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A New Miracle Worker
March 22, 2003
Leif Enger was looking for a miracle when he began writing Peace
Like a River seven years ago. His oldest son was gripped by severe
asthma and some of the attacks required terrifying trips to the
hospital.
Enger, 41, wrote the story, which has been on best-seller lists
since its release 18 months ago, to entertain his family and perhaps
understand his son's asthma.
"When you encounter something like that for the first time it changes everything about the way you view life," Leif (rhymes with "safe") Enger said in a telephone interview from his farmhouse in rural Atkin County, Minn.
"Your life is centered differently now because there's someone in your family who has a hard time just taking a breath. So that became something that was on our minds all of the time," Enger said. "Along with the miracle that we were hoping for we began to think a lot about miracles and supernatural happenings. We wanted one to happen on Ty's behalf."
Enger could not command a miracle, although his son has apparently outgrown the asthma. But what the writer did get was the seed of a best-selling novel.
On Rural Ground
Peace Like a River is the first selection in "A Tale for Three Counties," an area-wide community reading project in Genesee, Orleans and Wyoming counties that began in January and includes buttons, a Web site and more than a dozen book discussions. The project culminates next week with three visits from Enger for talks and book signings in Batavia, Medina and Perry.
In selecting the inaugural book, organizers wanted a story that would appeal to families living in rural communities.
Enger speaks as a humble Midwesterner, asking almost as many questions of his interviewer as he is asked. He said he is most comfortable writing on rural ground.
"It's kind of hard for me to write convincing characters unless I know what kind of ground they grew up on. I don't know if that makes much sense, but that seems to be the way it is for me," he said. "So I can write good prairie characters. I can write good sort of Midwestern farm country characters. I can write about small town life and characters because I know about these things."
Peace Like a River is set in rural Minnesota and the Badlands of the Dakotas. It is a story about the bonds that hold families together.
Eleven-year-old Reuben Land, who suffers severe bouts of asthma, recalls a few turbulent months in his family's life from the vantage point of adulthood. His father, Jeremiah, is a high school janitor with a gift for performing miracles. After Jeremiah rescues Reuben's older brother Davy's girlfriend from two teen-age attackers, they invade the Lands' home and are killed by Davy. When Davy escapes from jail and heads for the Badlands, Reuben, his poetry-writing younger sister Swede and their father go after Davy -- with an FBI agent (described by Reuben as a "putrid Fed") following on the trail of both Davy and his family.
Enger talks about the characters as if they are real people. And the reader believes that Reuben could be a childhood friend, or one of the neighborhood children.
"I just like a story to be told in a compelling voice and have characters in it that I would want to know," Enger said.
An adventure story
Along the way, Reuben tells of miracles such as the evening a pot of homemade soup lasted an extra long time, of seeing his father walk on air, and of the family driving a great distance without reaching empty or being seen by the state police positioned at every gas station.
"I hope that people, when they read the book, just get swept up in the characters and the story without thinking too hard about the themes," Enger said. "The themes, of course, are love, forgiveness and sacrifice and loyalty and these are the sturdy old chords that make up most of the songs we all remember.
"But this is foremost an adventure story," he said. "If you can read it for pleasure and enjoy it on that level it is working. And if you want to go further and uncoil love and death and that whole bundle of nerves, then, great."
By setting his story in 1962, Enger created a very different book than if it had been set in 2002. Even placing the action a few years later would have yielded a different story, one that would have been told against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement or the Vietnam War.
"It would have been hard for me to plow that particular ground because I was of a generation of kids that was allowed to be bored by world events," Enger said.
"I was brought up in an innocent atmosphere even though all that was happening and I wanted to get that (innocence) into the book," he said.
Story needs a cowboy
Enger's family was the first audience for Peace Like a River. He read them almost every scene in the first draft and often rewrote based on their comments. The story was about 30 pages deep when his youngest son, John, then age 4, asked if the story included any cowboys. Enger thought about the question and decided his adventure tale needed a cowboy. That led to the creation of Sunny Sundown, the main character in Swede's epic poem.
The poem would become a useful device for Enger. He used Sundown's pursuit of the outlaw Valdez to parallel the Land family's own struggles, foreshadowing coming events and revealing Swede's response to Davy's actions.
"That was just a tremendous amount of fun to do, writing those poems," Enger said. "I didn't know that it was going to be useful and I thought if the book were ever to publish I might have to take the poetry out. And then very quickly what happened was the poems became a way to show Swede's take on the fascinating things that were happening to this family. That turned out to be a very useful thing for the story."
Enger also thought the viewpoint of Reuben looking back would be helpful in the story he describes as a "fictional memoir."
"It's kind of like having a conversation with an old man with a very clear memory. I like that feel," Enger said. "It's very welcoming to me as a reader."
His boys helped him get inside the mind of his youthful narrator.
"It's really easy to write with the voice of an 11-year-old boy when you've got two really observant ones living in your house and talking to you daily about things that interested them," Enger said. "I found it really easy to go back and be 11 again."
Radio days
After receiving a degree in English and journalism at Moorhead State University in Minnesota, Enger worked at a commercial radio station for about nine months before joining Minnesota Public Radio in 1984. He worked as a general assignment reporter and producer for MPR's "Mainstreet Radio" for nearly 16 years, reporting news stories -- from floods and treaty rights disputes to interviewing a sex offender released to a small town about what his life was like -- and longer features, including award-winning pieces on a windmill collector and Bobby Vee, who as a teen-age musician helped fill in at the concert missed by Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper the night those stars were killed in an airplane crash.
"Leif is very intrigued by everyone," said Euan Kerr, a news editor at MPR who worked with Enger on "Mainstreet Radio." "He sits down and starts to talk and people just open up to him."
Enger's radio features provided a foundation as a writer that he has been able to build on as a novelist.
"More than anything it's the feature writer's eye for the salient detail," Enger said. "You pull in a detail about a cat rolling in the dust in the driveway and you throw that into the right kind of news story and it just has a different feel. It humanizes the story I think."
And that eye has proved especially helpful when creating characters.
"You can't ever just make one up out of whole cloth," Enger said. "You sort of have to delve back into the library of people that you've met and remember their attributes. Remember the way when they were really excited about something a little bit of spit would gather at the corners of their mouths."
An eye, and ear, for detail
Enger, the reporter, was "a master storyteller," said Mike Edgerly, news director of MPR, who worked as an editor with Enger for several years.
"Leif was a master at creating landscapes with his radio writing. What he's done in his novel, this is what he did with radio stories," Edgerly said.
"His work was wonderful for the eye, it was wonderful for the ear. It didn't matter if it was a rudimentary fracas up north or the windmill story," Edgerly said. "That craftsmanship really helps you see the characters."
Enger rose early in the morning to write -- between 5 and 7 a.m. -- when the farmhouse was at its quietest. Three books were always close by: The Concise Oxford Dictionary, The Compact Oxford English Dictionary and a thesaurus. It's a ritual he still practices.
A few people knew he was working on a book, but it wasn't talked about much, Edgerly said.
"I thought it would be bad luck to ask him how it was going," said Edgerly, who would eventually read early drafts of the novel. "But then one day, before he sent the manuscript to an agent, he said things were really starting to go well. He's such a modest and humble man, I thought everything must have clicked."
Enger, who has since retired from MPR, hadn't thought about publication until the story was about half finished. That's when his wife Robin suggested he finish the story and see if any publishers were interested.
He agreed, hoping to get a deal for a couple thousand library copies. Instead, five publishing companies bid on the novel and the producers behind Chocolat and Driving Miss Daisy purchased the movie rights.
"That was a huge surprise," Enger said. "I don't know how to describe that."
Best of 2001
Peace Like a River became a best-seller (a feat duplicated with its paperback release last fall) and topped year-end lists of the best books for publications from Time magazine to the Los Angeles Times. ForeWord magazine, a book industry publication, named Enger's novel its book of the year.
"This book transcends everyone's wildest imagination. It's magnificently written," Victoria Sutherland, ForeWord's publisher, said in an interview in which she compared Enger's prose to the work of John Steinbeck.
Reviewers have written that the book's uplifting spirit appeals to readers in hard times; the book was released the day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"It's a book that celebrates a certain innocence and also it's an adventure. It's sort of an enthusiastic, hopeful adventure of a style that hasn't been very popular lately," Enger said.
Writing for enjoyment
Back in the late-1980s and early-1990s, Enger and his brother, Lin, collaborated on a series of mystery novels. They published five books as L.L. Enger.
"We really came at it from a mercenary standpoint. We wrote them and published them thinking that if we could write a commercial enough book we'd get lots of readers and get lots of money," Enger said.
Their work was largely ignored, but sold just enough to justify another contract, Enger said.
"After an experience like that you say to yourself I've written as commercially as I can. I've published my last work. And anything I write now is just going to be for pleasure," he said. "That's why I wrote Peace Like a River. It was just for enjoyment."
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Lifestyles Section
Courtesy of Batavia Newspapers Corporation