Sun House

March 1, 2023

A Jesuit priest questioning his faith after a Mexican girl's senseless death. An actor who cannot get over losing his mother as a child. A young woman suddenly imbued with love for the world. All join on a solace-seeking journey to the area surrounding Montana's Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company. National Book Award finalist Duncan has been working on this saga for 16 years; with a 75,000-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from June 1, 2023
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.

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Starred review from August 1, 2023
Duncan (The Brothers K) returns to fiction after nearly three decades with a magnum opus of capacious grandeur that blends humor, heart, and unflinching human spirit in a sublimely drawn group portrait. The characters include twins Jervis and TJ, who share a deep connection to each other and to the spiritual realm. Risa grows up with a love of blues music, a favorite of her largely absentee father, and later finds temporary solace in Eastern wisdom. A young couple finds shared inspiration in a Gary Snyder quote but derive conflicting meanings that cause a rift in the relationship. A boy's mother dies on his fifth birthday, causing him to test fate and question the gods on subsequent "death days." Each is uniquely broken in either heart or body. Their faiths are tested, their beliefs challenged. Tragedy gives way to resilience, grief to hope. Their strength and survival feel earned and authentic. Each page abounds with imagination and pulses with heart. The language sizzles and sparkles, bounding between wit and profundity, capturing the beauty of the natural world and deploying whip-smart dialogue. While each character has experienced pain, each has also discovered power in community. The unchartered path from the darkness of the soul to one of transcendence is arduous, perilous, laden with obstacles, and beautifully rendered.

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