Variation West

by Ardyth Kennelly

Set mainly in Salt Lake City and other parts of Utah, Variation West covers more than a century of western life and history. But Ardyth Kennelly's sweeping final novel also covers the wider territory of the human heart: how it motivates people to love, to work, to survive - and to do violence to themselves or others.

Thirteen-year-old Hindle Lee, her mother dead and her father on the run after leading the Mormons' 1857 massacre of a wagon train at Mountain Meadows, goes to work in a convalescent home and eventually takes on a career as an "eclectic physician of women's ailments." Her sister Lucitie travels to England and back and becomes part of a four-generation hairdressing dynasty. Through the humorous, strange, and tragic stories of Hindle's patients, and through the authentic speech, sense of place, and experience of historical events that Kennelly re-creates for us, Salt Lake City of the nineteenth century comes alive.

That past, made mythic through the mind of a little Australian girl, are handed down to Hindle's granddaughter Rosetta. With a spirit hungry to know the world, Rosetta feels keenly the strangeness of time, the presence of the past in the here and now. She and her cousin Lavonne, working as beauty operators and never separated for longs, must deal all their lives with the hard truths about men, women, and beauty, and with different kinds of fanaticism and violence. All these elements are drawn together in a final reverberating event that only an artist could make meaningful.

760 pages, Paperback

First published November 13, 2014

About the author

Ardyth Matilda Kennelly was an American novelist with five works of historical/literary fiction published between 1949 and 1956, and one published posthumously, in 2014.

Reviews

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mother and grandmother shared their love of Ardyth Kennelly's books with me--I remember checking them out of the library when I was about 12. This newly-discovered novel is, as the publisher's description says, darker, with more adult themes than her earlier novels, but still vastly enjoyable (though I probably would not have been allowed to read it at age 12!)

This is a fascinating family saga spanning the early days of Salt Lake City through two World Wars and the Viet Nam War, set against the backdrop of the Mormon church. What saves darkness from turning into sordidness is the sweetness of seeing things through the eyes of characters like Hindle, Wyandra, and Rosetta. Think Fannie Flagg in a darker mode, but still with plenty of common sense and humor.

Now that I've finished it, I feel sort of lost, saying goodbye to these wonderful characters.

[M.T. Kearney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was so excited to read Variation West by Ardyth Kennelly because I'm a fan of her other books (that were written in the 1940s and 1950s). Published posthumously, Variation West starts out in typical Kennelly fashion focusing on a specific family practicing the Mormon lifestyle in Salt Lake City in the mid-1800s. However, this sweeping story soon takes a different turn leaving what I thought were the main characters in the dust to focus on a side character. After following this character for a couple of hundred pages (Did I mention this book is over 700 pages long?), that character is dropped at a most intriguing point and then we are on to new main character.
The transition between all these characters is choppy, in my opinion.
The story structure follows this same pattern through the lives of several more characters who are all loosely related. The over-arching theme that ties all of them together is the Mountain Meadow Massacre that occurred in 1857.
Over the length of the book, the cozy tone changes from that which got Kennelly published in the 1940s and 1950s to a story that reads like a Chuck Palahniuk book. In other words, things get stranger and stranger. Also, there is a lot of focus on twisted sexual practices, although there are no graphic descriptions -- Kennelly's writing is extremely veiled.
I was disappointed with this work as it wasn't the Kennelly I expected. But I have to admit it was interesting read. Kennelly definitely knew how to hook her readers.