SUN HOUSE

Jim Harrison meets Robert M. Pirsig, Timothy Leary, and the Dalai Lama in Duncan’s long-awaited follow-up to The River Why (1983) and The Brothers K (1992).

An inch-long steel bolt separates from an airplane and falls to Earth, where it “embed[s] itself in the skull of an eight-year-old girl hoeing weeds with her widower father in a Mexican cornfield, killing her almost instantly.” So improbable is this occurrence that it has to be more than chance, an assassination on the part of some jealous or malicious god. So thinks a fallen Jesuit, one of several characters in Duncan’s vast novel who suffer a crisis of faith—and who fall into each other’s orbit in a breathtakingly beautiful Montana valley that’s full of heartbreaking possibilities. The first major player we meet is a footloose actor whose mother died on his fifth birthday, a source of psyche-snapping grief for the rest of his life. In time, he falls in with another wounded bird, a Sanskrit student who is impossibly learned courtesy of her similarly brilliant if emotionally unavailable father, who, for reasons that unfold over hundreds of pages, turns out to be the reason Montana figures in the story at all. Duncan’s characters suffer pain, loss, death, all the makings of Buddhist samsara that fuel our Sanskritist’s weary mistrust of the world. Though of Michener length, the story is talky and without much action; Duncan writes page after page to describe even the smallest incidents, as with his long and quite shattering disquisition on the death of a beloved dog. Yet that talk, arch and bookish (Gary Snyder makes a cameo appearance), will prove captivating to those who enjoy novels of ideas—in this case, one that modernizes the Western by injecting it with ethnic diversity and doses of philosophy (and LSD, even).

For all its excesses, a book by a first-rate writer and one to be savored.