THE LOST BOOK OF MORMON

A search for the roots of Mormonism.

Steinberg (Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, 2009), who is not a Mormon, admires The Book of Mormon and its translator and publisher, Joseph Smith. “Joseph’s ambition to publish his bible,” writes the author, “struck me as a refreshingly honest acknowledgment of what it means to be a writer, a regular Joe with an unreasonable faith in oneself and in literature.” Steinberg sees the book as an exemplary tale “about writing books.” Every few pages,” he notes, “the story’s various narrators describe to us how the writing of this book is going.” Moreover, he considers it a prototype of “the big American literary project…to create America in words and deliver it to the people in a book as big and shameless and unruly and haunted and deeply problematic as the country itself.” He admits, of course, that the book is a religious tract and Smith, a Mormon prophet, so to investigate “the difference between prophecy and fabrication, angels and inspiration, delusion and fact,” he “set out on a journey through the exotic locales of this lost Great American Novel.” Steinberg’s travelogue is more about those locales and his personal trials and self-doubts than about theology. His marriage was doomed, he confesses, and he was worried about his writing career, which explains his eagerness to learn about writing from Smith. His journey took him to Jerusalem, where the sect began; Central America, where seminal events occurred; the Midwest, site of the real Garden of Eden; and Hill Cumorah, in New York, where Smith allegedly dug up the golden plates on which the book was inscribed.

A mixed bag. Relating his occasionally amusing adventures in breezy slang, Steinberg seems to be vying for the same audience that has made Broadway’s Book of Mormon such a huge hit.