Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

Despite not being raised in an explicitly religious household, or perhaps because of it, I have had a lifelong attraction to questions of faith. I spent my teenage years in Utah, and had many friends firmly devoted to their Mormon faith. I then attended a university that while founded by Congregationalists, has since become thoroughly (if not excessively) secular; even there, I spent significant time exploring religion, from classes like "The Book of Job and the Joban Tradition" and "Theism and Moral Reasoning" to my studies at the Cambridge Zen Center. I have always felt a closer fellowship with the faithful, or with those seeking faith, than with the skeptical.

This affinity extends to literature, in a sense. I have no desire to read what is marketed as "Christian fiction"; the little I have skimmed simply does not qualify as worthy writing. Instead, what I seek is the author who can craft an excellent work of literature while also exploring religious devotion, dogma, or doctrine. Think Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Par Lagerkvist's Barabbas, or a recent favorite, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.

In his debut novel, Peace Like a River, Leif Enger incorporates substantial religious content into his plot. The novel begins with the narrator relating his own beginning; he was born without breath:

"Sometimes," said Dr. Nokes, "there is something unworkable in one of the organs. A ventricle that won't pump correctly. A liver that poisons the blood." Dr. Nokes was a kindly and reasonable man. "Lungs that can't expand to take in air. In these cases," said Dr. Nokes, "we must trust in the Almighty to do what is best." At which Dad stepped across and smote Dr. Nokes with a right hand, so that the doctor went down and lay on his side with his pupils unfocused. As Mother cried out, Dad turned back to me, a clay child wrapped in a canvas coat, and said in a normal voice, "Reuben Land, in the name of the living God I am telling you to breathe."

And of course, he does. The first time I read this passage, it seemed as if Mr. Land was intervening in defiance of Dr. Nokes invocation that "we must trust in the Almighty." Read it again. Is it not just as plausible to see this scene as "the Almighty [doing] what is best" through Mr. Land's intervention? Notice that he "smote" Dr. Nokes; other than "beget," there is hardly a more Biblical verb. And surely the echoes ring from this rather famous passage:

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Reuben identifies this breath as the start of his father's miracles. The second is the absence of brain damage despite being deprived of oxygen for the first twelve minutes of his life. The third comes eleven years later, on a family trip to North Dakota that lays the foundation for much of the story to come. The night of a hunting trip during which Reuben has killed his first goose, he wakes from a dream and needs to use the outhouse. As he gets outside, he observes his father pacing back and forth in the flatbed of a grain truck, praying:

And then, as I stood watching, Dad walked right off the edge of the truck.

I saw it coming--his knuckles jammed to his face, his steps not slowing at all as the edge approached. I meant to rush out and warn him, but something froze me tight. I stood there with my knees locked and my heart gone to water, while Dad paced over the edge.

And did not fall.

He went on pacing--God my witness--walking on air, praying relentlessly, a good yard of absolutely nothing between the soles of his boots and the thistles below. As he went, the moon threw his strangely separate shadow to the earth; a sleepy pigeon cooed from the barn; Dad's boot touched the tops of a thatch of tall grama growing up among the thistles, and they waved as if stroked by wind. I will forget none of this. Nor the comfortable, fluttery feeling it gave me, as though someone had blown warm smoke through a hole in my center. Dad went perhaps thirty feet, paused, and started back. His eyes were still clenched shut; I don't know whether he ever recognized how buoyant was his faith that night.

Though Reuben narrates the story, and is the center of much of the action, his father is the engine that drives the novel. After walking on air, it is not until the end of the book that Mr. Land flirts again with the supernatural. But his faith and his morality inform the story at pivotal moments along the way.

There is much to admire in what happens in the interim. Enger has crafted an interesting, if not entirely original plot in which he deploys his admirably drawn characters. A particular favorite is Reuben's younger sister Swede, who is (almost) unbelievably precocious in her production of epic poetry set in the Wild West; in her hands Zane Grey is somehow transmogrified into Homer. She joins her brother and father in their search for Davy, the eldest son who has fled from prosecution for a crime he undoubtedly committed. What the purpose of that search is, and what the family will do if they find Davy, are questions that drive the story forward.

The novel is strongest when it remains with this core, nuclear family. It is much weaker when the focus shifts to Davy's flight and the company he has taken up, and a minor derailment comes with the deux ex machina performed by one of these characters near the end of the book. Not calamitous, but off-key in an otherwise worthy novel. Enger has taken a simple plot, populated it with several wonderfully original characters, and injected a welcome dose of spirituality.