Dream House on Golan Drive by David G. Pace (review)

David G. Pace is one of an emerging group of Mormon writers exploring the conflict between collective religious authority and personal authenticity. Properly understood as a work of magical realism, Dream House on Golan Drive tells young Riley Hartley’s coming-of-age story from the perspective of Zedekiah, a.k.a. Zed, one of the three immortal Nephites. Through Zed’s ironic voice, Pace rends the veil between the cosmology of his religion and the true-to-this-life experiences of a Mormon boy growing up in the 1970s and ’80s. As the maturing Riley explores his own propensities and doubts, he grows increasingly alienated from his familial and religious upbringing. Yet Dream House does not celebrate Riley’s rejection of the lds moral compass. Instead, Pace’s narrative poses the question that troubles wandering Mormons most: what will take the place of that compass?

The story begins as ten-year-old Riley moves with his large family from California to their “dream house” in a suburb just outside Salt Lake City. Riley’s father, Gus, is a well-respected lds lecturer with a gift for inspirational gab. Although a sincerely loving parent, Gus, like the paternalistic church he represents, sometimes inflicts collateral damage on the psyches of his flock through his allegiance to church doctrine.

When Riley is nearly twelve, the Hartley family takes in Lucy, a young convert and former heroin addict. Serving as the catalyst in Riley’s puberty-driven identity crisis, Lucy asks the kinds of questions that challenge all religious authorities. She wonders why, for example, the Mormon Word of Wisdom prohibits drinking tea or coffee, but not Coke or hot chocolate. Riley’s mother, Joan, tells Lucy that individuals are allowed to “embrace the larger meaning and decline soft drinks” (25). This discussion really concerns the spirit versus the letter of the law, but Gus and Joan cannot drift very far in the free-spiritual direction initiated by Lucy.

Riley, however, moves steadily away from the literal word. He and a few other boys secretly discover the joys of mutual masturbation, which Riley dubs “rubbing the genie lamp” (30). In a notebook provided by Lucy, he begins to collect words such as “genie,” “mendacity,” and “copulation” and to consider the problems involved in naming a thing. Ultimately, the novel celebrates the power of metaphor and symbol to expand and strengthen the possibilities of worldly and otherworldly experience, as opposed to the limitations imposed by literal “meaning.” In a lovely exploration of the efficacy of words, Riley wonders, “What if a fish had a name for the water it swam in?” (156). Would that name adequately capture the essence of the fish’s entire universe?

Presaging the next step in Riley’s self-awakening, Zed remarks: “Before people become free to do what they want, they take another journey. A guilt trip” (61). Sure enough, Riley is called to a meeting with Bishop Bowen, who reprimands him for his self-abuse. Ri-ley squeezes out some tears for the occasion, but experiences an increasingly familiar disjuncture between the shame he is expected to feel and the rapture he actually does feel while rubbing his metaphorical lamp.

The remainder of the novel chronicles Riley’s journey through college, a mission, two unfortunate marriages, and his discovery that the person he is becoming does not seem to be compatible either with lds doctrine or with his own strained notions of morality. However, the immortal Zed has the last word in the most unlikely of spiritual contexts—the New York City subway. In the end, he becomes Riley’s moral compass, reconnecting him with myth and mystery. Zed refers to himself as “one of the few people on earth who actually is perfect, although not in the way people usually mean when they quote the scripture” (16). Pace’s vision of a “perfect” immortal is definitely not usual, though he exhibits the ageless compassion of most great religious figures.

Furthermore, Dream House explores...