As a returned missionary, I found certain aspects of Tice’s story pretty implausible. It seems evident to me that the author either never served a mission or else deliberately altered certain basic realities of mission life so drastically as to make the experience unrecognizable. The story features two elders–Case, a smooth-talking cynic who baptizes by manipulation and evidently believes in nothing except his own power to make district leader, and Joseph, his earnest, socially inhibited companion. The familiar pairing of innocent and cad could have been interesting, but it wasn’t.
Write What You Know, Know What You Write: A Review of Bradford Tice’s “Missionaries”
By Eve
Zelophehad’s Daughters, 19 July 2007
http://zelophehadsdaughters.com/2007/07/19/write-what-you-know-know-what-you-write-a-review-of-bradford-tices-missionaries/
[Note that this story first appeared in the Summer Fiction issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and was then included in Best American Short Stories, 2008]
