So Brave, Young, and Handsome

So Brave, Young, and Handsome, Leif Enger. Grove Press (ISBN: 9780802144171) 2009.

Summary: A struggling writer goes with a new friend on a journey to apologize to the wife the friend abandoned.

Monte Becket was a postman in Minnesota in 1910 when, for fun, he wrote an adventure story about a postman, Martin Bligh. It became wildly popular, went through multiple printings, and his publisher hoped for a second book. So Monte quit his job and set to work. But the book wouldn’t come. The publisher rejected his drafts. About the time he was thinking of giving up, he meets an older man rowing a boat. Subsequently, they strike up an acquaintance. Glendon Hale lives in a barn where he builds boats. Monte, his wife Susannah, and son Redstart all like him.

Then one day Hale asks Monte to go with him to Mexico. Years ago, Hale had married, but abandoned his wife, Blue. He wants to go back and apologize. Surprisingly, Susannah agrees to him taking the trip. Did she think he needed his own adventures before he could write any more?

Needless to say, Monte got more adventure than he ever bargained for. First, on the train, Hale learns from an old porter he’d known, that a lawman is after him. Before he can be detained, he jumps off the train. Monte is not so lucky and is a “guest” at the lawman’s home, conveniently on a river. Hale, who Monte has learned is really Glen Dobie, comes by on a boat, and Monte is now a fugitive from the law. He learns Dobie was wanted for murder in a train robbery.

They manage to buy a car, and get the teenage mechanic, Hood Roberts, thrown in, if they will make a detour to a rodeo ranch in Oklahoma. While they elude the one man, another is on their tail. Charles Siringo has never stopped hunting Dobie. As a former Pinkerton detective, he is wily as a fox and relentless as a bloodhound. While Dobie escapes the rodeo during a gunfight, Siringo is wounded. Subsequently, Monte is left behind, held and portrayed by Siringo as a confidence man, so that he can help Siringo pursue, first Hood Roberts, and then Dobie, who is now headed to California where Blue has remarried and lives with a grower.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is his forced travels with Siringo. It turns out he is a literate man who even read Martin Bligh. Their conversations expose Monte’s naivete. He also meets a man who will not give up, even when a doctor says he’s not long for the world.

However the most intriguing part of the book has to do with why Dobie wants to find Blue. Why does he untertake baptism (again)? It seems he wants to make right what he’d done wrong. But how far will he go with that? I’m continuing to ponder why Glendon would ask Monte to leave Susannah so that he could seek the forgiveness of the woman he left? And what will become of Monte, Susannah, and Redstart? After all this, can he take up his former work as a postman? And will he ever write again?

In this work, Enger gives us a cross between a road novel and a Western. Beyond adventure, of which there is plenty, it is a novel of transformation, at least for Monte. A part of this involves the work of his hands, as Monte learns boat building from Glendon. Blocked in writing, he learns a different use of his hands. What will that mean for him? And what will he glean from his time with Siringo? Makes me want a sequel.