Magill on Literature Peace Like a River

Magill on Literature | Peace Like a River

Sep 13, 2006

Magill on Literature | Peace Like a River

At a glance:

Author: Leif Enger

First Published: 2001

Type of Work: Novel

Time of Work: 1962-1963

Setting: Minnesota and North Dakota

Principal Characters: Reuben Land, Davy Land, Swede Land, Jeremiah Land,

Israel Finch, Martin Andreeson, Roxanna Cawley, Jape Waltzer

Genres: Long fiction, Bildungsroman

Subjects: 1960’s, Family or family life, North America or North Americans,

United States or Americans, Parents and children, Murder or homicide,

Twentieth century, Midwest, Brothers and sisters, Fathers, Revenge, Tornadoes,

Miracles, Outlaws, Quest, Minnesota, North Dakota

Locales: North Dakota, Minnesota

Peace Like a River is a strange but pleasing coming-of-age book, containing

echoes of the picaresque novel and the archetypal quest, with passing references

to Homer, the Bible, and historical figures of the American West. Leif Enger

immediately establishes a winning voice for his eleven-year-old narrator, Reuben

Land, which alternates with the adult Reuben’s omniscient but equally relaxed

voice. He is a perceptive character, although admittedly self-critical, “beyond

my depth and knowing it, yet unable to shut up.”

To begin with, Reuben was born “a little clay boy” with ominously swampy lungs,

unable to draw breath until his father, Jeremiah, rushed into the hospital room

and commanded him to breathe. Even though the infant was without oxygen for

twelve minutes, he miraculously suffered no brain damage; but his lungs remain

weak into adolescence. Ironically, while Reuben has watched his father walk on

air and heal a man’s raw face with a single touch, his own asthma remains

uncured. Jeremiah can only steam him with salt and baking soda or thump his back

to loosen the congestion.

Reuben fully believes he has survived such an inauspicious beginning in order to

bear witness to his father’s unexplainable miracles, since “no miracle happens

without a witness.” He does not use the word “miracle” lightly, for real

miracles bother people. He is never certain whether his father prays for

miracles or whether they just happen.

Before the boy’s birth, Jeremiah was studying medicine on the G.I. Bill until he

was snatched up by a tornado and deposited unharmed four miles away. This event

changed his life. “Baptized by that tornado into a life of new ambitions,” he

dropped his medical studies in favor of an intense spirituality. His wife,

disappointed by his lack of initiative, later abandoned him and their three

children. Now he works as a school janitor in the small town of Roofing,

Minnesota, and is plagued by frequent, stunning headaches. A mild man of

conscience, he reads his Bible daily, silently, and without ostentation. A man

of prayer and intense conversation with God, he at one point literally wrestles

with the Almighty.

Davy, Jeremiah’s older son, is in some respects already an adult at sixteen, but

unfortunately he possesses an impatient nature. Unlike his father, he prefers to

act rather than wait. An accomplished hunter and trapper, he affectionately

labels his adoring brother “Natty Bumppo” (after James Fenimore Cooper’s famous

marksman), following Reuben’s first successful hunt; and he is very protective

of their little sister, known only as Swede. Swede is precocious and endearing,

an enthusiastic but unorthodox cook who sometimes decorates her sugar cookies

with frozen peas. She is a widely read and literate child but blunt with the

artlessness of childhood. She asks good questions that do not have easy answers.

A passionate fan of Western novels, Swede is in love with the legendary Old

West. Astride an old saddle Davy has given her for her ninth birthday, she types

spirited poetry with overtones of Robert Service. The dashing Sunny Sundown,

hero of her poems, is an upright lawman turned reluctant outlaw. Her real-life

hero is the young Teddy Roosevelt, who ranched in North Dakota before becoming

president. Reuben, too, admires and envies Roosevelt for his triumph over

asthma.

During a school football game two local troublemakers, Israel Pinch and Tommy

Basca, corner Davy’s girlfriend in the girls’ locker room and attempt to molest

her. At his janitorial duties. Jeremiah overhears the struggle and chases them

off. The girl later reports that his face was mysteriously “luminous” in the

darkened room as he whacked the two boys with his broom handle. After the boys

threaten his family, the feud escalates. The Lands find their front door covered

with tar, which Jeremiah quickly cleans, hoping the matter will end there, but

it does not.

While Jeremiah and Reuben attend an evening service at the Methodist church,

Swede is abducted and terrorized by Israel and Tommy. Enraged, Davy wants to go

after them, demanding, “How many times does a dog have to bite before you put

him down?” Instead, his father quietly summons the town policeman, who does

nothing. Two nights later, Davy smashes out the windows of Israel’s car, a

deliberate provocation, and when Israel and Tommy break into his home with a

baseball bat, Davy shoots them both. Although he is arrested and jailed for

murder, he refuses to plead self-defense, insisting that he intended to shoot.

Reacting to the scandal, the school superintendent decides to “scour that

janitor’s teeth” by first humiliating Jeremiah and then publicly firing him in

in front of a lunchroom full of children. At Davy’s trial, a reluctant Reuben

testifies as an eyewitness to the shootings until, carried away by

self-importance, he unintentionally strengthens the case against his brother.

There is little hope that the jury will release Davy, who promptly breaks out of

jail, escaping with a horse and a revolver. No one knows where he has gone.

The family’s hard times grow harder. Jobless and depressed, Jeremiah becomes

seriously ill with pneumonia. His children pound his back to relieve his clogged

lungs as their doctor prescribes antibiotics and bed rest. Reuben finds a

temporary job tearing down a corncrib, for which he is paid twenty-five dollars,

and he is then able to buy food for the household.

Just before Christmas, the family is visited by Martin Andreeson, a federal

investigator. Apparently, Davy has crossed the state line. Swede and Reuben are

hostile, dubbing Andreeson the “putrid fed,” but their father answers all

questions regarding Davy with absolute honesty. On Christmas Eve they receive a

mixed blessing—word that an acquaintance, a hard-luck traveling salesman, has

died, bequeathing his brand new Airstream trailer to Jeremiah. After a friend in

North Dakota reports that Davy has been seen, the Lands determine to find him.

As they set out on a modern odyssey, towing the shiny Airstream trailer with

their old station wagon, the novel expands its mythic dimensions. Andreeson

follows them across the Great Plains in bitter winter weather to a small city

park, where a severe headache forces Jeremiah to camp overnight. When the

federal agent knocks on their trailer door at dinnertime, Swede steals out to

pour maple syrup in his gas tank so he will not follow them again.

They pass through central North Dakota, evading state troopers who strangely

enough never see or stop them. They find themselves driving across the frozen

prairie on an empty tank, waiting to run out of gas and propane heat for the

trailer. Well into the Badlands, a notorious area of bleak buttes and mesas in

the western part of the state, they come to a farmhouse with two gasoline pumps

in front and a propane tank. The self-reliant owner, Roxanna Cawley, greets them

with a newborn goat in her arms. Earth mother and impressive cook, she soon

offers them a place to stay the night.

Reuben, who has always feared dying in his sleep if he cannot breathe, is

frequently troubled by bizarre dreams. That night he dreams of a ghastly little

man who ties up his strangled breath in a skin bag. When his father wakes him,

Roxanna is pounding his back to keep him from choking. Overnight, snow

transforms the landscape, and the blizzard prolongs their stay until snowplows

can free them. Soon Reuben is referring to Roxanna as “a lady you would walk on

tacks for.” Swede is greatly impressed by her knowledge of multisyllable words

and, best of all, by her colorful stories about her great-uncle, a physician and

gunsmith who was a friend of the outlaw Butch Cassidy. Jeremiah and Roxanna are

falling in love with each other.

Roxanna treats them to a wondrous January picnic in the Badlands, where years

ago lightning struck a vein of lignite that is still burning. In this “garden of

fire” where “the ground itself seemed coming unstitched,” Andreeson again

appears to report that Davy is definitely in the area. He begs Jeremiah to

search with him before the boy is hurt or killed. The next morning Reuben sights

his brother on horseback, watching him, and after dark Davy takes him to his

hideout to meet a fellow fugitive, Jape Waltzer.

When Reuben sees the formidable Waltzer, he subconsciously links the man’s “eyes

from a dead photograph” with the evil little man who carried the skin bag filled

with his breath. The boy is terrified. Nevertheless, he continues to ride out

secretly with Davy at night in the hope that his brother will return to them. He

anguishes over Davy, whose attitude toward the killings is pragmatic: “Say I did

regret it; what good does it do? I have to go on from here.”

Meanwhile, Jeremiah has begun to court Roxanna, even moving out to the Airstream

at night to preserve her reputation. Both good people who deserve happiness,

they are transfigured by this gentle courtship. At the same time, Reuben is

disturbed by his father’s newly cordial relationship with Andreeson, who no

longer appears to be an enemy. When the agent suddenly halts all communication,

Reuben, fearing for his brother’s safety and then for Andreeson’s, must decide

whether to reveal Davy’s whereabouts to their father.

Enger presents a moral dilemma with respect to the character of Davy. The reader

is reluctant to view Davy as a hardened outlaw even when his crime, a double

murder, is described in detail. Placed in the same ambivalent position as his

family, one longs to support him even though he never expresses remorse for what

he has done. It is as if the world cannot render a clear-cut judgment of Davy,

and perhaps that is the point.

One might be tempted to allegorize this novel, for it could easily slide into

abstraction: Jeremiah as the good Christian, a saint, even (as one critic

suggests) as God; Davy as the archetypal rebel, beloved even as he sins; the

fugitive Jape Waltzer, who is always accompanied by the odor of sulfur, as the

Devil. To limit the book in this way would be doing it a disservice, for its

very human characters are beautifully drawn. At its center it revolves around

the overwhelming power of love—divine, human, and brotherly love, perfect and

imperfect—the love that binds this small family together.

Enger’s vivid imagery is an attractive feature of Peace Like a River. The clink

of coffee cups and an overheard conversation may be reassuring noise or “the

sounds of hope landing facedown.” The book also provides some of literature’ s

most accurate and claustrophobic descriptions of severe asthma. As Reuben

explains, “Sometimes when the breathing goes it goes like that—like smoke

filling a closet. . . . Your breaths are sips, couldn’t blow out the candle on a

baby’s cake.” In lyrical passages, Enger evokes autumn and winter on the Great

Plains (“skies so cold frost paisleyed the gunbarrels”). Here the land itself is

always a presence, a sharp reminder of a power far beyond human

limitations—immense sky, sweeping prairie, the cold, clean Dakota wind—even the

boundless desolation of the fabled Badlands, where the ground is eternally on

fire.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist 97 (May 15, 2001): 1707.

Library Journal 126 (June 15, 2001): 102.

The New York Times Book Review 106 (September 9, 2001): 19.

Publishers Weekly 248 (July 16, 2001): 166.