Excellent Alone, Disappointing in Context

Jack Schwimmer
AP English
539

The Namesake--Jhumpa Lahiri
So Brave, Young, and Handsome--Leif Enger
Pride and Prejudice--Jane Austen

Having read Leif Enger's first novel, Peace Like a River, about six years ago, I had spent these last six years wondering when (or if) Enger would write a second novel. Thus, I had eagerly anticipated the follow-up, entitled So Brave, Young, and Handsome, which I read this summer with my family. Though Enger's second novel did not live up to my unusually high expectations, it was nevertheless an extremely enjoyable read, and a quintessential American journey full of love, adventure, and danger. The narrator is Monte Becket, first introduced as a novelist who wrote one great book five years earlier and can't seem to write another. Enger clearly sets up Becket as an autobiographical protagonist, (indeed, one of Becket’s rejected plots for a second novel is remarkably similar to that of Peace Like a River). Unlike Enger however, Becket finds adventure not through a second novel, but through a physical journey to help a mysterious outlaw, named Glendon Hale, find the wife he had abandoned 20 years earlier. Becket is a family man, father to Redstart with his loving wife Suzanna. In this way, Enger sets up his decision to go on a long journey as a huge departure from Becket’s normal life. This is especially interesting, because the characters Becket encounters on his journey have all spent years in the West, almost like a foreign country to Becket. As Becket continues on the journey, Glendon’s story develops: a relentless ex-Pinkerton named Charles Seringo has been pursuing him for years, and now in turn, begins to pursue Monte Becket himself for his very association with Glendon. As Becket and Glendon enter Mexico, the true nature of the adventure gradually becomes apparent, and more characters become essential both to the plot of So Brave, Young, and Handsome, and to Becket’s very survival. Though dark undertones persist throughout the novel, romanticism truly shines, particularly in the all-too-predictable ending. Seringo is a truly brutal character, and Hood Roberts, the young quixotic mechanic and want-to-be cowboy whom Becket befriends, murders a man while defending another friend. Thus So Brave, Young, and Handsome is chiefly the story of Seringo’s chase of Glendon, Monte, and Hood Roberts. Within the pursual, Enger beautifully intertwines character development, nostalgia for the Old West, and a relentlessly dark yet hopelessly romantic plot.
So Brave, Young, and Handsome, like Peace Like a River, is set in the Western frontier with a plot teeming with chase scenes. However, my personal favorite parts of Peace Like a River, the flawed yet relatable characters and the surprise ending, were the parts that Enger did not replicate in his follow-up novel. If I had not read Peace Like a River and knew nothing of Leif Enger’s career, I surely would have immensely enjoyed So Brave, Young, and Handsome. And while I still did enjoy it, I struggled to see it as standing separate from Peace Like a River. The fact that Enger evoked his first novel in the opening pages of So Brave, Young, and Handsome through his narrator’s struggles probably did not help. Yet Enger’s beautiful descriptive writing remained, and in that way So Brave, Young, and Handsome was not a disappointment.