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| So Brave, Young and Handsome: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Leif Enger
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $11.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  77 reviews
Sales Rank: 2153
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0871139855
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780871139856
ASIN: 0871139855
Publication Date: April 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, April 2008: A gritty western couched in the easy storytelling style of a folk ballad (think 3:10 to Yuma as sung by the Kingston Trio), Leif Enger's highly anticipated second novel (his first was Peace Like a River) tells the story of outlaw Glendon Hale's quest to right his past, as seen through the eyes of his unlikely companion Monte Becket. So Brave, Young, and Handsome begins with Becket, a struggling novelist bewildered by the success of his first book, who has pledged to his wife, son, and publisher to "write one thousand words a day until another book is finished." Four years and six unfinished novels later, Becket sits on the porch of his Minnesota farmhouse about to give up on number seven, when he spies a man standing up in his boat "rowing upstream through the ropy mists of the Cannon River." Eager to set aside his waning tale about handsome ranch hand Dan Roscoe, Becket calls out to the mysterious white-haired boatman and his life changes forever. At turns merry and wistful, romantic and tragic, So Brave, Young, and Handsome is as absorbing as a campfire tale, full of winking outlaws and relentless villains--the sort of story to keep you on the edge of your seat with hope in your heart. --Daphne Durham
Product Description
A stunning successor to his best selling novel Peace Like a River, Leif Enger’s new work is a rugged and nimble story about an aging train robber on a quest to reconcile the claims of love and judgment on his life, and the failed writer who goes with him.
In 1915 Minnesota, novelist Monte Becket has lost his sense of purpose. His only success long behind him, Monte lives simply with his wife and son. But when he befriends outlaw Glendon Hale, a new world of opportunity and experience presents itself. Glendon has spent years in obscurity, but the guilt he harbors for abandoning his wife, Blue, over two decades ago, has lured him from hiding. As the modern age marches swiftly forward, Glendon aims to travel back to his past--heading to California to seek Blue’s forgiveness. Beguiled and inspired, Monte soon finds himself leaving behind his own family to embark for the unruly West with his fugitive guide. As they desperately flee from the relentless Charles Siringo, an ex-Pinkerton who’s been hunting Glendon for years, Monte falls ever further from his family and the law, to be tempered by a fiery adventure from which he may never get home.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 72 more reviews...
 Incredible Road Trip, Odd Grace March 28, 2008
64 out of 68 found this review helpful
Monte Becket should have been happy, with a doting wife, adventuresome little boy, and a place by the river. Not to mention a bestselling novel to his credit. But something's missing and he can't seem to write a second. Then Glendon Hale shows up--courtly, charming, talented, and a self-confessed rascal--a man who walked out on his wife, the love of his life, many years before. Now he envisions a quixotic journey of redemption--to find his lost wife and apologize--and he asks Monte to go with him. So begins the road trip to end all road trips. Monte gets in deeper than he ever expected, and soon runs afoul of Charles Siringo, the detective/bounty hunter who has been pursuing Glendon for many years. Will they ever find the long lost Mrs. Hale? Will Glendon receive forgiveness? Wlll Monte ever make it home again? Or will both men end up in jail? Or worse?
Of course, I won't tell you what happens, only that this trip becomes longer, darker, and more costly than Monte could ever have dreamed. And that both men suffer and lose a lot, and that they end up touched by an odd kind of grace.
Leif Enger is an amazing writer. He brings this improbable yarn to life so richly, so delightfully, that you keep turning the pages, want to or not. He has an absolutely stunning gift for making his characters real and this absurd adventure profoundly believable. I enjoyed Enger's first book--Peace Like A River--but this one is much better. You simply have to drop what you're doing and get a copy. Now. I recommend it highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.
A Throwback Romantic "Western" April 4, 2008
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
First, I was not a big fan of "Peace Like a River" so I came to this with less than an open mind. I ended up truly enjoying it.
The narrator is a postman turned author. He wrote a best-selling romantic action western. He quit the post office to become an author. Unfortunately, despite starting seven new novels, he can not duplicate his best-selling feat - few books get finished and none published.
He then befriends a mysterious new neighbor and the fun begins. Although he can not write another romantic western, he lives it - or at least as close as one can during the Taft administration long after the west was won. All of the action comes from following the neighbor who, he comes to learn, has had a rollicking past. He then gets swept away by a charismatic Pinkerton detective and new adventures follow. All while romance in the old western style plays along.
The writing is clean and crisp, although it dragged a bit in the middle (nothing to make you want to put the book down). The story is believeable as told, even if it does, purposely, have elements of the spaghetti western or dime western set in the 20th century. The premise of the western when the west is not only done but out of the public's imagination in favor of industrialization and urbanization is clever and amusing.
The characters are terrific and memorable, particularly the neighbor. His past deeds are not revealed until the pair is on the road, and then it only comes out in bits and pieces. There are some very good supporting cast members who enhance the narrator's travels as well.
This is a very enjoyable and amusing novel. There's a bit of Zane Gray, Don Quixote and Buffalo Bill all rolled into one and Enger makes the mixture work for a book easy to recommend.
siringo steals the show March 29, 2008
18 out of 24 found this review helpful
The period from about 1890 to World War I was one of transition in the American West. There have been a number of fine books and movies about this transition, including The Wild Bunch, The Grey Fox, Days of Heaven, Heartland, Mari Sandoz' quintessential novel Slogum House, and Charles Siringo's A Cowboy Detective. Old-time gun hands may still be around, but life has passed them by. There are fabulous scenes in movies--such as in Wild Bunch where the gang talks about rumors of how people can fly, and in Grey Fox where Bill Minor is released from prison after many years, and finds that all the familiar things are gone. So Brave, Young, and Handsome is set in this same period, and two of the central figures are relics--one real (Charles Siringo), one fictional (Glendon Hale).
There are four main characters in this book: Monte Becket, a writer who cannot recapture the essence and success of his first novel about a daring Pony Express rider and his adventures with Indians, Glendon Hale, who paddles past Becket's house, and later Hood Roberts, an ill-fated young man, and Charles Siringo, a 60-year-old former detective from the Pinkerton Agency. Siringo is the only one of these people who is non-fictional: his character in the book is drawn with a wonderfully rich detail and flair. I have the feeling that Enger found Siringo to be much more interesting than the other 3 main people, and Siringo certainly steals the show in the book. If I were assigning ratings to each character based on how well drawn that person is, I'd give Roberts 2 stars, Hale and Becket 3 stars each, and Siringo a solid 5 stars. Hale travels with Becket and sometimes Roberts as well: Siringo is chasing Hale, who the law has been after for many years. For much of the novel, Hale and Roberts are on the run, and Siringo travels after them with Becket in tow: this is by far the most enjoyable and best-written part of the novel.
There are some elements which are almost surrealistic: the grizzled wiry Siringo is like a hellhound on Hale's trail, and seems to have an uncanny way of tracking Hale across thousands of miles. This same element was also present in Enger's previous work, the fine novel Peace Like a River, where the lawman relentlessly tracked Davy. So what you'll get here is a very good sense of time and place, of a land and life in transition, particularly so as Siringo and Becket drive into the small dusty towns in west Texas and New Mexico. The book may seem a bit slow at times when Siringo isn't present, but when Siringo is there, you get great storytelling.
 relatively amiable but pallid novel April 23, 2008
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
So Brave isn't a bad book by any stretch of the imagination. In some ways, it manages to be a good book. But it's mostly just pleasantly passable. It's that TV show you "watch" while you do your work, that kid you don't mind playing with when your best friends aren't around, that pizza you get because it's conveniently across the street as opposed to that really good place that takes so long to deliver. It doesn't really bore you or annoy you or make you swear off this particular author, but in the end you sort of wonder why you bothered with it and a few days later you've forgotten that you did.
It opens with Monte Becket, an author whose never been able to recapture the spark of that first surprise hit novel about a Pony Express adventurer and who has just given up on his seventh failed attempt to do so, a fact he'll withhold for some time from his confident and supportive wife. As he sits on his dock, an odd apparition appears in the fog paddling a boat by the dock--his new neighbor Glendon, who builds boats and has a mysterious past. This meeting develops into a strange friendship that eventually leads to Monte joining Glendon on his quest to apologize to the wife he left long ago in Mexico, a quest that is quickly interrupted when Glendon is recognized as a notorious train robber. The two are split then rejoin as for reasons even unknown to himself Monte keeps following Glendon further West. Along the way he picks up with a young man who shifts from mechanic to cowboy to modern-day bandit/fugitive and an inspector Javier-like former Pinkerton--Charles Siringo who is tracking Glendon.
There are several reasons the book is solid but unimpressive. The main one is quite simple; it just isn't all that compelling in either plot or character. Monte is relatively passive, always a dangerous trait for a narrator, and when he does act, it's almost always with a sense of numb bemusement or confusion. Glendon should be much more interesting than he is, but his relatively unexplored past and single-minded focus on apologizing makes him less than enthralling. Robert Hood, the young man, has potential, but at first he's not really a full character and when he starts to become one he goes off-stage and we hear about him third-hand. The only truly interesting character is Siringo, who doesn't appear for far too long. Things pick up when he's on the page, but that doesn't last long enough.
The time setting, the cusp between horses and cars, old and new west, is touched upon, but again, too much is left on the table. And though they travel cross-country, it feels a bit like a stage set from Hollywood. And finally, the end devolves a bit into sentimentality, or at least, too much so for my liking.
In the end, as mentioned, there isn't really much to dislike about the book (save one particular irksome way a character shrugs off an injury) but there also isn't much to really like. Either one would be an intensity of emotion the book just doesn't provoke. And so I can't really recommend it as there are so many other books out there that will provoke a strong (positive) response.
 Plodding and Predictable May 12, 2008
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
At the beginning of Leif Enger's second novel, following the success of his debut, Peace Like a River, one must wonder how much of the plot of "So Brave, Young, and Handsome" was inspired by real life. In the beginning, you see, we meet Monte Becket, who has quit his job at the post office after publishing a surprisingly successful novel. Emboldened by success, Becket begins calling himself a writer and quickly agrees to write a follow-up novel for the publisher who is now eager to capitalize on his success, only to become crippled by a serious case of writer's block. His attempts to create something that will not only live up to his debut but surpass it feel weak and uninspired, leaving Becket to wonder if he actually has a second novel in him at all.
Enter Glendon Hale, an outlaw who endears himself to the Becket family before deciding to head off for Mexico to make things right with the wife he abandoned years earlier. The deep friendship between Becket and Glendon is inexplicably instant, just one of many plot contrivances that the reader of "So Brave, Young, and Handsome" will have to shrug off in the course of the novel. That Becket is so terrified by the rut his new career is stuck in and what it could potentially mean for his family that he decides to follow Glendon to the ends of the earth if necessary is another. So off they go on a creaky-metaphor laden trip through the dying old west, caught in that perilous time where the modern age is still lingering on the horizon, threatening to take over everything that people like Becket and Glendon hold dear, and the old ways of life are steadily disappearing into the distance.
Complicating matters is the almost instant arrival of Charles Siringo, a corrupt former Pinkerton whose desire for revenge on Glendon is only equaled by his desire to recapture his former glory. Also throwing a wrench into the works is Hood Roberts, a sweet young auto mechanic who hitches a ride with Glendon and Becket only to end up on the lam with a beautiful girl at his side (his jarring evolution from naive wannabe-cowboy to in-too-deep-outlaw is yet another of those plot contrivances the reader will just have to shrug along with). And therein lies the ultimate problem with "So Brave, Young, and Handsome": its plot is nothing more than a series of forced twists and turns that never feels organic or realistic in any way. The metaphors that Enger utilizes feel obvious and hackneyed. Even his foreshadowing is contrived (a distant storm gathers in force and intensity - and just as it explodes rain and thunder all over our heroes - you guessed it! - Siringo shows up and the plot gets shaken up yet again!).
All of which might have been more forgivable had the characters been more compelling, the plot been less plodding and contemplative (Enger's attempts at philosophical musings fall flat), and the final pages been less predictable. I have never read "Peace Like a River," and after this experience I would be very hesitant to do so.
Grade: D
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