Hearing the groan of oarlocks I peered downriver. I would have settled for a nice surprise. How often I sighed in those days! I needed a revelation but you know how it is. What a cool spring morning that was-birdsong, dew on the blossoms-I yearned to be on the river myself, but Dan Roscoe had rustlers to catch and a girl to win. No laconic wit for Dan! It was himself I was writing about, with many low sighs, the morning I first saw Glendon Hale rowing upstream through the ropy mists of the Cannon River. A right enough pard to begin with, he became more arrogant page by page. Number Seven featured a handsome but increasingly bilious ranch hand named Dan Roscoe. I'm grateful for that, and you should be too. Seven novels, you exclaim-quite right, but then I didn't finish any of them. Later in the proceedings I do promise a tense chase or two and the tang of gunpowder, but here at the outset it's flat old Minnesota and I am sitting on the porch of my comfortable farmhouse, composing the flaccid middle of my seventh novel in five years. Would we talk pleasantly? Indeed we would, though you'd soon be bored-here on Page One I don't even live in interesting surroundings, such as in a hospital for the insane, or on a tramp steamer, or in Madrid. You, a curious stranger, could walk in this moment I would offer you coffee and set you at ease. I am not surrounded by people who don't understand me! In fact most understand me straightaway, for I am and always was an amiable fellow and reliably polite. My health is adequate, my wife steadfast, my son decent and promising. Common blots aside, I have none of the usual Big Artillery: I am not penniless, brilliant, or an orphan have never been to war, suffered starvation or lashed myself to a mast. Not to disappoint you, but my troubles are nothing-not for an author, at least. Excerpted by permission of Grove/Atlantic. And indeed, Enger captures the American West during the time it was just beginning to vanish.Įxcerpted from So Brave, Young, and Handsome edited by Leif EngerCopyright © 2008 by Leif Enger. In So Brave, Young, and Handsome, "you can smell the spilled whiskey and feel the grit," according to one review in Publishers Weekly.
When we were young and brave characters series#
During that time, he also wrote a series of mystery novels with his older brother Lin.Īt heart, Enger is an American balladeer he glories in the country's mythologies, iconography and larger-than-life characters.
A former public radio reporter, Enger worked for Minnesota Public Radio for almost 20 years. He spent five years writing that book, and it was an immediate best-seller. Rife with train robbers, cowboys, sharpshooters and Pinkerton detectives, it's a story about finding purpose and redemption in a land of shifting borders, where geography and modernism are finding form.Įnger is best known for his first novel, Peace Like A River, which also traced the contours of an earlier time.
When we were young and brave characters full#
Leif Enger's new novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, is set in the West in 1915 and takes full advantage of the era's color. Each week, we present leading authors of fiction and nonfiction as they read from and discuss their work.
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