Leif Enger's Off-beat Novel

 

SO BRAVE, YOUNG, AND HANDSOME (2008)

By Leif Enger

Thorndike Press, 286 pages

★★★★

 

 

 

What an odd and delightful book! So Brave, Young, and Handsome came out in 2008, when author Leif Enger was still working for Minnesota Public Radio. It often reads like a young adult novel, though it's not one—more like what you might get if you crossed YA wonderment with a Lake Woebegone tale, Huckleberry Finn, and a gentle send up of a Zane Grey Western.

 

It is set in 1915, a time in which automobiles and horses coexist, though the latter are more reliable. Monte Becket, his wife Susannah, and their son Redstart live along the Cannon River, a for-real tributary of the Mississippi in southeastern Minnesota. Monte penned a Western novel, Martin Bligh, that caught fire and his publisher is clamoring for more. Alas, Monte is having trouble capturing lightening in a jar a second time. Susannah retains faith in him, but Monte trashes draft after draft rejected by editors who want another Martin Bligh.

 

As such stories go, a mysterious stranger comes into their lives, a boat builder going by the handle of Glendon Hale. He lives in a converted barn downstream, but becomes a frequent dinner guest at the Becket household and a man Monte considers his friend. Glendon has traveled and his tales also delight young Redstart. One day, though, Glendon announces he is leaving, ostensibly to travel to Mexico to apologize to Blue, the love he left behind six years earlier. When he asks Monte if he'd like to come along, Susannah encourages him to go for a few weeks, thinking it might help him get over writer's block.

 

That's one way of looking at it. Their journey begins on water, but is abandoned when their small rowboat is nearly wiped out on the Mississippi by some rogues. Or are they pursuers? Surprise! Glendon is a wanted man with more aliases than a Russian spy. A man named Charlie Siringo is after Glendon, though he's also a cad, an ex-Pinkerton Detective who is a self-appointed freelance bounty hunter. Monte considers hightailing it back to Susannah, but he's such a milquetoast that you can convince him to do anything. Wouldn't wish to offend, after all, even if it means he has to come up with his own aliases, eat stolen food, and tell a few fibs.

 

A madcap journey unfolds in which one oddball character after another appears. There is, for instance, Glendon's friend Darlys De Foe, a sharp shooter with failing eyesight; Hood Roberts, a youngster who sells Monte a Packard and wants to ride along to a circus in Oklahoma; and Ern Swilling, an actor who will break his neck and wonder why he is seeing in back of himself. Is anyone on the up an up? Nope.

 

So Brave, Young, and Handsome is a series of comic misadventures, several of them tinged with tragedy. The latter, though, don't sting because the novel reads like a fable. Of what? Good question. It is surely the passing of one way of life with another having a difficult time being born. Sometimes it seems to be about redemption, though the lesson fails to take more often than it does. Plus, even if you were to assign some moral to it, the novel's tone is too offbeat for your judgment to stand up under cross examination. It's ultimately about how Monte finds his mojo but mainly it's a wacky road trip that ends in California. Glendon will seek out Blue–her name is actually Arãnado–but this isn't a hearts-and-coronets kid of book; it's too quirky for such things. Will Glendon reform and find peace? The book is too idiosyncratic for that as well.

 

Enger's book is also a fable in that normal logic is suspended. There's even a character who simply refuses to die. Yes, what we have here is a book in which the best odds lie with the improbable. Huckleberry Finn, of course, was Mark Twain's reworking of The Odyssey and you might recall from whenever you last read any of it, that lots of spurious things occurred in it. (If you don't remember, think the Coen Brothers' take, O Brother, Where Art Thou?)

 

I laughed aloud many times during my reading of So Brave, Young, and Handsome. I was late to the party, but they saved me a slice of the icebox cake. In all honesty, I'm still not sure whether or not I should be ashamed of myself for liking this book so much.

 

Rob Weir