I am doing a blog series on Novels Every Christian Should Consider Reading.
Tony Woodlief is a writer who lives in North Carolina.
His essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The London Times, and his short stories appeared in Image, Ruminate, Saint Katherine Review, and Dappled Things.
He is also the author of the book, Somewhere More Holy: Stories from a Bewildered Father, Stumbling Husband, Reluctant Handyman, and Prodigal Son.
His website is www.tonywoodlief.com.
God’s grace is freely given to humanity, but novels should earn it. We’ve all endured ones that don’t, that brim instead with what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace,” reading more like sentimental greeting cards than stories of actual lives. In the real world we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, while the wicked revel. Our grief is tainted with bitterness, our joy with envy, our righteous anger with pride. These truths persist because our hearts, Jeremiah says, are deceitful and dreadfully sick. Any novel that does not reflect this is lying.
Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River does not lie, but this is not the reason you should read it. You should read it because it is earnest and beautiful in a world of smirks and ugliness, yet more realistic about fallen man than most grim-eyed modern novels wallowing in weltschmerz.
Here is the book’s narrator, recounting the story of his stillbirth:
“In these cases,” said Dr. Nokes, “we must trust in the Almighty to do what is best.” At which point Dad stepped across and smote Dr. Nokes with a right hand, so that the doctor went down and lay on his side with his pupils unfocused. As Mother cried out, Dad turned back to me, a clay child wrapped in a canvas coat, and said in a normal voice, “Reuben Land, in the name of the living God I am telling you to breathe.”
And Reuben did, because miracles fall from his father, Jeremiah, like tears from his prophetic namesake. Yet this novel keeps in our minds what many Christian novels suppress: It is terrifying to fall into the hands of the living God. “A miracle,” Reuben explains, “is no cute thing but more like the swing of a sword.” That sword will swing many times as Reuben, with his father and sister, search for his wayward older brother, Davy.
Unlike Jeremiah and Reuben, Davy has no stomach for miracles. “You think God looks out for us?” he asks Reuben. “You want Him to?” Davy is repulsed by his father’s often-told story of being carried unharmed by a tornado. “It didn’t make sense,” he says. “It wasn’t right.” Davy is self-sufficient and cynical. He is what sophisticated types call a realist.
It is Jeremiah who is the true realist, however, because he walks open-eyed through a Christ-haunted world. It’s a world where all things work together for good, to those who love God, just as the Bible promises. But unlike a sentimental storybook, that good isn’t always apparent on this side of the veil. When his children ask what they should do, following a tragedy, Jeremiah simply says: “‘Persevere.'”
“It was a better answer,” Reuben says, “than we wanted.” Thankfully that can’t be said of this novel, which was a bestseller. It reached beyond a Christian audience not despite being permeated with faith, but because of it, because everyone senses the truth in Jeremiah’s admonition:
“We and the world, my children, will always be at war.
Retreat is impossible.
Arm yourselves.”
