A Mormon Odyssey: Jack Harrell’s “The Boy Comes Home”

Reposted from Mormon Short Stories substack.

Jack Harrell’s “The Boy Comes Home” won the 2024 AML award for short story, but accolades be damned, what really matters is that this story is quite simply the best story I have ever read about the intimate details of how Mormon faith crises affect both the lives of those who experience them as well as the lives of those who love those who experience them but do not experience them personally themselves. A story for our times. A story for the ages. A story about the all too often complex realities of coming home. A Mormon Odyssey of sorts.

Because I will only be discussing a single story, and because this story is available free online—it was published by Wayfare on Feb. 22, 2024—I will go into more detail and reveal more spoilers than I normally do, so please read the story before you read my analysis. Harrell’s unnamed “boy” may not be the Odysseus of Homer’s epic, let alone the Matt Damon of Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation. He doesn’t need to pass through the narrow strait between a deadly whirlpool and a six-headed monster, he doesn’t have to AA himself from addictive amnesia-inducing lotus flowers, he isn’t forced to kill a giant Cyclops. He doesn’t even have to tie himself—or be tied by his brothers like Nephi—to his ship’s mast. He also doesn’t have to face a disgruntled wife who he abandoned for two decades. In a home chock-full of 108 ill-meaning and ill-behaved suitors no less. And the story comes without the all-out sensory assault of Nolan’s sound effects and soundtrack, too. But that doesn’t mean that the boy’s return home is any less treacherous than Odysseus’s—either for himself or for those he loves (at least after a fashion) and those who love him (like only a mother can).

At the heart of Harrell’s story lies the all-too-common current reality of a mixed-faith Mormon home broken by a recent divorce and an estranged son, the aforementioned titular boy. The mise-en-scène is a boy “who hasn’t been home since leaving for college” finally at long last returning home for his father’s second wedding to his soon-to-be new stepmother. It is perhaps not stated explicitly, but we are left to assume that he probably hasn’t set foot in a Mormon church since leaving home, and shacking up with his girlfriend, either. His two sisters are less complicated, or at least have less complicated relationships with their mother who they are “just like, wanting the things she wants” and “let[ting] her love them, which is all she wants from her boy”—even if only one sister was actually married in the temple. While the father’s nuptials provide the occasion for this diminutive homecoming of sorts, the specific scene depicted in the story is simply the boy’s brief stop by the house to see his mother for a “few minutes” while he “pick[s] up some things from his childhood.” But a lot of complex familial and religious tension is packed into this short story about these two ships passing in the night.

In the simplest sense, “The Boy” is basically just a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story. It is the story of a late-teen/young twenty-something gradually asserting his own autonomy from his parents and moving off to “college on the other side of the state” in large part because he wants to “get away” from his mother. Even as a five-year-old, he was already free-spirited, jumping off the “diving board” into the “deep end” of the pool. Then on to adolescence with its “city league football” and “fights about his friends, his bedtime, his video games.” His mom may have been too “big on rules” from time to time, after all that was the “way she was raised” herself, but by fifteen her boy was all “Back off, mom” and “Jeez, mom! Give it a rest.” This independent streak may not have come entirely out of the blue, but it still “blindsided her” nonetheless. He had not only “moved beyond her reach,” but he “just kept moving” on from there.

Now he is at college on the other side of the state living with his girlfriend out of wedlock. By now, a mission is completely out of the question, if it had ever been in the offing in the first place at all. The boy has been stretching his legs, possibly even sowing some wild oats, for quite some time now. Nothing extreme or dangerous, but certainly not the simple orthodox life that his good Mormon mother had imagined for him. He has simply come of age in a different age than hers, and he has put his own mark on it to boot. His mother’s one conciliation is that he has finally, however belatedly, however fleetingly, at last come home. At least for a moment. He is not exactly a returning conquering hero, and her own open arms are perhaps little more than wishful thinking. More hopeful than assured, but she is now once again, like always, loving him the “best she knew how.”

At a deeper level, however, “The Boy” is an inverted Bildungsroman. It is told in third person, but in a limited third person that sticks close to and reveals not the mind of the son who is coming-of-age, but of the mother who is sliding deep into middle age, just shy of a mid-life crisis, precipitated at least in part by the growing distance between herself and her son, having already lost her recently divorced husband to his new wife. Kind of like a Catcher in the Rye told from the perspective of Holden’s middle-aged mom. This story focuses on the mom’s concerns, anxieties, insecurities, broken dreams, and simple desire to hold it all together and love her son in spite of whatever he or she thinks about their relationship. Most importantly, she realizes that her opportunity is short, so she wants to get things “right” and tenuously maintain “some connection to her son” in the brief “precious moments” that she has with him lest she risk “losing him forever.” She may be overthinking things, perhaps even making inadvertent mistakes, but her worries are the worries of one trying to love too much rather than too little, as perhaps only a mother can.

But the fundamental dynamics of both the boy’s growth toward independence and his mother’s loss of her son’s innocence are shaped principally by their different relationships to the Mormon faith. The boy’s parents are fundamentally “good people, dedicated to the Church and the principles of home and family,” even if they “somehow knew” early on that their marriage probably “wouldn’t last forever.” The “only question was when,” and apparently when is now now even if it still “hurt[s]” to see just “how easily he walked away from their life.” That they both “still [go] to church” does little to ease the pain, instead only opening up a Pandora’s box of questions about “their connection to the children”: “What was sealed and what was broken?”

What is perhaps most poignant in all of this is that the mother has learned to walk on eggshells, struggling desperately to remember that she needs to “stop herself” from worrying about her own concerns because she needs to be the grownup in the room and “think about” her son instead. She “can’t look anxious.” She can’t show that she is “disappointed.” She “mustn’t do anything he can’t ‘handle.’” She has to “compl[y] with the distance he puts between them.” Above all, she knows not to “ask about the Church.” This story is primarily about this delicate dance, this tiptoeing through the minefields created by the son’s decision to leave the church and the strain it puts upon his relationship with his mom. This strain is depicted thoughtfully in the subtle details of the story as the mother must game plan how to not let this religious difference break their relationship.

The “welding link” of sacred “covenants” that once held their family together is fraying, but perhaps not beyond repair. Her son may be moving ever further away from her, arguably an inevitable part of growing up, and distancing himself further still from the church, a decision he is far from alone in making, yet there is still something that “seals” her to her family “despite the choices of others.” However trying, however exhausting, however downright soul-crushing, she keeps hope alive, doing the best by her son that she knows how, however tenuous and tendential that may be. Ultimately, religion proves to be both the cross that the mother must bear and the strength that bears her up no matter how far her son may stray from it. It is also perhaps also the basket in which she has put all her eggs, so that when her son strays from that faith there is little else left to bind him to the family. The tension between the mother’s heavy cross and the son’s unbearably light unboundedness is what animates this story, turning it into a poignant and moving parable for our times.

The story is told from the perspective of the mother, so it obviously sympathizes with her Herculean, even Sisyphean, task of navigating a fraught intergenerational conflict precariously balanced on the precipice of an ever-widening religious chasm. The story carefully reveals her pain, studiously examines her equal devotion to both child and church, and largely exonerates her for, if nothing else, doing the best that she knows how. Her son’s probably many, but likely minor, grievances, betrayals, and disappointments are perhaps acknowledged by his mother’s forthright admission that she “knows she made mistakes.” Which, to her credit, is more than many parents can say, including ones who have made many more mistakes and made far less diligent effort than she has.

There is one particularly poignant moment in the story, however, when even the mother herself admits, “What does she want? She doesn’t know.” She’s improvising, grasping at straws, throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. But some days, in a situation such as this, caught in her own strait between the Scylla of her God and the Charybdis of her son, what more can a mother do? We can hear the son’s voice through the cracks in the narrative, but he is not the star of this show. The spotlight does not shine on him. Not today. Narratively speaking, he is a two-bit player in the drama of his mom’s life. We know no more about the inner workings of his mind than we do of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s. All we can do is guess, but we can at least make an educated one. That perhaps is for another story, however. What this story does tell us about the boy is that he is the love of his mom’s life, the apple of her eye, her most cherished dream. And in that sense he is seen and heard, albeit only indirectly as refracted through the prism of his mother’s love.

Ultimately, however, the story concludes uncertainly in a liminal zone between hope and despair. The boy neither callously casts his mom off forever like a never-to-return prodigal son, nor does he rush back into her embrace like the little child he once one. Instead, he tenuously holds out an olive branch, inviting her to dinner. Or at least willingly and graciously accepting her invitation to dinner. Not a full-on olive tree mind you, but at least it is something. And something is always better than nothing, isn’t it?

If you are looking for a definitive exclamation point, however, you are not going to find it here. If you are looking for a no-holds-barred take down of how Mormon parents alienate their own children through their hyper-religiosity, you are not going to find it here. But if you are looking for solid reassurance that all you have to do is read your scriptures and go to church and all of your children will stay safely and comfortably in the church, you are not going to find that here either. I’m not going to go full-on Mark Twain on you and suggest that anyone looking for a moral to this story should be shot, but this is certainly not a blustering wear your self-righteousness or your self-unrighteousness on your sleeve kind of story either. No matter how sympathetic it is to a poor devout Mormon mother who not only loves her children deeply but wants nothing more than to have them not even love her back but more modestly simply let her love them.

What then is the moral of this subtle and nuanced cautionary tale? Certainly not that all is well in Zion or that if we just say our prayers and attend the temple regularly, then we will all hie off into the sunset and live happily ever after as an eternal forever family maybe somewhere near Kolob, to sort of mix genres between a Mormon western, a Latter-day Saint family sit community, and a beloved hymn. No. Life both in this life and in the hereafter is inevitably messy in worlds where individuals’ agency and temple covenants are often not easily aligned.

Certainly not that somehow the broken relationship between this mother and her son is somehow a unique, let alone aberrant, cross reserved only for the wicked. The cruel punishment of an angry God meted out unjustly and unfairly only to a few very unlucky souls. No. This is a story for our day. For the latter days. For Latter-day Saints. A universal story of Everyman and Everywoman. A real existential struggle coming soon to a theater, ward house, and home near you.

Certainly not that we must abandon all hope just because our children no longer attend church, have married outside the temple, or are simply shacking up out of wedlock altogether. No. This is a story of hope even in dark times, but it comes with a clear warning. Do not rush in where angels fear to tread. Walk gently. Tread gingerly. Respect others’ agency. Spend more time showing an increase of love by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned than reproving betimes with sharpness. Don’t even think of exercising unrighteous dominion. Practice random acts of kindness. And deliberately calculated ones as well. Don’t worry if you don’t know math all that well. The Lord looketh upon and rewardeth the heart. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Let the hearts of the parents turn toward their children and wait patiently, and work diligently, for those children’s hearts to turn back toward their parents.

This story isn’t bold enough to promise like Orson F. Whitney did with a hockey assist from Joseph Smith that “the eternal sealings of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant service in the Cause of Truth, would save not only themselves, but likewise their posterity. Though some of the sheep may wander, the eye of the Shepherd is upon them, and sooner or later they will feel the tentacles of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to the fold. Either in this life or the life to come, they will return.”

But it does try to keep hope alive. With faith in charity. And there’s a hat trick for you. Hope you enjoyed Spain’s utter dominance over Argentina which proves that with a good enough defense you don’t really need much offense. Sometimes, you don’t even need to score a hat trick. Sometimes a single virtue will do, but if you have to choose only one, this story reminds us that we should choose charity. It may not offer a prophetic guarantee that your own personal family homecomings will always run smoother than Odysseus’s—let alone the Fockers—but sometimes, like in this exquisitely beautiful and moving story, charity really is all we have left to fall back on. It may draw even to a tie in regulation once in a while, perhaps even have to go to penalty kicks from time to time, but it is still undefeated. It never fails. It’s a check that the bank will always cash. It may not make you a millionaire, but it will at least cover the tab for dinner, and if this also happens to be your lucky day, your children just might even join you.