Leif Enger showed up on the bill for our local bookstore's reading room (Village Books), promoting his latest novel So Brave, Young, and Handsome an extremely worthwhile read. I was an avid follower and believed the rest of Bellingham must be as well. So I was stunned to see that only a handful gathered to listen to him speak. Before his reading began I chatted with him about life in the midwest and family life (as Talia and I had just started our own family). He was soft spoken and generous in demeanor and equal to the image I had cast of him based on his first book. His debut novel, one sprawling across the American Midwest, was Peace Like a River. My Uncle Kris, a torrential reader, recommended it to my mom, who in turn passed it to me. Now, you must understand that at the time I was racing through a reading phase I would liken to the punk movement or some sort of anarchist adventure. On my list at the time were books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, anything by Chuck Pahlaniuk or Douglas Coupland. I was, internally, being fed by the edgy seditious nature of these novels. It was a vicarious position since I didn't really want to experience violence for no reason, nor take copious amounts of drugs just for fun, but I did enjoy the view through each narrator's fuzzy or blood shot eyes. So when I opened Peace Like a River and read: "From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and the air to fill them with - given circumstances, you might presume, for an American baby of the twentieth century," I was not taken. I thought... "I'll give it a chapter and if it's just a feel good family novel - I'm done." (I now know the terror and joy of loving a child and this book is a treasure to me). Four pages later, I was hooked. A deeply loving father that seems to work miracles; an asthmatic narrator who struggles to understand the craziness around him; an older brother who's protective, strong, and headstrong; and perhaps one of the greatest little sisters in all of literature - a spaghetti western poet who cannot help but encourage and lean on her older brother.
It is a family book. But it is so much more. An adventure, filled with romance, redemption, evil, tremendous good, deep questions, and humor. With the arrival of Fall and the imminence of Winter, I cannot recommend this book enough. A perfect book to relax with, inside, on a rainy day. It is suspenseful enough to keep you up a little later, but not scary enough to force unwanted images into your dreams.
Before I wax eloquent any longer, here's a brief snippet. Enger's prose is like few that I know.
"Before dawn we settle among decoys in one of August's barley fields. Dad and Swede lay on their elbows side by side, the two of them whispering under a swath. Davy and I took the opposite flank, he with his clawed-up Winchester goose gun. I was too young to shoot, of course and so was Swede; we were there purely, as she said, "for seasoning." In all the years since I don't remember a colder morning afield. Rain can outfreeze snow. We lay between soaked ground and soaked swaths with a December-smelling wind coming over our backs. As the sky lightened we heard geese chuckling on the refuge away to the east. The rag decoys puffed and fluttered. I yawned once, then again so hard my ears crackled."
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