Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

Wow. This is a book!

I don’t think I’ve been this impressed with a novel since Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, which I hate to admit I first read sometime after I turned 45. I think I could find things to quibble over, but I don’t want to. Leading of course to the wannabe author’s key question, why do I like it so?

1. I suppose this is part of how I know I like it, not why I like it, but I couldn’t wait to finish it. If I meet the author, I’ll tell him how he ruined two nights of sleep. Two consecutive nights. That quality has to count in the final judgment of literature: if you write a book in a forest and no one reads it, does it make any noise? Or some such mixed metaphor.
2. I loved the diction. A novel that has a lot of words I don’t know is mostly just odd. That’s not this one. Low-frequency words that I’m prone to use tend to be Latin or Greek in origin—perhaps not surprising for a med school survivor. That’s not him. Here, every few pages, there are robust, healthy, but above all surprising, usually Anglo-Saxon or at least venerable English words that came by their Latin roots honestly, via the Normans. Minnesota words, you might say. North Dakota winter bar-the-door words, maybe. I’m thinking of "jeopardous." "Besmirched." "Bushwhacked." "Fictive." "Allegiant." Even "scapegrace," though that one was flung in by a precocious latency character who was showing off. The words themselves made you pay attention just for the taste of them ... but, strangely, not so much pay attention to the words, but to the message, like makeup so artfully applied that you notice the woman not the paint.
3. The perfectly knitted, quotable sentence was rare, but there were a few happy exceptions, most especially the last half page of the book. I also marked this one: "We supposed over that obituary for most of the day, Swede and I—mostly Swede, whose vaulting imagination revealed mine as miserly and torpid."
4. It has wonderful but not impossible characters; it has what I am surprised to keep noticing in books I like: a believable, not cloying, love story; it has at least a small story-within-a-story—sure, this one’s obvious, but I liked it anyway.
5. Not least, the author had some things to say, and (I checked on his bio page) his perhaps most obvious message was nevertheless a heartfelt one, a truth told with an understated passion that almost made it feel immanent.

Plus, it has a passage I want to quote Sunday for ward conference.

Definitely recommended.