Wednesday, May 17, 2006

May 2006: Peace Like a River


Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
Discussion: Tuesday, May 30th at Alison's

New York Times Book Review
By Katherine Dieckmann
Published: September 9, 2001

It's tough to give magic realism an all-American spin, since God always seems to get mixed up in the equation, transforming fragrant lyricism into something that, to all but true believers, seems implausible: the perfectly timed miracle. Such convenient mysticism crops up frequently in Leif Enger's unabashed throwback of a first novel. Set in rural Minnesota in the early 1960's, it might as well be staged in frontier days, with its spunky, resourceful characters, rough-and-tumble adventures and folksy homilies along the lines of ''Yes, yes sir -- routine is worry's sly assassin.'' In this world of goose hunting and Bible quoting, it's virtually impossible to imagine that the story takes place just before Beatlemania and during the civil rights movement; even the appearance of an Airstream trailer seems jarringly anachronistic.

''Peace Like a River'' revolves around the coming of age of a boy named Reuben Land, a reticent, well-meaning kid who was born with ''swampy lungs,'' meaning that when dramatic convention requires it, he gasps for breath on cue. Reuben's life is turned upside down after his older brother, Davy, shoots two intruders in their home, gets arrested, then breaks out of jail and flees town. So it is that the Land family -- Reuben and his father, who is a poetry-loving elementary school janitor, and Swede, his tomboyish little sister -- head off after Davy. (When the children were small, Dad was carried four miles by a tornado without suffering a scratch, and Mom skipped out on the family, apparently lacking an appreciation for a husband who is touched by angels.)

From here on out, ''Peace Like a River'' mostly traces the Lands' travails along the inevitable path to the lost son. There are myriad problems with this approach, the chief being that Davy never really comes alive as a character or seems particularly worthy of this dogged pursuit, beyond the obvious motivation of blood ties. He's a symbol, stolid and ineffable, and he remains remote throughout. His sole function seems to be to demonstrate the principles of fate; or, as Reuben puts it, ''History was built into Davy so thoroughly he could never see how it owned him.''

Such sentiments seem a bit lofty coming from an 11-year-old narrator. While it's true that this is a tale told in retrospect, the heightened, present-tense feeling serves to make Reuben come off as improbably, annoyingly wise when he says things like: ''You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any,'' and describes traveling uphill on horseback as follows: ''I could feel Fry angling upslope and my own rear slipping rumpward, a cumbrous type of riding demanding on my part a chronic forward scoot taxing muscles novel to me.'' In fact, this book would be far more compelling and convincing if Swede, a burgeoning young poet, were at its center, the sole girl in a male-dominated family, refreshingly cool and no-nonsense as she struggles toward creative self-definition. But Enger's fusty traditionalism demands that this be a boy's own story.

And when that story becomes too plain, along comes a well-timed miracle to juice it up. A pot short on soup, for example, suddenly becomes bottomless when a stranger shows up for dinner. We know this kind of thing stems from Reuben's oddly spiritual father, because early on the boy sees him step off the end of a flatbed truck and walk on air. Given the usual fate of noble innocents, it's no surprise that dad meets a less than joyful ending during the novel's climactic shootout.

It is testimony to Enger's storytelling skills that this final bit of action is possessed of a certain breathless energy; as clichéd as his basic enterprise is, he manages to infuse sections of this novel with some surprisingly lively writing and deftly turned sentences. But ultimately the book suffers from a surplus of pretension (one chapter is titled ''The Throbbing Heart of News'') and a dearth of surprises. Enger's world, full of simple pleasures and populated by deep-thinking naïfs, seems unlikely to have ever existed, in this century or any other.
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