For all but two fall semesters during the last ten years, the faculty of the Oregon Extension of Houghton College has assigned The River Why, by David James Duncan. Over the 21 years of curricular flops and successes attempting interdisciplinary, Christian liberal arts education, we have jump-started each autumn's semester-long conversation by discussing two books we have asked our incoming students to read over the summer. The lineup has included Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Theodore Roszak's Where the Wasteland Ends, Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Thoreau's Walden, a collection of Flannery O'Connor's stories, Don DeLillo's White Noise, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, among others. Our students like most of these books, but they love The River Why.

Many immediately buy Duncan's second novel, The Brothers K, and his collection of stories and essays, River Teeth, as well. Initially, they enjoy reading an author whose ideas and images they "get" on their own without depending on a professor. They persist because Duncan's narratives offer young adult characters, like themselves, struggling to stand on their own vocationally, relationally, and spiritually.

The River Why is funny, positive, and romantic (as in: loserly but lovable hero meets totally awesome dream woman as he wanders through emerald forest glade). The main character, Gus Orviston, springs from the loins of a High-Church and highly educated Brit, Henning Hale-Orviston, a fly-fishing journalist who writes Victorian prose, and his eastern Oregon ranch-raised, Low-Church, bait-plunking, unfiltered-Camel-smoking wife and nemesis, Carolina Carper. Gus tells his story of growing up amid the continual strife of this ill-matched pair. And yet, despite the ongoing marital battles, the reader senses that Gus's parents share a deep love and that the wild idiosyncrasies of his upbringing will actually enable Gus to mature into an adult in his own right.

To readers in their early twenties, the novel's end is particularly satisfying: Gus has found a bucolic homestead, a rewarding, creative way to make a living, a life's mate, a community of diverse friends, and spiritual peace. And the same is true generally for the four Chance boys in The Brothers K. Since our evangelical students often fear they will fail to attain these ends, they relish the success of Duncan's young men.

At the same time, Duncan's characters perplex our students. Gus, for example, attains a level of self-knowledge and self-possession clearly tied to a deep spiritual and emotional encounter that feels and reads like a religious conversion. But unlike any conversion my students have heard about from the pulpit, this plateau of spiritual peace that Gus seems to attain makes no behavioral demands or ideological claims on him. It frees him to love who he is and what he does without making him unquestioningly hum the tune of hand-me-down "shoulds" or "oughts." And it occurs outside the walls of a church and without the familiar accents of religious language.

So Gus's story both attracts and mystifies our students. At the book's end, he is a young man at peace with and in love with God, a good and giving person with a strong moral sense, yet without the prod of guilt or the burden of institutional dogmas. Consequently, the most common question that arises after we've discussed The River Why for a couple of hours is this: "But is Duncan a Christian?"

As a teacher, I announce that I invite all questions. But in all candor, that one irritates me. The least attractive aspect of evangelical practice and doctrine for me is the impulse toward evangelism that seems to breed this personally intrusive survey question: "Are you saved?" My worst experience of this came at the hands of a well-meaning pastor who, after hearing that at age 37 I had just met my birth mother for the first time, asked, "Is she born again?" Unaccompanied by an invitation that I tell him the story that would uncover the ambivalence and complexity of such a meeting, his question felt like an assault.

Still, I honor the question, because my students come from homes or churches or colleges where the evangelistic imperative has lofty status. I demean them and their history insofar as I scorn it. Where else for them to start to gain their bearings as independent seekers? For most of them, I realize, an answer to this question is tantamount to establishing true north as they strike out as adults into a culture that offers passage to many diverse spiritual and philosophical compass points. I must not confuse my personal resistance with their essential right to begin their journey from their home.

In the course of a semester of talking about a gathering of authors of often inexplicit spiritual affiliations, the question invariably comes up. I try to find the most helpful response from a regiment of counter questions. Smart-al-ecky questions: Can't you tell?Why does it matter? Softer-hearted exploratory questions: Is the author's personal life relevant? What do you see here that would help us with an answer?Do you hear the gospel here? Does he sound like a Christian? And slightly more personal questions: Is Gus's story your story? What do you mean by Christian? What if he isn't--how will that matter to you? Are you wondering whether you believe?

As we explore ways to answer these questions, both my students and I learn that a solid encounter with a writer's work diminishes the urge to tag him or her with any "-ism" or "-ity." As Wendell Berry says of Edward Abbey:

No sooner has a label been stuck to his back by a somewhat hesitant well-wisher than he runs under a low limb and scrapes it off. To the consternation of the "committed" reviewer, he is not a conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable ist of any other kind; he keeps on showing up as Edward Abbey, a horse of another color, and one that requires some care to appreciate.1

Nevertheless, the students' need to label Duncan partially explains their urge to read The Brothers K, a mature novel whose central conflict features the church. They find there a deeper exploration of the connection between young adulthood and the search for a meaningful faith.

What fishing is to The River Why, baseball is to The Brothers K, but it is by no means a "baseball book." Rather, it presents the multigenerational story of the Chance family from the 1940s through the 1980s with all the political and social struggles that four brothers, two sisters, their parents, grandparents, children, and lovers experienced in the Pacific Northwest--and also in India, Vietnam, Canada, and across the States--in those years.

Whereas Gus gains individuation and a fairly vague early seventies' countercultural spirituality in The River Why (some of our students easily dismiss him as a hippie), in The Brothers K, Seventh-day Adventism is the central religious experience the characters share either by embrace or revolt. My students find this a much more familiar religious context, and consequently it is all the more unsettling to them when Duncan plays out a large range of complex responses among the diverse members of the large Chance clan.

In that novel and in the collected essays and stories of River Teeth we meet a writer who knows the benefits and deficits of growing up in an authoritarian religious home, the defeat of a failed marriage, the terror of raising a child alone, and the deep grief of losing a favorite brother to an early death. Duncan writes honestly about the failures of religion and its saints and with spleen for some of its leaders in the face of these human losses. Yet Duncan also shows compassion for the "tribe" of believers. The strongest "pastoral" character in The Brothers K is, ironically, Papa Chance, an adamant nonchurchgoer who comes to blows with the least lovable character, Brother Babcock, pastor of the Adventist church the younger Chance children attend with their mother while Papa stays home Saturdays drinking beer and watching baseball on the tube. Yet by the last chapter, Duncan's love-hate affair with the church culminates in a wonderful affirmation of the pastoral impulses and gifts in all of the novel's characters: young and old, male and female, believers and doubters.

Such luminous moments often occur in Duncan's work. He seeks God and writes as if he feels sought, yet his best characters often attack and condemn the church. Kincaid Chance, the narrator of The Brothers K, sums up his renegade father's opinion of Jesus: "Then there's Papa, who once said He's God's Son all right, and that He survived the crucifixion just fine, but that the two-thousand-year-old funeral service His cockeyed followers call Christianity probably made Him sorry He did." Or, as Duncan himself puts it in the autobiographical essay, "The Mickey Mantle Koan" (in River Teeth): "I discovered that Jesus was not a Christian."

In passages like this, Duncan reminds students of that iconoclastic Southern Baptist preacher Will Campbell. In Brother to a Dragonfly, Forty Acres and a Goat, and The Glad River, Campbell shows that his love of God and the gospel is so broad, so deep and wide, that he can't contain it within the walls of any church. So he calls himself a preacher without a steeple and points to Saint Paul's simple invitation "Be ye reconciled" as doctrine enough.

Because Duncan's writings are set mainly in the Pacific Northwest and convey his close bonds to this place as spiritual grounding, his work also reminds students of the Terry Tempest Williams they've met in Refuge and the Kathleen Norris of Dakota. For Williams, a bird refuge near the Great Salt Lake serves as the nursery for her stories of family, the death of her mother and grandmothers, and her coming to age as a woman and mature Mormon. The Dakotas serve the same function for Kathleen Norris.

For these women as for Duncan, place offers access to the great and holy mystery of faith by serving up stories that offer very little theological dogma but that link writer and reader to God as sure as the river flows or rainbow trout rise for salmon flies. Thus, when Duncan watches a great blue heron ascend high into the sky, way above the altitude that these mud-wading fish and frog feeders need to reach, he wonders: "Maybe the laws of nature were on the fritz today, and the metaphysical was getting physical, or the biological mythological" ("Lighthouse," in River Teeth).

In the short story "Molting" (also in River Teeth), Duncan's protagonist recounts an incident in a ramshackle farmhouse, on the eighth day of a mid-November Pacific downpour not far from the Oregon shore, in which he huddles around a wood stove with his three-year-old son, Tucker. He looks out to a driveway that "is a matched pair of unnavigable creeks. The actual creek is a wide, brown river." You can almost hear the catch in his throat in the next sentence: "Sometimes everything reminds me of my dead marriage."

Tucker watches Tom and Jerry cartoons while the father tries to read a book on archaeology. The boy wants his dad to watch with him. As keenly as we smell the lingering alder smoke, we sense the tension between the man's two impulses: to escape the rain, the child, the incessant drone of the tv and his broken-down life, and at the same time to relish every moment with his son, whom he must deliver to his ex-wife the next day. As he sips tea, the phone rings, and Gretchen, his neighbor, asks if she can come over to borrow some dry firewood. For a break, he feigns a need to use the bathroom just to get alone and escape from himself for a few moments into the pages of his book. The boy, suffering a head cold, calls out that he's lonely. The father returns, offering a glass of orange juice and his company. Snuggled up next to his little guy, he lifts the book to screen off Jerry, who is pushing Tom's head into a toaster, and he reads these arresting, although probably apocryphal, words of Jesus: "Jesus said unto them, Smite the rock and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and there am I."

For a moment the child is stilled by the excitement of watching Jerry pinch Tom's paw in a slammed window, and Duncan muses:

And I see a round of alder as the ax comes down; see the fresh white opening as the wood leaps apart; see, standing on the block as the halves fall like bodies to each side, the nothing, the everything, there am I . . . Chills flow up and down my spine. Tears fill my eyes. Then the dog, Zeke, bursts with a roar from behind the stove, scratches the floor with spinning claws; Tucker lurches, spills the dregs of his orange juice; I grab his glass to save it and spill my entire cup of tea.

Zeke keeps barking. The door. Someone is knocking.

My wet-wooded neighbor.

I shout "Come in!" run for a sponge, wipe up the spills and pull on my boots, trying all along to feel the sentence. I look for Christ in the couch stains. Christ in the sponge, Christ in the empty cups, Christ in my boots, but Gretchen just keeps knocking, Zeke just keeps roaring, Tucker jumps on my back, yells, 'Jerry's getting Tom!' and I can't even tie my laces, let alone smite or cleave or find.

He finally collects himself enough to split a pile of kindling. The rain stops while they haul it to Gretchen's battered Volkswagen. He sees another wall of rain coming in fast as he spins around to look at his surroundings

more alder in the south, and more gray rags; once-gold meadow grass to the east, lying flat and gray as a carcass on a freeway; in the middle of the carcass, the dead brown patch of yarrow. That's all there is. That's really all there is. And as the day darkens and Gretchen says so long, all there is does not seem sufficient to get us through.

As Gretchen trudges to her car, the soul-sick man hefts the tool once more to secure the promise: "Cleave the wood and there am I." But the chopping block hardly shudders from his final ax blow:

And I feel heart-sick. All that work, all that splitting, and not once did I remember. I tell myself that the words were apocryphal, but immediately recognize this as a kind of lie: there was nothing false about the way they resounded when I read them.

Heading back toward Tom and Jerry and Tucker, muttering, "I am doomed," he hears, down the driveway, Gretchen gasp:

She's radiant. Her face has bloomed. When she points, agape, toward the meadow behind me, I realize I've been listening, for some time, to a strange thrumming in that direction.

I turn.

And were it night, and were we shepherds, we might have dropped to our knees in the face of such beauty. But things being as they are, we just walk, rubberbooted, toward it, drawn like oil through a wick up into a burning lantern that makes sudden, perfect sense of the valley's dark, rain-washed gray. The beauty thrums, allows our approach, turns to and fro, thrums louder. We are nearly upon it before it moves. And though it is a hundred beings, two hundred wings, that rise up before us, it is one deft gesture that pierces the rain: one mind, cleaving the whole dark valley, as the hundred sun-bright goldfinches rise from the dead brown yarrow.

In 1995 I invited David Duncan to our school to speak for himself. He sat with small and large groups of students from evangelical colleges like Westmont, Houghton, Calvin, Eastern, Wheaton, Eastern Mennonite, Bethel, Gordon, and George Fox, talking about his life, his faith, and theirs. He showed a clutch of neophyte fly-fishers how to cast dry flies into our pond. He read from his fiction and from an unpublished essay on Christmas and wonder, in which he said he believes Jesus is alive today, and added: "I have bet my literary and spiritual life on the belief that Jesus is not a liar."

When he left, a few of us discussed again whether or not Duncan is a Christian. Someone mentioned that if Duncan believes Jesus is not a Christian, then maybe Duncan's commitment to Jesus means we are asking the wrong question. We decided to think about that for a while.

Sam Alvord oversees the writing program of the Oregon Extension of Houghton College.

1. "A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey," in What Are People For? (North Point Press, 1990), p.38; emphasis added.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 31

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