Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.
$24 - 320 pages.

If he were here to begin the account, I believe Dad would say what he said to Swede and me on the worst night of all our lives:
We and the world, my children, will always be at war.
Retreat is impossible.
Arm yourselves.

—Reuban Land in Peace Like A River

The description of a book on the inside of the jacket cover is, we readers assume, designed to give a attractive precis of the book to coax us into opening our wallets and plunking down the necessary cash to read the rest of the story. What we do not expect to find is a jacket cover synopsis that contradicts directly the author’s intentions in his story.

Yet that is precisely the case in Peace Like A River, Leif Enger’s moving story of a family, its troubles, and its quest to solve those troubles.

Whoever wrote the flyleaf description to this book — surely it was not Leif Enger himself — seems to misunderstand this story of miracles, the power of the Holy Spirit to act through Jeremiah, the head of the family, and the power of myth, in this case the myths of the Old West and its outlaws. The writer of this flyleaf speaks of Biblical tales yet clearly Reuban’s father regards them as more than “tales.”

This same writer tells us that Reuban, raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, yet it is Reuban’s sister, Swede, who loves these tales; Reuban himself experiences the miracles.

Too bad about the flyleaf. This is a novel that stands head and shoulders above most fiction today, a story that does not need an advance apology for mentioning God or miracles. It is the story of a boy, Reuban Land, who lives with his spirit-gifted father Jeremiah, his brother Davy, and his sister Swede, in a small town in Minnesota. After the family is terrorized and threatened by two punks from school — Jeremiah has thwarted their attempted rape of a girl — Davy lures the two into an ambush and kills both of them. On the eve of his conviction, he escapes from his cell and flees west into the Badlands. Aided by certain miraculous events — one of the most beautiful scenes in the book is when a friend of Jeremiah leaves him a new trailer — the family sets out to find Davy in the hope of coaxing him back home.

During this journey the family reveals itself to the reader. Jeremiah is a fascinating character, a man of some intellectual promise who gave up his ambitions when he experienced what he thought was a call from God. Swede, the younger sister of Davy and Reuban, loves stories of the Old West and celebrates that love by writing stories and poems about different outlaws. Davy is a perfect observer; he doesn’t understand his father’s spirituality or his sister’s passion for writing or his brother’s need to protect the family in the way he did, yet he acts as a witness for them, as someone who records their lives and describes their powers and his love of them.

There are other well-drawn characters — Roxanna, who extends the family hospitality and soon becomes part of the family; Jape Waltzer, an insane loner who befriends and then tries to kill Davy; and Andreeson, the federal agent who frequently pops into the lives of the Land family, trying to run Davy to ground.

Peace Like A River is filled with miracles presented, oddly enough, in a realistic way. From his four-mile flight in a tornado to his role in saving Reuban’s life, Jeremiah is at the center of these miracles. Yet what is also splendid about the book is Reuban’s realization near the end of the novel of his belief in a higher power:

“Maybe I see our daughter, home from school, picking plums or apples for Roxanna; maybe one of our sons, reading on the grass or painting an upended canoe ... Then I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers.”

Whether writing about winter in the Badlands or breakfast in a small-town diner, Leif Enger, who lives on a farm in Minnesota and has worked as a reporter and a producer for Minnesota Public Radio, has given readers a fine first novel. We wish Enger well and anticipate many good stories from him in the future.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville.)

 

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