Attempts to Be Whole
Scott Abbott. Immortal for Quite Some Time. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. 257 pp. Paperback: $24.95.
Reviewed by Scott Russell Morris,Ā Dialogue,Ā Summer 2017 (50:2).
In Immortal for Quite Some Time, Scott Abbott meditates on his brotherās death. That Abbott comes from a devoted Mormon family and that his brother was gay and died of AIDS is the tagline that seems to sell the bookāand this review, too, apparently, as I am writing that first despite my best intentionsābut really, this book is not about his brother John or about the homophobic culture of the LDS Church and many of its adherents, despite both of those being common motifs. It is about Scott Abbott. And, as all good personal non fiction is, it isnāt really about Scott Abbott either, but rather about what it means to grow up in a culture that is so overwhelmingly shaping that it āinforms even your sentence structureā (89) and then to find that you no longer want to have a place in it. In the last few weeks as Iāve contemplated what I might say about Abbottās book and as Iāve discussed it with others (one of whom saw it on my couch and asked, based on the title, if it was a vampire novel), Iāve described it in a few ways: It is about a BYU professor who was in the thick of the academic freedom concerns at BYU in the ā90s. Or, it is about a brother going through his dead brotherās things and thinking about what that might mean about the two of them, both nonconformists. For those more interested in writing and less about the story, Iāve told them about the most interesting feature of the book: It is written mostly as a series of journal entries, but there are a lot of other voices; for example, a female critic consistently questions the stories and rhetoric in Abbottās entries, which he responds to in a separate editorial voice. There are also his brotherās words, at first taken from found texts like notebooks, letters, and book annotations, but then, toward the end, John actually speaks from the dead, directly to the narrator, though mostly to underscore the fact that he no longer has a voice, deflecting questions by responding, āYou can probably answer that yourself,ā and āI donāt really get to answer that, do I?ā (207, 202).