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PEACE LIKE A RIVER, Leif Enger's drama about family tragedy and a search for
all-American redemption via the highway, is a long-winded story about a young boy and the
consequences of his brother's noble actions. Set in the 1960s, it evokes today's tabloid
headlines about youth-associated crime but skips the inevitable parallels to today's
schoolday massacres, thanks to the more innocent time period. It is an interesting story
with some interesting characters but somehow it doesn't gel these elements together into a
really great book.
Reuben Land loves Minnesota, where he grows up, but he loves westerns more. In fact, he
loves them so much that his sister, also a fan of the genre, takes to writing one of her
own. Their father, a well-meaning janitor who can't quite keep the household running, is a
man who seems to be able to make miracles happen --- ever since being seemingly divinely
saved from the tunnel of a tornado, he has been able to perform what some would refer to
as "miraculous" actions. However, when his older son Davey shoots a household
intruder, he is unable to conjure up any miracles and instead takes his clan on a race
west in order to find and save Davey, who has skipped his jail time.
Naming the family "Land" makes this seem like one long Woody Guthrie song about
the well-meaning folk that populate the middle of this great land of ours and also
evokes the hope for land out West in that great teeming natural province that
beckons Americans to a new life even today. Somehow, though, Enger's good solid prose and
strong characterizations do not make up for the mundane road trip to which all other plot
points aim. There is something in the search, rescue, and fun with Davey that doesn't
quite make sense to me --- I kept thinking that this story, which includes lots of horses
(Davey escapes from jail on a pony) and pleasantly grizzled characters on the road who
would be played by Walter Brennan were he alive today, was taking place at the turn of the
century or as a companion to a Willa Cather book. Aside from the mentions of things like a
Mercury automobile, there are no clues that would make you think this book is taking place
in the early '60s in a country where life is automated and about to go topsy-turvy with
the war in Southeast Asia. It seems pointless to me to set a book in a particular era and
not evoke that era in the story. Imagine if the book had been set so that, as they
traveled West, they discovered a new America rising? What a long, strange and fruitful
literary trip that would have been.
PEACE LIKE A RIVER is a nice read but it never quite gets to where it should be going.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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