In four novels, If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home chronicles sixteen years in the growth of a boy to manhood from 12 to 28.
The genesis of this project is a love story I wrote in the summer of 1978. The story haunted me for years. What I eventually came to recognize was that its psychic and dramatic setting – what it was like to grow up Mormon in America – had never been put on the map of our collective consciousness in a universal way that readers everywhere, from all walks of life, all religions, all cultures, could reach and experience from the familiar territory of their own lives. To create that setting, I put the original story aside, and began where the story needed to begin – with a boy at the beginning of his duty to his father’s faith, and the birth of his dream to play jazz trumpet. It is still guided and informed by the love story that gave it life that summer.
Journey
BOOK one of the series
Journey is the first in what Max envisages as a sequence of four books that introduces us to his fictional alter ego, Shake Tauffler, and chronicles, in astonishing prose, his coming-of-age in Utah in the 50s and 60s.
As Journey opens, Shake Tauffler is just twelve and at the beginning of his journey to musical, moral, and sexual consciousness. Shake has moved to Bountiful, Utah with his brothers, sisters, and Swiss parents, who recently immigrated to the US. His new home in Salt Lake’s suburbs is where he is taught to be “in” but not “of” the world as a good Mormon boy. But jazz, sex, and his own humanity eventually make him “of” the world, despite his earnest efforts to toe those Mormon lines. He discovers jazz trumpet, makes a circle of buddies, uses his bicycle to escape from home, and notices girls for the first time. Shake’s innocence is never lost – even as he journeys with great intent and flawed execution through a Mormon path that is never the right fit for him. And so we root for his inevitable escape – and lament tragic losses along the way.
Of The World
book two of the serieS
At sixteen, licensed to drive, armed with his trumpet and a talented band, Shake Tauffler begins to slip the harness of his home and neighborhood to test himself in the raw world of the streets and nightclubs of Salt Lake and its outlying towns. His threatened parents intensify their attacks on his emerging sexual and moral consciousness. Jazz and its negro heroes still define him, but his church takes off its gloves to teach him that in God’s eyes negroes are anything but heroes. The Huck Finn days of Journey are over; this is the rebel Shake, conflicted, torn, haunted by the faceless mystery of never being good enough and a hunger he can’t name, roaming the night alone or with his hoodlum pals, looking for refuge in hot cars, chance girls, violence, the cry of his trumpet, the faces of the American night.
In Of the World, the Shake we met in Journey takes on tougher obstacles, extends his reach, becomes streetwise, and continues to meet the senseless forces of his life openly, with courage, wit, defiance, joy, and wonder. He joins the Army and becomes a tanker. He embraces the freedom from his past, the simplicity and sense of life in the real world, and the chance to define himself from scratch among his fellow soldiers. But his past rears up when he falls in love and has to face the ruthless racial dogma his faith has tried to breed in him. He returns home, a man and a hero, to a family and church who are quick to remind him who and where he is. A mission when he turns nineteen lies just ahead. The road of the life he built is ending. One last defiant self-affirming act takes him across the American desert to close it down his way.
As the promised continuation of the first book, Of the World is for readers who enjoy losing themselves in a big American story. It is alive with scenes that weave the lives of his family, his band, his church buddies, and his hoodlum pals into a rich, kaleidoscopic, constantly moving narrative. The reach of its settings takes in Salt Lake and its outskirts towns, the secret holy places of the Mormon Church, the landscapes of Nevada, California, Las Vegas, Kentucky, the Mojave Desert.
Not Into Night
book three of the serieS
Not Into Night opens with Shake at nineteen on a jet to Austria, where he will serve a two-year Mormon mission. 1963 is a tumultuous time for the United States as the civil rights movement rages in the South. Given his first love for a black girl, Cissy, and his devotion to the black heroes of jazz, the conflict deeply affects Shake. As the plane loads in Salt Lake, he reflects on the life he’s had to close down. College. His gift for jazz trumpet. The peril his younger brothers and sisters will face without him to buffer them from a disturbed mother and zealous father. His forays beyond the Mormon fenceline as he discovered sex, music, violence, and moral and emotional consciousness.
On his mission he finds a way to combine jazz trumpet with mission work, even as he wrestles through several “seniors” he is partnered with, good and bad. He manages to form an ad-hoc family with a wonderful couple and their daughter who is eager for an older brother. He works daily on his faith – until bad luck pairs him with a dangerous mission partner that quickly puts them both on a violent path to excommunication. One wild, drunken night with a Viennese prostitute threatens to undo years of discipline. Shake strikes a desperate deal with God to keep their sins secret, and even produces two exceedingly rare converts to the Mormon faith in the coming months. But eventually the road runs out. He is caught, faces a kangaroo court, and we leave Shake where we found him – lifting out of a city on a plane – bound this time not into night but west into the sun.
"Max Zimmer has written The Great American Mormon Novel. For decades, readers have depended upon a few extraordinary writers to understand fully what it means to be an American – Philip Roth, Julia Alvarez, Ralph Ellison, Erica Jong, John Updike. Zimmer has added a critical new dimension to our shared national understanding of who we are and how we got here in this sweeping narrative. Twelve-year-old Shake Tauffler’s decade-long journey through the Mormon Church and beyond will resonate with all Americans who ponder their soul and place in our changing national portrait."
/ michael strong /
When we first moved to Utah from Switzerland, for a few years we lived on a ranch called La Sal