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Leif Enger explores wild heart of the old West

By Loren Keller

If reading Leif Enger’s finely paced novel So Brave, Young, and Handsome brings to mind the experience of riding a horse, that may be due to reasons beyond the fact that it is written in the style of an old Western adventure story.

“When I was thinking about the way to tell this story, of course I referred to a lot of old Western literature,” the Minnesota author explains over the phone from a book tour stop in Chicago.

“These old Western guys tended to write in short scenes and episodic chapters – one thing leading to the next, leading to the next, and it achieved a sort of galloping rhythm, I think,” Enger says. “It sort of pulls you through.”

Set in 1915, the novel introduces Monte Becket, an author struggling to complete a follow-up to his successful first novel. Seven unfinished drafts later, Becket promises his publisher he’ll write a thousand words a day until a new book is finished – though he finds little success until befriending mysterious, aging outlaw Glendon Hale and joining him on a pilgrimage westward.

The struggling novelist of the book has a few things in common with its creator.

Enger’s debut novel, Peace Like a River, was named one of Time magazine’s top five novels of the year following its publication in 2001 and was a New York Times best seller. The book was named the first “All Iowa Reads” selection in 2003.

“Autobiography I’d say was useful to this book – it gave me about 35 pages,” Enger says. “I wanted write it from the point of view of a Midwestern man who goes west and just tells what he sees. Because that’s what I am, a Midwestern guy. I used a point a view that was quite similar to mine, and I used the struggle of Monte as just a door into the story I wanted to tell.”

In dogged pursuit of fugitive Hale is lawman Charles Siringo, a character named after a real-life agent for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency who published The Cowboy Detective in 1912. Enger also borrowed the name of his dad’s friend Hood Roberts for the young character in the book who tags along with the author and outlaw on their journey toward redemption.

Like his character Monte Becket (and the author Jack London) Enger says he too aimed to write a thousand words a day for a number of months when working on this book, which took its title from the melodramatic refrain of the famous song “The Cowboy’s Lament.”

“The difficulty I had was I could write a thousand words quite easily but most of the time I ended up throwing them away,” Enger says. “They have to be good words, words that will stay beyond just that day.”

During a break from writing Enger found the inspiration for his character Glendon Hale, spotted by the narrator rowing a small boat upstream while standing up.

“For me the process really always begins with a compelling character – someone that I see in my mind’s eye who has a history and a full story behind them. So for me, if I don’t have a compelling character to start with, I’m wasting my thousand words,” Enger says.

Raised in Osakis, Minn., Enger worked for nearly 20 years as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio before becoming a novelist.

“Journalistic experience, at the kind I had, was a terrific way to learn how to propel a story forward, how to draw a character in a few quick strokes, how to have a beginning, middle and an end, even in a short piece,” he says.

“I always wanted the freedom to write fictional stories. Every time I was on to an interesting story for Minnesota Public Radio I had to fight the temptation to round it out and make it better with judicious use of a little fiction. I resisted the impulse because people get fired for doing that, but a story can always be made better.”

His novel Peace Like a River was optioned several years ago by the Manhattan Project film studio but remains in development. Actor Billy Bob Thorton has reportedly expressed interest in shooting the film in Minnesota.

“I hope they make it,” Enger says. “It’s a good screenplay at this point. They actually hired a screenwriter to put it into screenplay form. But then there were subsequent rewrites and they sent me the script to do a dialogue polish on it.”

Enger says his next book is “just notes right now” but is not going to be historical or set in the West – not that he is uncomfortable working inside a genre.

“If you draw characters that are complicated, that are three-dimensional, that are layered,” he says, “then I think that you’ve transcended genre, no matter if you’re writing a story that has horses in it or not.”

Leif Enger read at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, at 7 p.m. Friday. He will appear at Barnes & Noble, 333 Collins Rd. NE, Cedar Rapids, at 2 p.m. Saturday.