A short and sweet review of So Brave, Young, and Handsome, by Leif Enger.
Enger’s way with words is inimitable. In So Brave, Young, and Handsome, he sketches the odyssey of two men and a boy who cross the American West. One is an aged, fugitive train robber who pursues forgiveness from his abandoned wife even as he is relentlessly pursued by a self-proclaimed Pinkerton detective. His companion, the narrator of the story, is an author without words who pursues a braver version of himself. (He will find it during his unlikely abduction by a dying man.) And the boy who joins them in their trip across America at the turn of the century? He pursues the greatness of cowboy life in a day when the cowboy is already a lost breed.
The narrator of So Brave, Young, and Handsome could not be described by any of the adjectives in his title. The only character who could nearly be described that way is not even a fully developed persona in the story. Instead, we see the pursuit of true courage and grace.
I love Leif Enger’s writing. Last year, I read his Virgil Wander. Peace Like a River, another of Enger’s novels, is one of the best books I’ve ever read. (See my review HERE.) This vagabond tale doesn’t rank as high as that one did, but I would read it again just to relish the delightful turns of phrase. For example, the quotes below:
Favorite Quotes from So Brave, Young and Handsome
“You are a feeble and tenuous being; the only thing a horse wants from you is your absence.”
Leif Enger
“He was at least sixty yet still managed, through a sanguine outlook on pain, to startle crowds by riding at full gallop standing on his head in the saddle.”
Leif Enger
“Death arrived easy as the train; [he] just climbed aboard, like the capable traveler he was.”
Leif Enger
“Recently it often seemed as if Susannah were looking at the moon while I looked somewhere else—say, at a lake. If I saw the moon in the lake I believed we were looking in the same place, but let anything disturb the water and we were two people standing alone. We needed to look at something the same way, as we once had, or as it seemed to me we once had. I didn’t know how to do it.”
Leif Enger
“You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work. I suppose grace was pouring over Glendon, who had sought it so hard, and some spilled down on me.”
Leif Enger
If you have time to read only one of Enger’s books, get Peace Like a River. But if you’re always searching for a well-turned phrase, inventive storytelling, and the pursuit of truth in fiction? Then, reader, I encourage you to read each of Enger’s novels. Next on my list to read is his newly published, I Cheerfully Refuse.
