Book of the Month/December 2014

Leif Enger’s other novel, Peace Like a River, was an earlier selection of mine for “book of the month,” a year ago today, in fact. And now comes his other novel So Brave, Young, and Handsome.

Let me first say that I don’t really care for his titles. Peace Like a River is taken from the prophet Amos, but comes off like a mash up of an evangelical cliche and a folk song. After you read the book, you don’t care, but there it is. So Brave, Young, and Handsome is taken from a song called “The Cowboy’s Lament.”

We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly
And bitterly wept as we bore him along
For we all loved our comrade, so brave, young, and handsome
We all loved our comrade, although he’d done wrong

The book is set in the West, in the early days of the twentieth century, when the old ways of the West were still a living memory, but the new ways had settled in. The book is written in the first person by a writer from Minnesota named Monte Becket. He had published one book, Martin Bligh, that had been a best seller, and now after many attempts on the second one, was coming to grips with the fact that writer’s block had him by the windpipe. He is happily married to Susannah and has a precocious son named Redstart.

They have an elderly neighbor named Glendon Hale, who used to be a train-robber, back in the day, and who also has different names as a consequence. He also used to be married to a Mexican woman whom he calls “Blue,” and whom he abandoned as a result of fleeing the authorities. He is coming to the full fruition of his regrets, and wants to go find Blue and seek her forgiveness.

Susannah encourages Monte to go with Glendon, which he does. On the way they have a series of meandering adventures, which you may read about on your own. I didn’t think this book was as good as Peace Like a River, but it was still quite good. To meander quite as much as it did meant that he needed another hundred pages or so to let the reader get adjusted to the dramatic changes. Reading this was like going down one of those switchback grades we have here in Idaho, the kind where you can see your own headlights in the rear view mirror.

But, with that said, and at the same time, Enger’s gift for creating round characters is manifest on every page, and his metaphors are sprinkled over the whole thing, like stardust, and also not like what I just did.

Well worth the read.