Lit Du Nord: Minnesota Books and Authors

By Nick Healy

Here’s a simple summertime reading tip for you. Ask a friend or family member this question: What’s your favorite book?

The question is one that lots of people seem to find difficult to answer. The readers in your life will probably respond by listing three, four, five beloved books. You might have to press a little bit. Ask which book they think you’d like best. When you get a recommendation, you might even ask to borrow their copy.

Take that book with you to the cabin or the woods or wherever you go for a bit of summer rest — the backyard, for many of us — and give yourself some uninterrupted time to read.

What you’ll discover is that, because it came from a friend, the story has layers of intrigue it otherwise wouldn’t. You’ll find that while you are getting to know the characters and tracking the plot of the story you are also watching for evidence of your friend in the pages.

You’ll find that you can’t help but wonder what makes the book important to your friend and you can’t help but notice traits in characters and mileposts in the plot that connect to your friend’s experiences in life somehow.

Regardless of whether you admire the book as much as your friend does, you’ll feel a connection to the story. It will stick with you. It will take hold in your memory.

I came to know two books by Minnesota’s Leif Enger this way. Enger, of course, made his name as a novelist with “Peace Like a River,” his 2001 debut and a critical and commercial hit.

For years it seemed as if nearly everyone I knew had read the book, and many of them recommended it to me. There was a copy in my “So Brave, Young, and Handsome” by Leif Enger

house, but for whatever reason, I never got to it.

Enger’s second novel came along in 2008. With a slightly unwieldy title — “So Brave, Young, and Handsome” — the book also received fond reviews and sold well. Again I heard good things, and again I didn’t get to it.

Eventually “Virgil Wander,” Enger’s third novel, found its way to me. A friend at work had gotten her hands on an advance copy, and after she read it, she sent it to me via interoffice mail, along with a note saying she thought it was my kind of thing. I appreciated the gesture, so I started reading right away. And I couldn’t put it down.

The book has strands of a love story, a mystery, and a portrait of small-town life in our corner of the country.

The title character operates a single-screen movie theater in Greenstone, a fading North Shore town, and after barely surviving a car crash, he must piece back together his life and his notion of himself. The story is funny and captivating. It has everything I like in a novel.

Soon after finishing “Virgil Wander,” I mentioned it to a friend of mine. His face lit up. He loved Enger’s books, and he couldn’t wait to tell me about “So Brave, Young, and Handsome.”

This was a friend I’d known for about a decade at that point, and somehow I’d never learned who his favorite writers were, which books he treasured most. My friend handed me his copy of “So Brave, Young, and Handsome,” and again I was eager to get started reading for reasons that were mostly outside of the book.

Around that time, we took our teenagers to Phoenix for a short trip during their spring break. I brought along Enger’s second novel, and I spent some very content hours sitting by a pool and reading.

The story is genius in terms of plot. Two men go off on a journey

in search of one’s long-lost bride, and soon they find that they, too, are being pursued.

It wasn’t hard for me to see why my friend liked the book. Enger seems to approach the world with ever-present openness to wonder and with an appreciation of small and familiar comforts and a keen eye for moments of beauty.

My friend BR O’Halloran was also that sort of person. He was curious about the world, and he always was paying attention. He was impressed by nature, and he was a friendly and generous presence amid a daily shuffle that can feel unfriendly and callous. He was the sort of person we need more of.

“You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself,” Enger writes in the novel. “I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work.”

BR passed away in late April. He was a young guy, still in his 40s. He had brain cancer. To me, his disease seemed terribly, maddeningly unfair and unkind. But he stayed himself all the way.

Soon after his death, I picked up a copy of “So Brave, Young, and Handsome” at the library and started reading. Enger’s narrator had me again — from the very first line. And rereading the book gave me a chance to encounter BR once more, to imagine him reading the story and getting swept away by it.

I felt lucky getting into the story again and finding my friend there, too.

Nick Healy is an author and freelance writer in Mankato.