girlhood's Nebraska: "I knew every farm, every tree, every field in the region around my home and they all called out to me" (Sergeant 219). All are moved by affection and nostalgia, often by gentle irony and wry humor, written "back before the world turned nasty," to echo the title of Pauline Mortensen's recent collection.

Today we get regionalism with a difference. The events and situations in what we may call the new Mormon fiction often border on the sensational but are in fact no more extreme than the news reported in the local papersholy murders, the obsessions of fundamentalists, the excesses of fanatics acting out compulsions rooted in their perverted reading of scripture. In his short story "Jenny, Captured by the Mormons," the very title echoing 19th-century melodrama,John Bennion gives us a returned missionary gone berserk ready to jump off the Church Office Building to prove he is an archangel (115-157). In a single work, Linda Sillitoe's novel Sideways to the Sun, we getwithin the framework of the seemingly normal life of a Mormon warda father's inexplicable desertion, a flight to Navajo country where the errant husband has taken up with a tribal woman, the abandoned wife's angry disaffection symbolized by her shedding her temple garments, adolescents skirting sexual precipices, and a polygamist fundamentalist's near seduction of a confused teenager. That's at the level of plot. The novel's meaningful action shows us a resourceful woman learning how to cope with doubt and adversity and achieving some measure of self-knowledge. An apt metaphor concludes the work:

Sunlight