solving techniques, though Freeze’s humor is subtle. For instance, Freeze classically delivers a self-help book (written by Dr. Laura of course) into the mother’s hands via the nosey neighbor across the street. Later in the story, he literally sends in the Boy Scouts to keep the problem child distracted and busy. The story’s humor is both Mormon-quirky and Mormon-deprecating without being condescending or pejorative. Originally published in The Antigonish Review, “Poachers” is not only a story of redemption, but clear evidence that fiction about Mormon life and values, when well-written, can stand on its own outside our niche market.
The seven stories in Dominant Traits that do not identify Mormon characters still carry a decidedly Mormon flavor. In “Writing on Stone,” Freeze introduces us to a young man whose family was rejected from the Hutterite community. The death (and possible suicide) of a female cousin whom he loved in childhood drives him back to the strange Anabaptist community even though he believes he will not be welcome. The thematic exploration of excommunication and patriarchy are uncomfortably familiar, but each is balanced by an overarching sense of love and forgiveness.
In “A Prayer for the Cosmos,” we meet a basketball coach who knows right from wrong like he knows black from white, and yet the shades of gray tempt him when the team faces a championship run. His star player is failing the coach’s math class, a fact that should render the student ineligible to play, but no one outside the coaching circle knows this. He wrestles with this moral dilemma: Should he follows the rules, sit the player out, and unfairly punish the entire team and community because of one student’s one failure? Or should he wait to enact a punishment for the grade, thereby ensuring only the guilty suffers? And how culpable is he, as a teacher, for his student’s lack of learning?
Interestingly, in this same story, Freeze runs a tangential plotline that portrays another moral dilemma. The coach and his wife live next door to her former brother-in-law and his lonely mastiff, Otis, an animal that has already injured their own small dog. However, an obligation has been established: The neighbor expects Otis to be invited to the other side of the fence for play-dates with little Zeke, a much smaller dog. Embedded in this nearly silly second plot are the shadows of important Christian doctrine: Our neighbor is our brother; We are our brother’s keeper; Do for him as you’d want him to do for you; Forgive. These doctrines, though seemingly simply, become complex, especially when applied to his coaching dilemma. Who does he forgive? The failing student? Himself, the inept teacher? If he is his brother’s keeper, doesn’t that mean he has responsibilities to the failing student, but also the team and community? How would he want to be treated . . . if he were the student? Or if he were another member of the team? Suddenly even the most obvious, rule-based moral decision is fraught with traps. The coach takes the high road in making one ethical decision and the low road for the other. In the end, he reaps regret.
The other stories in Dominant Traits are equally sophisticated, equally complex and thought-provoking. All are brutally—and playfully—honest. He turns staid scenarios upside down. Clichés fall by the wayside. The underdog abounds, but doesn’t necessarily win and doesn’t necessarily lose. In “Dummy,” a young man who is part of a theater company witnesses a mutiny among the company of actors and resigns himself to playing the fool in order to keep his job. In “Shoot the Moon,” a college student deceives an aged friend to save the old man from a painful truth, but the price the pays student is high. In “Francis the Giant,” a science teacher pairs a top high school athlete with an unpopular, unintelligent classmate. Instead of helping his peer complete their project, the athlete ridicules him into an act of vengeance. Freeze also tackles stories about mental illness, intimidation, and even sexual maturation and infertility.
Yes, sex exists in Dominant Traits, though certainly not gratuitously. Yes, some of his characters swear—and not just with words found in the Bible. Yes, moral consequences are explored rather than defined. And yes, Freeze is a practicing Latter-day Saint who passes his temple recommend interviews. Be assured that readers will face Freeze’s characters head-on, hear them unfiltered, and see into their hearts, their minds, and, in one story, into the bedroom.
“Seven Little Stories about Sex,” the last story in the collection, possesses a level of intimacy that might make some practicing Latter-day Saints squirm. His seven little stories are vignettes which chronicle the burgeoning sexual awareness of a character who is referred to only as “the boy,” even though the reader follows him into his adulthood. The character, however, is no Peter Pan, no man-child locked in his own myopic quest for groping self-fulfillment. Instead, Freeze cops a narrative voice that sounds as God-like as a limited, third person point of view can: We see the raw, intimate details of his sexual awakening, but understand his journey as bewildering. We watch as his innocent desire grows up and grows into a deep longing to do what he cannot, to procreate with the woman he loves. The culminating act of marital love is written with tenderness and affection and is as essential to the story as the page itself.
Some Mormon readers will still likely call foul, claim the very existence of the story is needless, voyeuristic, inappropriate. However, what I see in the story is a tender revelation of the struggle and the pleasure the human male encounters as he comes to understand the body God gave him and, ultimately, the highest purpose for which it is created. “Seven Little Stories about Sex” is art in the same way Michelangelo’s David is art. Experiencing each, I believe, is intended to be a discovery of the divine design of man. Fortunately, literature can move beyond the limitations of visual art; Freeze’s final story is not static in the way a statue must be. Instead, it highlights man’s God-given freedom to choose, to be tempted, and to ultimately gain a perspective that broadens understanding and improves the soul. The scriptures teach that God’s followers are to be in the world, but not of the world. Freeze has placed this story squarely in the world, but the soul of the story is clearly somewhere far removed.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that Dominant Traits is a moral treatise or some sort of Message Fiction. It isn’t, but it isn’t iconoclastic either, and it certainly isn’t heresy. While any given reader may be less than enamored with one story or another, taken on the whole, Dominant Traits, has the potential to become one of the dominant short fiction collections in the Mormon canon, provided, of course, Mormon fiction needn’t be defined as stories solely about Mormon characters. Of course, Freeze’s collection has appeal well beyond the niche Mormon literary market and may serve as a primer for Mormon writers who aspire to cross-over with their short fiction.
October 30, 2012
I have never been to Canada. However, after reading these short stories, I feel like I know more than the average US citizen about the culture of southern Alberta.
The stories in here are all tied together by their setting in southern Alberta, Canada. Outside of that, the stories vary greatly. We get narratives from the point of view of an assistant basketball coach all the way to that of a middle-aged mother with a son of questionable birth. Somehow, Eric Freeze manages to write these stories convincingly; none of these personas seem foreign to the author. The imagery is consistent, and the language used engenders familiarity within the reader. There's also a lot to be taken from the author's ability to tell multiple small stories within the confines of a twelve-or-so-paged story, somehow fitting enough in to make each digression worthwhile.
Overall: Do read this. Each story within the collection is worth reading. The pace is enjoyable, and any level of reader could really appreciate the stories, whether it be for the skilled prose or the fascinating stories or a healthy combination of both; this collection has all of it.
The stories in here are all tied together by their setting in southern Alberta, Canada. Outside of that, the stories vary greatly. We get narratives from the point of view of an assistant basketball coach all the way to that of a middle-aged mother with a son of questionable birth. Somehow, Eric Freeze manages to write these stories convincingly; none of these personas seem foreign to the author. The imagery is consistent, and the language used engenders familiarity within the reader. There's also a lot to be taken from the author's ability to tell multiple small stories within the confines of a twelve-or-so-paged story, somehow fitting enough in to make each digression worthwhile.
Overall: Do read this. Each story within the collection is worth reading. The pace is enjoyable, and any level of reader could really appreciate the stories, whether it be for the skilled prose or the fascinating stories or a healthy combination of both; this collection has all of it.
February 2, 2013
This was an interesting collection of character studies. Freeze really paints a picture of Canada and it was worth reading if only for learning more about the culture. There are themes and images carried throughout the collection that tie the book together in interesting ways. However, in the first person perspective stories, I didn't get a feel of the unique characters' voices, which was disappointing. There were many unique and engaging ideas for stories in here, but they tended to run on and stop in a most unsatisfying manner. I kept waiting for some hook to attract my attention, but the stories lacked plot or engaging storylines.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews