What do you think?
Rate this book
If Where You're Going Isn't Home #1
Journey (If Where You're Going Isn't Home) by Zimmer, Max (2012) Paperback
Journey, recipient of a Foreword Clarion Five Star Review, is the first book of the coming-of-age trilogy If Where You're Going Isn't Home by prize-winning short story writer and author Max Zimmer.
1956. Shake Tauffler hears a line of music on the radio of a cattle truck and discovers his dream to play jazz trumpet. His family is moving one last time -- from a southern Utah ranch to a town outside Salt Lake -- on his father's quest to bring his family from Switzerland to the heartland of the Mormon church. In two months, when Shake turns twelve, he'll join his buddies on a shared journey through the ranks, rituals, lessons, and duties of his father's take-no-prisoners religion. At the same time, armed with a used trumpet and his bike, he'll start another journey, on his own, to a place whose high priests aren't his father's friends but the Negro greats of jazz, men he's been taught to believe are cursed but from whose music he learns everything he dreams of being.
Shaded with Huck Finn and James Dean, Shake Tauffler is a kid anyone will recognize, a kid who responds to bigotry, abuse, repression, hypocrisy, rejection, and death with courage, humor, heartbreak, sometimes pain, always wonder. His rites of passage are keenly drawn and vividly familiar, his dream to play jazz trumpet that of most any musician. But his story of growing up Mormon in America uses the familiar territory of our own lives to take us to an altogether different place.
Lyrical, rowdy, unflinching, Journey follows Shake across the first four years of a decade-long search for the clarity and flight of a trumpet line to lift him like a steel bird out from under the iron sky of his faith. It is a search that ends -- for now -- in a truce of startling tenderness.
1956. Shake Tauffler hears a line of music on the radio of a cattle truck and discovers his dream to play jazz trumpet. His family is moving one last time -- from a southern Utah ranch to a town outside Salt Lake -- on his father's quest to bring his family from Switzerland to the heartland of the Mormon church. In two months, when Shake turns twelve, he'll join his buddies on a shared journey through the ranks, rituals, lessons, and duties of his father's take-no-prisoners religion. At the same time, armed with a used trumpet and his bike, he'll start another journey, on his own, to a place whose high priests aren't his father's friends but the Negro greats of jazz, men he's been taught to believe are cursed but from whose music he learns everything he dreams of being.
Shaded with Huck Finn and James Dean, Shake Tauffler is a kid anyone will recognize, a kid who responds to bigotry, abuse, repression, hypocrisy, rejection, and death with courage, humor, heartbreak, sometimes pain, always wonder. His rites of passage are keenly drawn and vividly familiar, his dream to play jazz trumpet that of most any musician. But his story of growing up Mormon in America uses the familiar territory of our own lives to take us to an altogether different place.
Lyrical, rowdy, unflinching, Journey follows Shake across the first four years of a decade-long search for the clarity and flight of a trumpet line to lift him like a steel bird out from under the iron sky of his faith. It is a search that ends -- for now -- in a truce of startling tenderness.
Paperback
First published May 16, 2012
2 people are currently reading
36 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 15, 2016
I applaud the author for taking on a difficult subject (growing up Mormon) and making it somewhat interesting reading. I woulda given this book 4 stars just for that. However the annoying you-are-the-main-character present-tense narrative alone irritated me so much I wanted to give the novel 1 star.
But I did finish Zimmer’s book. And I will read the next two. I was interested in the subject matter. So let’s talk about that.
Writing any story set in the Mormon community is gonna be a daunting task. Who are your readers? Mormons? Non-Mormons? Ex-Mormons? The jargon and history and multiple threads of belief, the intricate nuances of the Church and Mormon community are so vast, what does the writer include so a Non-Mormon can follow and make sense of things? Zimmer does a good job of figuring this out. Too good perhaps. He includes a lot! And perhaps that is why his coming-of-age tale is so bloated and long. The dialogue in the book is good, well-written and believable. But I felt most conversations about Mormon things dragged on a bit too long. They could have been cut in half and still retained their impact (maybe even heightened it). As far as brevity in explaining all things Mormon, one needs only look at Under The Banner of Heaven by Krakauer, or The Mormon Murders by those two Harvard Professors, or A Gathering of Saints by Lindsay, or From Housewife to Heretic by Johnson, or Leaving The Saints by Hugh Nibley’s daughter to see how, with just a few deftly written sentences, the writer can convey a point of Mormon history or nuance of Mormon belief without the characters going on and on about it for several pages. However, that being said, I also get that Zimmer was using these conversations (especially with the Sunday School Teacher) to build an overall sense that these kids are being somewhat brainwashed and indoctrinated. The comments and questions Shake and his friends have for their Sunday School Teacher and parents are insightful and real. These are questions that all Mormon kids ask. And the pat answers that the Sunday School Teacher and the parents give the kids are all too real…and sad. I am sure that Zimmer is setting the stage in books to come for his main character Shakes to question and perhaps lose his faith.
Zimmer does an excellent job of describing Mormon’s belief in ‘testimony’ above all else. Don’t question things. Once the Church leaders have spoken the thinking has been done. Wait for that Burning in the Bosom. It is your testimony. Don’t ever deny it. We start to see that teaching kids these things at such a young age is a mind f@$%#K! Especially in regards to the Mormon Priesthood that is bestowed upon Shakes at an early age. Zimmer does a great job of giving his young characters the impression that with this Priesthood comes supernatural powers that they can use for god knows what…as long as they are faithful enough and never masturbate. I particularly enjoyed the part where Shake was sweating out his Priesthood interview and lying about his masturbation habits to his Bishop.
Overall. Good job! Looking forward to reading the next book. Will have more to say on the series with book 2.
But I did finish Zimmer’s book. And I will read the next two. I was interested in the subject matter. So let’s talk about that.
Writing any story set in the Mormon community is gonna be a daunting task. Who are your readers? Mormons? Non-Mormons? Ex-Mormons? The jargon and history and multiple threads of belief, the intricate nuances of the Church and Mormon community are so vast, what does the writer include so a Non-Mormon can follow and make sense of things? Zimmer does a good job of figuring this out. Too good perhaps. He includes a lot! And perhaps that is why his coming-of-age tale is so bloated and long. The dialogue in the book is good, well-written and believable. But I felt most conversations about Mormon things dragged on a bit too long. They could have been cut in half and still retained their impact (maybe even heightened it). As far as brevity in explaining all things Mormon, one needs only look at Under The Banner of Heaven by Krakauer, or The Mormon Murders by those two Harvard Professors, or A Gathering of Saints by Lindsay, or From Housewife to Heretic by Johnson, or Leaving The Saints by Hugh Nibley’s daughter to see how, with just a few deftly written sentences, the writer can convey a point of Mormon history or nuance of Mormon belief without the characters going on and on about it for several pages. However, that being said, I also get that Zimmer was using these conversations (especially with the Sunday School Teacher) to build an overall sense that these kids are being somewhat brainwashed and indoctrinated. The comments and questions Shake and his friends have for their Sunday School Teacher and parents are insightful and real. These are questions that all Mormon kids ask. And the pat answers that the Sunday School Teacher and the parents give the kids are all too real…and sad. I am sure that Zimmer is setting the stage in books to come for his main character Shakes to question and perhaps lose his faith.
Zimmer does an excellent job of describing Mormon’s belief in ‘testimony’ above all else. Don’t question things. Once the Church leaders have spoken the thinking has been done. Wait for that Burning in the Bosom. It is your testimony. Don’t ever deny it. We start to see that teaching kids these things at such a young age is a mind f@$%#K! Especially in regards to the Mormon Priesthood that is bestowed upon Shakes at an early age. Zimmer does a great job of giving his young characters the impression that with this Priesthood comes supernatural powers that they can use for god knows what…as long as they are faithful enough and never masturbate. I particularly enjoyed the part where Shake was sweating out his Priesthood interview and lying about his masturbation habits to his Bishop.
Overall. Good job! Looking forward to reading the next book. Will have more to say on the series with book 2.
September 17, 2013
Great writer. Couldn't put this book down. Brought back a lot of memories of my own journey growing up in Salt Lake (though as a non-Mormon). The music in the book was especially moving for me.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews