In 1992, David James Duncan published his breakthrough novel The Brothers K, a compelling and critically acclaimed chronicle of 1960s America. Inspired by Russian literature and America’s national pastime, the novel tells the story of the Chance family, a tight-knit clan made up of baseball fanatics on one side and, on the other, religious zealots. Baseball provides the novel with its main narrative framework (a “K” is a strike-out as well as an allusion to Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers), but religion is never too far removed from the action.
For many restless pew-sitters, the novel stands out for how masterfully Duncan translates the intricacies of a fundamentalist Christian family into material worthy of great literature. Kincaid, the youngest of the four Chance brothers, assembles the sprawling account of his siblings wrestling with their inner lives. Over the ensuing years their concerns move from box scores and Bible passages to the wisdom of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Upanishads. To satisfy their spiritual hunger, they reach deep within sacred tradition for the core tenets that are often muted by religious cultural trappings. But they also reach far outside of them. For the Chance children, spiritual inquiry and insight exist in the midst of their doofusy, screwed up, confusing church-school-household adolescence, not apart from it. The point for Duncan seems to be: keep your spirit awake in this world, not trained on the next.
Duncan expands this point in his long-awaited follow-up, Sun House, a novel more than twenty years in the making. Like The Brothers K, Sun House is a voluminous chronicle of a specific time in American history, this time spanning the turn of the twenty-first century, as the effects of unchecked capitalism and climate change start to take hold. Over seven sections, or “tellings,” the novel recounts the formation of the Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company, an unlikely collective of urbanites and ranchers—“broken-open lowly people”—and the fires and failures each member endures before joining this collective.
Strung together like “story beads,” the novel focuses on four main characters. Early on, we meet Risa McKeig, a University of Washington student studying—or, more accurately, falling in love with—Sanskrit and the Vedic spiritual tradition that introduces her to her own “infinite insides,” which inspires her efforts to “convert sadnesses into interior night sky.” We also meet the twins TJ and Jervis McGraff, whom Risa eventually befriends. TJ is a failed Jesuit-turned-chef, and Jervis is a street wanderer/preacher who serves as a kind of holy fool, moving events along and motivating others. A Shakespearean actor named Jamey Van Zandt, who enters the drama as a child grieving the death of his mother on his fifth birthday, eventually joins the group in Seattle.
The Pacific Northwest holds most of the action until the story ripples out to Colorado, where the folk singer Lorilee (Lore) Shay is having her heart won, then stomped on, and Montana, where Kale Broussard, a rancher and old soul, grieves the bygone days of his family’s estate in the Elkmoon Mountains. Kale holds fast to the belief that “the one way to preserve and defend a place’s rightness is to inhabit it, intimate, knowledgeable, and vigilant as can be,” even though the only way he and his crew can go on living in the place is to serve the absentee corporate stronghold that has bought them out. These Elkmoon Mountains also happen to be the childhood home of Dave McKeig, Risa’s failure of a father. Corralling the story is a narrator nicknamed “The Holy Goat,” or HG, an eventual member of the “unintentional menagerie”—not to be confused with an overly intentional community. Get too intentional or “thinky,” as Jervis says, and all the magic of this “Earth-gentle lifeboat” dissipates.
The novel plays with and stretches to high heaven the genre of the Western. Its many “embedded co-authors,” quoted extensively by HG, prefer the term “Eastern Western,” a genre in which “the timeless wisdom of the East touches the brokenness of the West.” We are also in the realm of the difficult-to-define genre of spiritual writing. Duncan unapologetically populates the bookshelves of his earnest characters with ancient texts and floods their conversations with excerpts. Every page is steeped in the world’s wisdom traditions, referencing or quoting directly from Buddhist master Eihei Dōgen; the Indian poet Valmiki and Vedic literature; the thirteenth-century Beguines, laywomen who lived and loved in community and who were fiercely persecuted by the Catholic Church; and the Beguines’ champion, the mystic Meister Eckhart.
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