Peace Like a River

Peace Like a River begins with a birth that should not go well, which is the only way it could begin, because the whole novel is about a family that believes, at every hour and against the evidence, that something is holding them up. Reuben Land, the narrator, enters the world unable to breathe, and his father, a school janitor and a man of uncomplicated faith, leans over the baby and commands him to do the one thing he cannot do. Reuben breathes. He grows into a boy with severe asthma who spends the rest of the book half-arriving at his own conclusions about what happened that day, and the adult he becomes narrates the story looking back on his eleventh year with the frankness of someone who has decided to report the evidence and let the reader argue with it.

I read it without knowing anything about it, which I recommend, and I came out of it aware that I had encountered something unusual, a religious novel that is not self-conscious about being religious, a Western with almost no gunfights, and a family story that is willing to end with the ledger open. Published in 2001, it became one of those books people press into other people's hands, and after reading it I understood the pressing. It is a quiet book with a hole in the middle of it, and the quiet makes the hole worse.

The Land family

The household makes sense once you know its pieces. Jeremiah Land is the janitor at the school, deeply devout in a way that manifests as calm certainty rather than sermon, and Reuben believes his father performs actual miracles, a belief the narration presents with a straight face. Around him are the children: Davy, the eldest, who is the one the world will come for; Reuben, twelve-ish in temperament though eleven in years, watchful and breathless; and Swede, the youngest, a girl with a notebook who writes an ongoing Western serial about a cowboy named Sunny Sundown and an outlaw called Valdez.

The mother, Helen, is not in the house. Reuben narrates her leaving as a settled fact of the family's geography, and the absence does what such absences do, it makes the remaining members more tightly wound around each other. This is a family that has already survived one departure and has no illusions about being owed stability.

Swede's cowboy story is the novel's best structural invention, and it runs beside the main plot like a second column of the same newspaper. Her Sunny Sundown and Valdez saga keeps rewriting itself as the story deepens, the outlaw more sympathetic, the hero more compromised, the border between them blurrier, and the parallel is not subtle, but it earns its keep, because a child writing a Western is exactly how a family processes what is happening to them. They cannot sort Davy cleanly, so they watch a ten-year-old try to sort fictional men instead.

The two men who came to the house

The event the book organizes around is presented from inside the family's account, and Enger is careful never to let the reader forget that this is an account. Two local men, Israel Finch and Tommy Basca, have been making trouble, and the family's version is that they had threatened and harmed people close to them and then come to the house at night. Davy meets them outside and shoots them both.

What follows is trial, and the trial is the first place the novel's double vision becomes hard to bear. Reuben testifies. The family expects a conviction, which tells you everything about how they read their own situation: they expect Davy to be punished, because they believe what he did was both understandable and fatal to his future. Then, on the morning of sentencing, Davy escapes his cell, and the family's expectation is overturned by the boy himself.

I want to linger on the choice Enger makes here, because it is the choice that governs the rest of the book. A more conventional novel would make the killing the mystery, was it justified, should he hang. This one makes it the given. Everybody in the story knows what happened and roughly why. The mystery is what you owe a person after the fact, and the novel answers it by setting his father, his brother, and his sister on the road after him, which is a morally suspect project that the book never pretends is anything else.

The Airstream and the road

The family acquires an Airstream trailer and sets out following leads, moving across Minnesota and into North Dakota and the Badlands, and the middle of the novel becomes a road story with the particular quality of the American prairie, enormous skies, small towns, weather that arrives with opinions. They are followed by a federal agent named Martin Andreeson, who is not a villain so much as an office, the government made mobile and mildly embarrassed.

On the road they meet Roxanna, who shelters the family in bad weather and becomes genuinely important to them, and the Roxanna chapters are the warmest in the book. She is a person with no stake in the central drama who chooses to help anyway, and her presence lets Enger write tenderness without the strain of romance.

There is a risk in this section, which is that a road novel with an Airstream and a widowed father can curdle into sentimentality, and Enger keeps it honest by never letting the journey feel purposeful. They do not know where Davy is. Their leads are mostly stale. The landscape does not cooperate with their urgency. What they have instead of a plan is the company, and the book's faith, in both senses, is in the proposition that the company is the point even when the mission fails.

Davy, Waltzer, and Sara

The search eventually finds its object, and what it finds is not what the family expected. Reuben reaches Davy, who is living in hiding in the company of a man named Jape Waltzer, and the world Davy has entered has its own gravity. Around Waltzer is a girl named Sara, being raised in a situation the book makes unmistakably coercive, a household where a controlling man's charm is the governing law and everyone inside has learned to speak his dialect.

This is the point where the novel's crime plot and its moral education merge. Davy, the killer, the boy who shot two men in the dark, becomes the person who decides that Sara has to be extracted from Waltzer's household, and his violence is redirected toward something the reader can endorse without reservation. Enger does not call this redemption, and neither should a summary. It is a decision, made by a young man who has already learned exactly what such decisions cost.

The family's reunion, when it comes, has the shape of a negotiation rather than a rescue. Davy brings Sara and asks that she be allowed to stay with the family. He cannot stay himself. The household that set out to bring him home ends up accepting a different cargo, a girl instead of a son, and the asymmetry of that trade is the quiet devastation of the book's final movement.

The shooting, and the old country

Then Waltzer shoots Jeremiah and Reuben, and the novel goes somewhere I did not expect it to go, which is into an extended sequence in which Reuben, dying, wakes into what he calls the old country, a landscape of almost unbearable peace where he meets his father.

The sequence is written with restraint and total commitment. Enger does not hedge it, does not frame it as a dream the boy might have misread, and the narration's certainty here is the logical conclusion of a book that has treated every earlier miracle as real. What Reuben comes to understand is that his father's death has purchased his own life, a sacrifice in the plain theological sense, and he returns from it to a body that will keep breathing, eventually, without the command.

How you take this section determines how you take the whole novel. Readers who share the book's frame will find it the reason it exists. Readers who do not will either admire the nerve of it or resent the machinery. I landed between admiration and something I do not quite have a word for, a secular reader being handed a genuine miracle and told plainly that the offer is real. That is a rarer thing in fiction than the rarity suggests, and I respected the book enormously for refusing to make its central belief decorative.

The coda

The adult Reuben closes the story from a distance of years. He has married Sara. Swede has become a writer, which surprises nobody who read her notebooks. Davy visits from time to time and cannot be persuaded to stay. The man who shot Jeremiah is not caught, and the novel leaves that open, refusing the consolation of a final confrontation.

That last refusal is the book's most adult decision. There is no justice for Waltzer, no reckoning, no scene where the debt is collected. What there is instead is a family that has been reduced and has continued, a marriage to the girl the mission rescued, a sister's stories in print, a brother arriving for dinner and leaving again. The peace of the title, in the coda, is not a resolution. It is a quality the family learned to carry while the resolution stayed out of reach.

Where it falls short

The novel's gentleness is also its limitation. Reuben's narration is warm to the point of occasionally smoothing out texture, and readers who want their prose to keep some roughness will find the cadence, with its direct addresses and its aphoristic pauses, a little rehearsed.

The middle stretch, once the Airstream is rolling, drifts through a series of encounters that do not all carry equal weight. Some of the roadside figures are illustrations rather than characters, and the book is visibly more interested in the family's interior than in the world it passes through, which in a road novel is a structural mismatch.

And Andreeson's thread never quite resolves. The agent pursuing them evaporates from the plot in a way that the book treats as realism, since real pursuits do peter out, but which reads on the page as an abandoned thread. I did not mind, because his function was pressure rather than plot, but a tidier reader will.

Who should read it

This is for you if you like families in crisis told from the inside, if the American road appeals to you in fiction, and if you are willing to read a book whose metaphysical claims are meant literally. It is for people who came to faith-based fiction warily and want it written with craft rather than reassurance, and for readers of Westerns who suspect the genre's real subject was always moral ambiguity wearing a hat.

It is not for you if you need your narrators unreliable, or if a novel that treats miracles as fact will close the door before you are through the first chapter. On that question the book offers no compromise, which is precisely what gives it its strange, old-fashioned force.

I finished it on a Sunday afternoon and found that I had been reading slowly without noticing, the way you walk on good ground. What stayed with me was not the shootings or the trial but the image of a family driving a silver trailer across a landscape too large for their question, arguing about a girl's cowboy poem while the answer waited somewhere ahead of them, out of order and out of time, and arrived anyway.