59 pages • 1 hour read
Leif EngerPeace Like a River
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Clay”
Content Warning: The following chapter summaries and analyses discuss the source material’s allusions to sexual assault and depictions of gun violence.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Clay”
Chapter 1 introduces the book’s protagonist and narrator, Reuben Land, and describes the miracle of his birth. He was born in 1951 to Helen and Jeremiah Land, delivered by Dr. Nokes. At the moment of his birth, his father is outside the hospital, pacing and praying. Reuben isn’t breathing, and all the doctor’s efforts to make the infant’s lungs function prove unsuccessful. After 12 minutes, Jeremiah hurries in, having felt an inexplicable urge to rush to his wife’s delivery room. He later tells his son, “God told me you were in trouble. […] He made me run” (1), suggesting Reuben’s life will be shaped by divine intervention. Jeremiah tries to get Reuben to breathe, but Dr. Nokes tells him the baby will have brain damage after going this long without air. He tells Jeremiah they must trust that the baby’s death is God’s will, for which Jeremiah hits the doctor in the face.
Reuben’s body by this time is cold and gray, like a lump of clay. Jeremiah orders his infant son to breathe in the name of the living God, and Reuben breathes. In his narration of the event, Reuben says it was a miracle. He goes on to qualify it as a true miracle, unlike many of the everyday wonders people call miracles, such as a beautiful sunrise after a storm. A true miracle, he explains, is something that “contradicts the will of earth,” defying the laws of nature (2).
Reuben introduces his sister Swede to the narrative, who believes people fear true miracles because they fear change. More relevant to the story of Reuben’s birth, or at least to his understanding of it, Swede believes miracles never occur without a witness. This shapes Reuben’s belief that he was allowed to live, after being born not breathing, to serve as a witness to his father’s future miracles.
Chapter 2 Summary: “His Separate Shadow”
Reuben believes his lack of brain damage, despite the doctor’s prediction, is his father’s second miracle. He does, however, live with chronic asthma. In the dramatic present, 11-year-old Reuben is on a hunting trip with his family, which now consists of him, his father Jeremiah, his older brother Davy, and his younger sister Swede. On the day of the hunt, there’s palpable tension between Jeremiah and 16-year-old Davy. They aren’t speaking to each other, though Reuben is unsure why.
Eleven is too young to use a gun in their family, but Davy hands his shotgun to Reuben anyway and encourages him to take down a low-flying goose. After missing two shots, Reuben hits it with the third, when the goose is practically out of range.
Feeling his first kill has made him a man, Reuben insists on gutting and cleaning the goose himself back at the barn of their family friend, August Shultz. August was Jeremiah’s childhood neighbor and best friend, and lives on a farm in North Dakota with his wife Birdie. Backstory reveals that Jeremiah’s family lost their farm toward the end of the Dust Bowl years.
Swede tells Reuben what she knows about the tension between their father and older brother. The previous night at the school’s football game, teenaged boys named Israel Finch and Tommy Basca beat up Davy’s girlfriend, Dolly, in the girls’ locker room. Jeremiah, who works as a janitor at the school, showed up in time to stop something worse from happening, implying the boys meant to rape her. Reuben later learns from Davy that Finch and Basca threatened their father and his family after the incident. Swede believes Davy will do something violent to Finch and Basca in retaliation.
Late that night while heading to the outhouse, Reuben hears his father praying and pacing on the flatbed of the grain truck parked behind the barn. He sees him pace past the edge of the flatbed and walk on air 30 feet out and back, which is miracle number three. Reuben catches a few of Jeremiah’s words of prayer and is surprised to hear his own name, not Davy’s.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Beauteous Are My Cakes Indeed”
Reuben learns more about what happened to Dolly. She was alone in the girls’ locker room during halftime when Finch and Basca came in, cut the lights, and approached her. She fought back, hitting Finch in the neck with a padlock. Basca grabbed Dolly and held her while Finch hit her and ripped open her sweater. Jeremiah was cleaning the boys’ locker room when he heard a commotion. He rushed in, his face strangely luminous in the dark, and stopped the boys’ attack by thrashing them with his broom handle. To Davy, this thrashing seems an insufficient punishment once he learns what Finch and Basca intended to do to Dolly. Afterward locking up at the school, Jeremiah encounters Finch, who says he and Basca will be watching Jeremiah’s family.
When the Lands return home from their hunting trip, they find their front door covered in tar. Jeremiah explains the principle of escalation. Reuben doesn’t fully recognize the point, asking what they should do to Finch and Basca now. Jeremiah says they shouldn’t do anything, they’ve already won.
Reuben and Swede return to school, where Swede tries to impress her teacher by composing heroic verses about a cowboy named Sunny Sundown. Jeremiah takes Reuben to a special Wednesday night service at church. A guest preacher rumored to offer healing is giving the sermon. Reuben suspects Jeremiah brought only him, leaving Swede and Davy at home, because he’s hoping for a miraculous cure of Reuben’s asthma.
Reuben slips away from the service for a bit to spend some time in the church kitchen with his crush, Bethany Orchard. When they return, several congregants are speaking in an unrecognizable language, while others are unconscious on the floor, including Jeremiah. To Reuben, he appears to be in a peaceful repose, and Reuben concludes that he’s been knocked cold by the power of God’s love. Reuben suddenly feels someone shaking him violently, and his lungs clear. He realizes the only person near him is the preacher. Jeremiah regains consciousness with a sense that they need to hurry home, and the chapter ends with the implication that Finch and Basca have done something to Swede.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Your Toughened Heart”
Verses from Swede’s cowboy epic introduce the villainous Valdez, setting the tone for Finch and Basca’s next act—abducting Swede from her home while Jeremiah and Reuben are at church. They return her about 20 minutes later, telling her they’ll come back for her. Physically she’s bruised, but emotionally she’s traumatized. The police officer who responds treats the incident casually. He talks about it like a harmless prank, despite one of the boys having violently attacked a teacher a year ago. He says Basca’s aunt wanted Jeremiah arrested for his treatment of the boys in the locker room the other night, riling Reuben’s sense of injustice.
The Land family celebrates Swede’s ninth birthday with all the cheer they can muster in an attempt to eclipse their anger over the feud. She receives a book from Reuben, a typewriter from Jeremiah, and a riding saddle from Davy. An unsuccessful traveling salesman named Tim Lurvy drops in on Swede’s birthday dinner. Jeremiah is always too kind to turn Lurvy away when he shows up, which is at least once a year. A small batch of Jeremiah’s famous red-potato chowder, which Reuben fears Lurvy will get the majority of, somehow fills everyone’s bellies and doesn’t run out. Only Reuben seems to notice this miraculous occurrence.
Sometime after midnight, Reuben is woken by the sound of intruders entering the house and then his bedroom. The lights come on and he sees Finch and Basca carrying a baseball bat. Davy is sitting up in bed with his gun in hand. Finch lifts the bat and Davy shoots, hitting Finch in the forehead. Then he shoots Basca. The shot isn’t immediately fatal and Basca tries to crawl away, but Davy shoots him again. Swede runs out of her room after the first shot, but Jeremiah restrains her. Reuben wonders, in hindsight, when Davy realized he’d done something for which he’d have to endure exile.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The scene of Reuben’s birth acts as a hook for the narrative arc. It presents a tension-filled, life-or-death scenario, and resolves it by introducing the miraculous. Reuben’s definition of a true miracle, something that defies the laws of nature, establishes one of the novel’s conflicts, which can be seen as faith versus reason, or God’s law versus natural law. Reuben uses the biblical story of Lazarus rising from the dead to illustrate a true miracle, saying, “When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth” (2). This example attributes miracles solely to God’s will. A related conflict established in Chapters 1-4 is that of the faithful versus a faithless world. Jeremiah tells his family, “We and the world, my children, will always be at war” (3). Such allusions to Christian tenets occur throughout the narrative.
Leif Enger uses foreshadowing to move the plot and escalate tension. For example, Reuben narrates: “If he were here to begin the account, I believe Dad would say what he said to Swede and me on the worst night of all our lives” (3). The phrase “the worst night of all our lives” foreshadows the harrowing conflict in store for the characters.
When Finch and Basca tell Jeremiah they’ll be watching his family, they pit themselves as antagonists against the entire Land family, and the conflict between Finch and Basca and the Lands supports an exploration of another thematic concept, family loyalty.
The escalation of this conflict builds tension between the Lands and Finch and Basca. It also supports one of the book’s thematic messages about forgiveness, as it forces the characters to decide whether or not to retaliate.
The novel’s first chapter introduces the book’s protagonist and narrator, Reuben, and characterizes his life as miraculous in and of itself. This sets him up to face and defy great odds in the scope of his character arc. Israel Finch and Tommy Basca function as antagonists in these chapters, while Jeremiah, Davy, and Swede Land are supporting characters. Swede’s cowboy epic about Sunny Sundown acts as a symbolic parallel to the characters and conflicts in the story.
Beginning in Chapter 2, the book’s setting contributes to the narrative’s nostalgic mood. A spirit akin to that of old westerns and frontier tales permeates the story, despite its setting in the 1960s. The Land family’s goose hunt on North Dakota farmland, with Enger’s imagery bringing the rural setting to life, supports this spirit. Reuben’s trip to the outhouse in the middle of the night furthers the sense of an era defined by a closer connection to nature.
Despite the narrator being 11 years old in the dramatic present, the book is written in the past tense, which allows Reuben the observations that come to one through hindsight in adulthood. This lends the narrative voice a level of sophistication which would not be accessible to Reuben as a child. His diction includes words like “roweling” and “soughed,” for example.
Reuben’s account remains true, however, to a child’s experience of events. Adults try to shield him from troubling details, many of which he learns from eavesdropping or secondhand accounts. For example, Swede says of the locker room incident, “I heard Dad say he got there in time” (10). Neither Swede nor Reuben fully understand the significance of this statement, though the implication is that their father prevented the boys from raping Dolly. The narrative voice is fitting for Reuben’s 11 years and adds a sense of innocence, which contributes to a thematic exploration of injustice. The narrative voice also demonstrates Reuben’s heroic image of his father, which aligns with a young boy’s worldview.
Enger’s writing style consistently employs vivid imagery. In a vision of Tommy Basca seeing hell after being shot by Davy, Enger writes, “I knew with certainty he was seeing all the devils waiting for him, whetting their long knives, that he could hear their gabbling shrieks, that the smell of sulfur so quick in the room issued from some dim mouthlike chamber panting after his soul” (49). This line demonstrates Enger’s use of sensory details to convey the sights, smells, and sounds of eternal punishment.
Intertextuality in the form of literary allusions is another notable aspect of Enger’s style. His literary inspirations become Swede and Reuben’s inspirations, upholding a tradition of novelists honoring history’s literary greats in their work. For example, Davy’s nickname for Reuben is Natty Bumppo, an allusion to works by James Fenimore Cooper.
Chapter 3 does the heavy lifting of establishing an authorial tone regarding matters of faith. Reuben’s description of the reasons the family changed churches depicts the pastor of the former church more invested in popularity than following God, in Jeremiah’s eyes. In contrast, Pastor Reach, the minister of their new church, is sincerely regretful of his sinful nature and a “great advocate of forgiveness” (27). Including this description in the narrative illustrates its importance to Enger as part of the book’s message about faith and Christianity.
Chapters 1-4 introduce several of the book’s motifs and thematic concepts, including The Rewards of Faith. The intertwined ideas of faith, divine intervention, and miracles come into play in the very first scene, with the miracle of Reuben’s birth. Enger approaches the subject of faith from a perspective of Christianity, supported by biblical allusions and references throughout the story. The miracle of the soup in Chapter 4, for example, is a biblical allusion to a miracle performed by Jesus in which he multiplied five loaves of bread and two fish to feed a crowd of 5,000 people.
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By Leif Enger
