Not to disappoint you, but my troubles are nothing — not for an author, at least. Common blots aside, I have none of the usual Big Artillery: I am not penniless, brilliant, or an orphan; have never been to war, suffered starvation or lashed myself to a mast. My health is adequate, my wife steadfast, my son decent and promising. I am not surrounded by people who don’t understand me! In fact most understand me straightaway, for I am and always was an amiable fellow and reliably polite. You, a curious stranger, could walk in this moment; I would offer you coffee and set you at ease. Would we talk pleasantly? Indeed we would, though you’d soon be bored…
It’s a thoroughly likable voice, isn’t it? I can say for sure that he’s wrong about being boring. Let me introduce you: meet Monte Becket, the narrator of So Brave, Young and Handsome, Leif Enger’s second novel, published seven years after Peace Like a River. Monte is an author, but so far, a one-hit wonder. When the novel opens, it’s 1915 and he’s on his seventh attempt to produce a second bestseller on a par with his first book, a blockbuster western called Martin Bligh. One morning he sees a man rowing up the Cannon River in the mist. It begins an adventure in which Monte Becket steps out of story-writing and into a story, befriending the lone boatman and joining him (with his steadfast wife’s blessing of course) in his quest for redemption.
Something about Glendon Hale, the rower, reminds him of “Old Quixote,” a quintessential picaresque hero. It’s a fitting frame for this tale in which the narrator embarks on a journey that moves him spatially, but leaves us wondering at times whether he’s moving at all internally. It’s been called a western, but to me So Brave, Young and Handsome read more like a critique — lighthearted, but ironic — of the western. There’s nothing particularly romantic or swashbuckling about Monte Becket. (It’s irritating at times, frankly…) Glendon Hale is a different story, with a history more suited to a wild west tale, but this novel picks up after most of the romantic action has ended, and finds him searching for redemption and resolution of some of the complications his past has created. Apparently Enger weaves in a real-life character in Charlie Siringo, a tough-as-nails but definitely fading detective in pursuit of Glendon (and by association Monte). There are plenty of references to a legendary cast of western outlaws, but in the present the last vestige of those days is the Hundred and One, a kind of declining Disneyland of the wild west. Even the novel’s title is ironic, since none of its characters are “brave, young or handsome;” it seems to aim at a nostalgic ideal. All in all it reminded me more of Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven (but much more comedic) than a romantic cowboy story with illusions intact.
Like its predecessor, this story inhabits a world filled with meaning. It doesn’t give the sense of a fictional universe freighted with consciously crafted symbolism so much as an author who sees the world as a meaningful place. It’s a setting where faith is relevant, as part of Glendon’s quest is for spiritual peace. Justice, repentence, baptism