Novels

Virgil Wander

I finished Leif Enger’s newest novel Virgil Wander. It leaves me with mixed reactions. Have you read the book? If so, I would love to hear your thoughts.

As usual, Enger has created a thoroughly likable protagonist/narrator. Virgil is self-deprecating, ruminative, caring, quirky, visionary. In the opening pages, he explains that he has literally driven off a cliff into Lake Superior and survived. Was it an accident? Or did the imp of the perverse get the upper hand briefly? This question is explored but never fully answered.

As with Enger’s other books, much of the joy is in the journey with this book. The author’s humor and superb power with words made me smile and laugh aloud at times. I was transformed into everyone’s least favorite reader, the one who reads passages out loud to family members who may be nearby simply because they have to be shared.

Yet somehow the book was thin on plot. The tale centers on Virgil’s life as a small-time theatre operator and town clerk, a mooning romantic carrying a torch for the widow of a friend who disappeared in a small plane years earlier, a friend to various memorable residents of Greenstone, Minnesota with its perpetual cold and darkness and its mythical past. But while the book was evocative and engaging in capturing my interest, somehow it failed to satisfy. Various things happen, but how they tie together is unclear. The story raises a number of questions that seem not to be fully answered. The end result is a slice of life: unique, memorable characters blundering along together on the edge of a lake the far edge of which is beyond their sight. They have heartaches and friendships and histories and tragedies. That’s about the size of it.

My response to the novel makes me realize that I get enough of life without clear structure and meaning on my own. I don’t need it in a book. When I read, I want there to be a clear meaning or purpose, an artistic vision that gives me a way of understanding life that I haven’t tried on before. I suppose if I worked at it, I could conjure something meaningful from this book, but for the most part it came across to me as rambling and rather dark. Virgil wanders. We wander with him for a time, then go our separate ways. Somehow, that wasn’t enough for me, despite the incidental pleasures of entertaining description and dialogue.

2 Comments

  • Sandy

    I liked the town, the characters, and the story…but after a while, I started to wonder if something was going to happen. Then when something happened, it seemed so odd and out of context. It reminded me a little of the movie First Reformed. An extreme end to a quiet novel.