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If Where You're Going Isn't Home #2
Of the World (If Where You're Going Isn't Home) (Volume 2) Paperback – June 16, 2013
Of the World is the second book of the groundbreaking coming-of-age trilogy If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home, the story of a boy growing up Mormon in America with a dream to play jazz trumpet. It follows Journey, the first book of the trilogy, and the recipient of a coveted ForeWord Clarion Five Star Review.
At sixteen, licensed to drive, armed with his trumpet and a talented band, Shake Tauffler begins to slip the harness of his home and neighborhood to test himself in the raw world of the streets and nightclubs of Salt Lake and its outlying towns. His threatened parents intensify their attacks on his emerging sexual and moral consciousness. Jazz and its negro heroes still define him, but his church takes off its gloves to teach him that in God’s eyes negroes are anything but heroes. The Huck Finn days of Journey are over; this is the rebel Shake, conflicted, torn, haunted by the faceless mystery of never being good enough and a hunger he can’t name, roaming the night alone or with his hoodlum pals, looking for refuge in hot cars, chance girls, violence, the cry of his trumpet, the faces of the American night.
In Of the World, the Shake we met in Journey takes on tougher obstacles, extends his reach, becomes streetwise, and continues to meet the senseless forces of his life openly, with courage, wit, defiance, joy, and wonder. He joins the Army and becomes a tanker. He embraces the freedom from his past, the simplicity and sense of life in the real world, and the chance to define himself from scratch among his fellow soldiers. But his past rears up when he falls in love and has to face the ruthless racial dogma his faith has tried to breed in him. He returns home, a man and a hero, to a family and church who are quick to remind him who and where he is. A mission when he turns nineteen lies just ahead. The road of the life he built is ending. One last defiant self-affirming act takes him across the American desert to close it down his way.
As the promised continuation of the first book, Of the World is for readers who enjoy losing themselves in a big American story. It is alive with scenes that weave the lives of his family, his band, his church buddies, and his hoodlum pals into a rich, kaleidoscopic, constantly moving narrative. The reach of its settings takes in Salt Lake and its outskirts towns, the secret holy places of the Mormon Church, the landscapes of Nevada, California, Las Vegas, Kentucky, the Mojave Desert.
At sixteen, licensed to drive, armed with his trumpet and a talented band, Shake Tauffler begins to slip the harness of his home and neighborhood to test himself in the raw world of the streets and nightclubs of Salt Lake and its outlying towns. His threatened parents intensify their attacks on his emerging sexual and moral consciousness. Jazz and its negro heroes still define him, but his church takes off its gloves to teach him that in God’s eyes negroes are anything but heroes. The Huck Finn days of Journey are over; this is the rebel Shake, conflicted, torn, haunted by the faceless mystery of never being good enough and a hunger he can’t name, roaming the night alone or with his hoodlum pals, looking for refuge in hot cars, chance girls, violence, the cry of his trumpet, the faces of the American night.
In Of the World, the Shake we met in Journey takes on tougher obstacles, extends his reach, becomes streetwise, and continues to meet the senseless forces of his life openly, with courage, wit, defiance, joy, and wonder. He joins the Army and becomes a tanker. He embraces the freedom from his past, the simplicity and sense of life in the real world, and the chance to define himself from scratch among his fellow soldiers. But his past rears up when he falls in love and has to face the ruthless racial dogma his faith has tried to breed in him. He returns home, a man and a hero, to a family and church who are quick to remind him who and where he is. A mission when he turns nineteen lies just ahead. The road of the life he built is ending. One last defiant self-affirming act takes him across the American desert to close it down his way.
As the promised continuation of the first book, Of the World is for readers who enjoy losing themselves in a big American story. It is alive with scenes that weave the lives of his family, his band, his church buddies, and his hoodlum pals into a rich, kaleidoscopic, constantly moving narrative. The reach of its settings takes in Salt Lake and its outskirts towns, the secret holy places of the Mormon Church, the landscapes of Nevada, California, Las Vegas, Kentucky, the Mojave Desert.
Unknown Binding
First published June 14, 2013
8 people want to read
About the author
Max Zimmer
17 books5 followersCalled a raw new voice in American fiction by Rolling Stone magazine for his story "Utah Died for Your Sins," Pushcart Prize winner Max Zimmer was born in Switzerland, brought across the Atlantic at the age of four, and raised in Utah in the take-no-prisoners crucible of the Mormon faith. He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Utah and was teaching fiction, working on a doctorate in writing, when he was invited East for a summer at Yaddo, an artists' retreat in the upstate New York town of Saratoga.
He never intended to stay in the East. He was there to finish a sprawling novel about the West and return home to his family and friends and the students he loved. But one reason for staying kept leading to another. From Yaddo he took a job teaching fiction in the Writing Arts Program at a SUNY campus in the town of Oswego on the shore of Lake Ontario. It was there, in the summer of 1978, that If Where You're Going Isn't Home was first conceived, as a long love story. From Oswego, he gravitated toward the city, lived and tended bar in Manhattan, and wrote for the power industry to pay the rent while he kept writing fiction, practicing and developing his craft. After seven years, more than ready for the mainland again, he moved to the northwest corner of New Jersey, where he married his wife Toni and settled in to write If Where You're Going Isn't Home from the beginning.
He still lived with the sense that Utah was his home. That he'd come East on some kind of visa. That after this thing, and then that thing, he'd get around to making the move back. Then, coming back from a visit to Utah one winter, he got off the plane at Newark Airport and headed for the door off the second floor of the terminal that led to a small roof where people stepped out for a smoke before heading for the baggage carousels downstairs. It was night, the high lights wore the halos of a cold mist, the whine of idling jets came from the tarmac, baggage trucks trailed their toy carts around below him, and the deep raw whistling hum of the highways came out of the surrounding night. And there it was. That singular response. That dimension of depth and permanence. The East had become his home. Utah had become a place he was from, a place he wrote about.
Among Max's published works are poems, stories, reviews, magazine articles, short biographies, and liner notes for jazz albums. Success came quickly once he started writing. Following its nomination by Ray Carver, his first published story "Utah Died for Your Sins" was awarded the Pushcart Prize, and singled out in a Rolling Stone review. He has read at venues ranging from coffee shops to SUNY writers' conferences to the PEN New Writers Series. E.L. Doctorow, John Cheever, Jack Cady, Grace Paley, Lewis Turco, and John Gardner are among other established writers who have acknowledged and championed his writing and storytelling talent. On a coast-to-coast college tour following the release of Ragtime, Doctorow read his work in Utah and called it the best writing he'd seen the entire tour. After meeting him on a similar tour following the publication of Falconer, Cheever enthusiastically promoted his work for the last five years of his life.
As a break from the long and ambitious project that If Where You're Going Isn't Home has been, Max writes poetry, short fiction, and for the last seven years an anything-goes humor and human interest column under the heading "Actual Mileage" -- inspired by a Ray Carver story -- for an automotive magazine with an international readership. As a rare break from writing period, he'll go out and hear some musicians he knows play jazz, spend time with his family, hang out with a circle of local writers, or take his homebuilt Porsche Speedster out and spend a couple of evening hours lost on the roads through the woods and hills and farmland out toward the Delaware River and the Poconos.
He never intended to stay in the East. He was there to finish a sprawling novel about the West and return home to his family and friends and the students he loved. But one reason for staying kept leading to another. From Yaddo he took a job teaching fiction in the Writing Arts Program at a SUNY campus in the town of Oswego on the shore of Lake Ontario. It was there, in the summer of 1978, that If Where You're Going Isn't Home was first conceived, as a long love story. From Oswego, he gravitated toward the city, lived and tended bar in Manhattan, and wrote for the power industry to pay the rent while he kept writing fiction, practicing and developing his craft. After seven years, more than ready for the mainland again, he moved to the northwest corner of New Jersey, where he married his wife Toni and settled in to write If Where You're Going Isn't Home from the beginning.
He still lived with the sense that Utah was his home. That he'd come East on some kind of visa. That after this thing, and then that thing, he'd get around to making the move back. Then, coming back from a visit to Utah one winter, he got off the plane at Newark Airport and headed for the door off the second floor of the terminal that led to a small roof where people stepped out for a smoke before heading for the baggage carousels downstairs. It was night, the high lights wore the halos of a cold mist, the whine of idling jets came from the tarmac, baggage trucks trailed their toy carts around below him, and the deep raw whistling hum of the highways came out of the surrounding night. And there it was. That singular response. That dimension of depth and permanence. The East had become his home. Utah had become a place he was from, a place he wrote about.
Among Max's published works are poems, stories, reviews, magazine articles, short biographies, and liner notes for jazz albums. Success came quickly once he started writing. Following its nomination by Ray Carver, his first published story "Utah Died for Your Sins" was awarded the Pushcart Prize, and singled out in a Rolling Stone review. He has read at venues ranging from coffee shops to SUNY writers' conferences to the PEN New Writers Series. E.L. Doctorow, John Cheever, Jack Cady, Grace Paley, Lewis Turco, and John Gardner are among other established writers who have acknowledged and championed his writing and storytelling talent. On a coast-to-coast college tour following the release of Ragtime, Doctorow read his work in Utah and called it the best writing he'd seen the entire tour. After meeting him on a similar tour following the publication of Falconer, Cheever enthusiastically promoted his work for the last five years of his life.
As a break from the long and ambitious project that If Where You're Going Isn't Home has been, Max writes poetry, short fiction, and for the last seven years an anything-goes humor and human interest column under the heading "Actual Mileage" -- inspired by a Ray Carver story -- for an automotive magazine with an international readership. As a rare break from writing period, he'll go out and hear some musicians he knows play jazz, spend time with his family, hang out with a circle of local writers, or take his homebuilt Porsche Speedster out and spend a couple of evening hours lost on the roads through the woods and hills and farmland out toward the Delaware River and the Poconos.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 17, 2013
Loved this 2nd book of the trilogy even more than the first. Reading it is like listening to great Jazz. Very satisfying. Can't wait for book 3!
Displaying 1 of 1 review