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Sun House
An epic comedy about love, spirit, and the quest for transcendence in an anything-but-transcendent America, from the author of the perennial cult bestsellers The River Why and The Brothers K
A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.
The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to the healing lands of Montana and a newly founded community—where nothing tastes better than Maker's Mark mixed with glacier ice, and nothing seems less likely than the soul-filling delight that a troupe of spiritual refugees, urban sophisticates, road-weary musicians, and local cowboys begin to find in each other's company.
With Sun House, David James Duncan continues exploring the American search for meaning and love. This stunning novel, set amid the gorgeous landscapes of the American West, illuminates the contemporary world through the prisms of Eastern wisdom; cast-off ecstatic religious ideals; and the unpredictable, expansive yearnings of the human heart.
A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.
The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to the healing lands of Montana and a newly founded community—where nothing tastes better than Maker's Mark mixed with glacier ice, and nothing seems less likely than the soul-filling delight that a troupe of spiritual refugees, urban sophisticates, road-weary musicians, and local cowboys begin to find in each other's company.
With Sun House, David James Duncan continues exploring the American search for meaning and love. This stunning novel, set amid the gorgeous landscapes of the American West, illuminates the contemporary world through the prisms of Eastern wisdom; cast-off ecstatic religious ideals; and the unpredictable, expansive yearnings of the human heart.
784 pages, Hardcover
First published August 8, 2023
614 people are currently reading
5938 people want to read
About the author
David James Duncan
23 books665 followersDavid James Duncan (born 1952) is an American novelist and essayist, best known for his two bestselling novels, The River Why (1983) and The Brothers K (1992). Both involve fly fishing, baseball, and family.
Both received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers award; The Brothers K was a New York Times Notable Book in 1992 and won a Best Books Award from the American Library Association.
Film adaptation
In 2008, The River Why was adapted into a "low-budget film" of the same name starring William Hurt and Amber Heard. Since April 30, 2008, the film rights to The River Why have become the subject of a lawsuit by Duncan alleging copyright infringement, among other issues.
Other works
Duncan has written a collection of short stories, River Teeth (1996), and a memoir of sorts, My Story As Told By Water (2001). His latest work is God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right, published in 2006.
An essay, "Bird Watching as a Blood Sport", appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1998; Duncan wrote the foreword to Thoreau on Water: Reflecting Heaven (2001).
An essay, "A Mickey Mantle koan: The obstinate grip of an autographed baseball" appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1992.
Personal life
Duncan was born in Portland, Oregon and lives in Missoula County, Montana.
Both received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers award; The Brothers K was a New York Times Notable Book in 1992 and won a Best Books Award from the American Library Association.
Film adaptation
In 2008, The River Why was adapted into a "low-budget film" of the same name starring William Hurt and Amber Heard. Since April 30, 2008, the film rights to The River Why have become the subject of a lawsuit by Duncan alleging copyright infringement, among other issues.
Other works
Duncan has written a collection of short stories, River Teeth (1996), and a memoir of sorts, My Story As Told By Water (2001). His latest work is God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right, published in 2006.
An essay, "Bird Watching as a Blood Sport", appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1998; Duncan wrote the foreword to Thoreau on Water: Reflecting Heaven (2001).
An essay, "A Mickey Mantle koan: The obstinate grip of an autographed baseball" appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1992.
Personal life
Duncan was born in Portland, Oregon and lives in Missoula County, Montana.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 249 reviews
September 8, 2023
Sublime. That’s the fastest way to describe this writing, this story, this world birthed by David James Duncan.
For almost 800 pages I’ve been swimming in the Ocean of Sublime—an ocean you can just as easily drown in as float. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Second and third thoughts: How the f**k did he write this (let alone get it published) and how on earth can I convey what this is to people who may consider it a foreign language as well as the few humans who live for this stuff?
I don’t know the answers to either of those questions. In addition, I don’t know who besides me would be so drawn into this book.
I can tell you that there is a mythically romantic tone throughout and there are two main characters who start the book in separate stories in Portland, OR, and Seattle, WA (location is as much a character as any person): a boy-man, Jamey, and a girl-woman, Risa. I can tell you that they are idiosyncratic, independent thinkers who feel even more deeply than they think. I can tell you that Jamey is a people-loving, irrepressible clown with a father and a dog you fall in love with. I can tell you that Risa falls in love with Sanskrit sounds and language and Vedic sages and the whole world they birth and then lives with Grady, the funniest horniest philosophy student ever written, and then with Julian, a good-looking prick who is threatened by her love of “Skrit” and the inner journey. And I can tell you that the first-person narrator feels like a person-god, who I don’t believe in, but he has such a great sense of humor that I more-than-willingly suspended my disbelief.
There are plenty of other characters who appear first in their own chapters. For instance: a mountain climber and a singer who love, have a kid, then don’t love; an ex-Jesuit priest and his twin brother, a street nonpriest-sadhu who gathers a flock anyway, whose epistolary history of the Catholic Church’s persecution of the Beguines mesmerized me (if Herman Melville had been this joyfully light-hearted and in love with his history of whales, he could have gotten away with it).
And in a symmetry that makes subliminal sense, these people finally begin to converge in the mountains of Montana exactly halfway through this epic in an “Eastern Western”—meaning “When East [spiritual traditions] touches West [the region of the USA], the central struggle is against cosmic illusion . . . (p. # NA)” And this is when the storytelling starts to crank up, so if you get bogged down in the first 400 pages, but are liking it, stay with it . . . particularly because, very soon after the convergence begins, the god-person narrator actually explains the unorthodox structure of this massive book, and hearing it can make you sparkle, as well as spiritually roar in the backtracked scene when Risa and Jamey finally start their journey together.
I found out the hard way that I needed to take breaks. Everybody speaks within a style of cascading thoughts, although it’s slightly different for each character. (Think of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter or Aaron Sorkin’s smart-smart-smart speed-demon, fact-laden intellectual torrents.) When I tried to read too many chapters without a rest, the spiritual stream-of-consciousness became tedious. So subsequently I took many breaks, and when I returned, I was open to the Voice behind the voice and ate it up; I realized taking breaks also evoked contemplation about what I’d read, and it was in contemplation that the heavy text got light and worked on me. Also, there are enough heavenly narrative actions and descriptions (see sample below) to break up the thought tirades.
If your life is completely focused on the surface of here and now—plot-plot-plot—and you are uninterested in awareness, enlightenment, or any kind of transcendent journey, let alone the power of the sounds of language beyond its literal meaning, you will not be interested in this book. In fact, you may feel like the distracted bar crowd who “don’t get” what makes Risa, Jamey, and readers like me spiritually roar during their ecstatic convergence over a story of Gandhi’s death.
But if you are a person who longs for Oneness, who is compelled by the debate between the counter-evolutionary force of ego vs. the evolutionary force of enlightenment (to embody “free nothingness at Ocean’s [consciousness, All That I] service” (p. # N/A),” if you’re convinced that enlightening yourself is the only real work to be done in this life, if you pace yourself, eagerly surrendering, even to a language that sometimes strikes your poor undereducated head as chicken-scrawled squawks and the poetry of a holy fool (think Paul Beatty’s screamingly hilarious The Sellout , only substitute the literary classics, mountain climbing, and Eastern philosophies for research psychology and The Little Rascals), you may end up in a blindingly brilliant roofless Sun House of indefinable dimensions—happier and more heartbroken than you imagined possible.
Writing sample:
Thank you, Hachette Book Group, for the advance reading copy. (You can buy book, audiobook, and e-book at the publisher’s website.) And thank you to very smart marketing people who placed an excerpt (that reads like a short story) in Orion magazine where I first encountered it, lighting a flame inside me that ignited my desire for more.
For review readers who may want more—some good advice:
A compliment:
There is not the tiniest speck of commercial concern in either the writing or the publishing of this book that will probably appeal to a small population of readers. If anyone reading my review feels drawn in some subliminal way to this material, I hope you will investigate it.
Future:
Nature, mountain climbing, and Earth life are central to this 776-page story. Reading it is a marathon. I’m glad I did it, don’t anticipate rereading it, but this book will have a future life with me. Once read, it is the perfect treasure trove for bibliomancy—blindly selecting a section and reading. This works best with hard copies, and since I have an e-book, I can’t let it fall open, point, and read where my finger lands. But I’ll find a way. I’m so glad to own a copy of Sun House.
Day after finishing postscript
I am completely shut down. Can't take in anything but music. This has happened to me after life-changing experiences: all I can do is sit and let whatever is going through me do its work. I don't pretend to know what it is and have no desire to know. I can't remember the last time a book did this to me. Thank you, Mr. Duncan.
8/15/23 postscript
Last night I watched the Swedish movie As It Is in Heaven made by Kay Pollak (borrowed from the NY Public Library). It is referenced in an amazing scene at the end of Sun House, and seeing it and how much Duncan borrowed from it, repurposing it, allowed me to sink even deeper into this book. I highly recommend seeing the film after reading Sun House.
For almost 800 pages I’ve been swimming in the Ocean of Sublime—an ocean you can just as easily drown in as float. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Second and third thoughts: How the f**k did he write this (let alone get it published) and how on earth can I convey what this is to people who may consider it a foreign language as well as the few humans who live for this stuff?
I don’t know the answers to either of those questions. In addition, I don’t know who besides me would be so drawn into this book.
I can tell you that there is a mythically romantic tone throughout and there are two main characters who start the book in separate stories in Portland, OR, and Seattle, WA (location is as much a character as any person): a boy-man, Jamey, and a girl-woman, Risa. I can tell you that they are idiosyncratic, independent thinkers who feel even more deeply than they think. I can tell you that Jamey is a people-loving, irrepressible clown with a father and a dog you fall in love with. I can tell you that Risa falls in love with Sanskrit sounds and language and Vedic sages and the whole world they birth and then lives with Grady, the funniest horniest philosophy student ever written, and then with Julian, a good-looking prick who is threatened by her love of “Skrit” and the inner journey. And I can tell you that the first-person narrator feels like a person-god, who I don’t believe in, but he has such a great sense of humor that I more-than-willingly suspended my disbelief.
There are plenty of other characters who appear first in their own chapters. For instance: a mountain climber and a singer who love, have a kid, then don’t love; an ex-Jesuit priest and his twin brother, a street nonpriest-sadhu who gathers a flock anyway, whose epistolary history of the Catholic Church’s persecution of the Beguines mesmerized me (if Herman Melville had been this joyfully light-hearted and in love with his history of whales, he could have gotten away with it).
And in a symmetry that makes subliminal sense, these people finally begin to converge in the mountains of Montana exactly halfway through this epic in an “Eastern Western”—meaning “When East [spiritual traditions] touches West [the region of the USA], the central struggle is against cosmic illusion . . . (p. # NA)” And this is when the storytelling starts to crank up, so if you get bogged down in the first 400 pages, but are liking it, stay with it . . . particularly because, very soon after the convergence begins, the god-person narrator actually explains the unorthodox structure of this massive book, and hearing it can make you sparkle, as well as spiritually roar in the backtracked scene when Risa and Jamey finally start their journey together.
I found out the hard way that I needed to take breaks. Everybody speaks within a style of cascading thoughts, although it’s slightly different for each character. (Think of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter or Aaron Sorkin’s smart-smart-smart speed-demon, fact-laden intellectual torrents.) When I tried to read too many chapters without a rest, the spiritual stream-of-consciousness became tedious. So subsequently I took many breaks, and when I returned, I was open to the Voice behind the voice and ate it up; I realized taking breaks also evoked contemplation about what I’d read, and it was in contemplation that the heavy text got light and worked on me. Also, there are enough heavenly narrative actions and descriptions (see sample below) to break up the thought tirades.
If your life is completely focused on the surface of here and now—plot-plot-plot—and you are uninterested in awareness, enlightenment, or any kind of transcendent journey, let alone the power of the sounds of language beyond its literal meaning, you will not be interested in this book. In fact, you may feel like the distracted bar crowd who “don’t get” what makes Risa, Jamey, and readers like me spiritually roar during their ecstatic convergence over a story of Gandhi’s death.
But if you are a person who longs for Oneness, who is compelled by the debate between the counter-evolutionary force of ego vs. the evolutionary force of enlightenment (to embody “free nothingness at Ocean’s [consciousness, All That I] service” (p. # N/A),” if you’re convinced that enlightening yourself is the only real work to be done in this life, if you pace yourself, eagerly surrendering, even to a language that sometimes strikes your poor undereducated head as chicken-scrawled squawks and the poetry of a holy fool (think Paul Beatty’s screamingly hilarious The Sellout , only substitute the literary classics, mountain climbing, and Eastern philosophies for research psychology and The Little Rascals), you may end up in a blindingly brilliant roofless Sun House of indefinable dimensions—happier and more heartbroken than you imagined possible.
Writing sample:
. . . Jamey espied a seamstress’s shop on Hawthorne Street with a bright-colored, new-looking, hand-painted sign that read: DAMSELS IN THIS DRESS. Typical of his modus operandi at the time, Jamey charged inside to inform whoever thought of the name that he or she was a genius.
The woman he found within—perched on a stool at a counter that doubled as her sewing table, hand-stitching spaghetti straps onto an altered prom dress—was the most spherical person Jamey had ever seen, yet also one of the most delicate. She struck Jamey as the thoroughly charming progeny of a Victorian-era porcelain doll and a beach ball—and when he began extolling the shop’s name, the entire orb of her lit up! (page # N/A)
Thank you, Hachette Book Group, for the advance reading copy. (You can buy book, audiobook, and e-book at the publisher’s website.) And thank you to very smart marketing people who placed an excerpt (that reads like a short story) in Orion magazine where I first encountered it, lighting a flame inside me that ignited my desire for more.
For review readers who may want more—some good advice:
“‘Stop chasing your thoughts,’ . . . ‘Watch people closely, the streams of them, without getting diverted by judging them, . . . and you’ll start seeing these little acts of love. They’re everywhere . . .’ (page # N/A)”
A compliment:
There is not the tiniest speck of commercial concern in either the writing or the publishing of this book that will probably appeal to a small population of readers. If anyone reading my review feels drawn in some subliminal way to this material, I hope you will investigate it.
Future:
Nature, mountain climbing, and Earth life are central to this 776-page story. Reading it is a marathon. I’m glad I did it, don’t anticipate rereading it, but this book will have a future life with me. Once read, it is the perfect treasure trove for bibliomancy—blindly selecting a section and reading. This works best with hard copies, and since I have an e-book, I can’t let it fall open, point, and read where my finger lands. But I’ll find a way. I’m so glad to own a copy of Sun House.
Day after finishing postscript
I am completely shut down. Can't take in anything but music. This has happened to me after life-changing experiences: all I can do is sit and let whatever is going through me do its work. I don't pretend to know what it is and have no desire to know. I can't remember the last time a book did this to me. Thank you, Mr. Duncan.
8/15/23 postscript
Last night I watched the Swedish movie As It Is in Heaven made by Kay Pollak (borrowed from the NY Public Library). It is referenced in an amazing scene at the end of Sun House, and seeing it and how much Duncan borrowed from it, repurposing it, allowed me to sink even deeper into this book. I highly recommend seeing the film after reading Sun House.
September 21, 2023
As you are probably aware, I am an ardent admirer of David James Duncan, and I've been waiting for this book to come out for eons, ever since I got to go have lunch with him at Gaia House back in 1996 and hear that he was writing a book about a guy who was an actor and started pumping Matt Miller for information about the topic. So that was, what, 27 years ago. That's a long time to wait for one of your favorite authors to finally come out with his next piece of fiction. Needless to say, I was beyond excited when this book finally hit the shelves, and I was the first one in Schuler Books when the door opened on August 8 to procure myself a copy.
So if you're wondering what I thought about it, here's what I've decided. Duncan is an amazing writer. But he has a tin ear for dialogue sometimes, and conversations just end up being people trading diatribes about one thing or another, sounding nothing like any human beings I ever converse with regularly. Some of his scenes read like Plato's dialogues, with one person holding forth at great length, and then another stepping in with a fully-formed opinion or argument, which then gets responded to point by point by the original speaker. There's very little give and take in these scenes when clearly Duncan wants to hold forth about something and is using his characters as his mouthpiece.
Second, Duncan is the quotiest writer of all time. He starts each chapter with a quote or two, which is sweet, but then when one of his characters are going off about something, they're quoting all kinds of people all the time, which is cool, but again, not actually particularly realistic. (Unless I just hang out with the wrong kinds of people altogether.)
Additionally, while I can appreciate Jervis' Dumpter Catholocism and its criticism of organized religion in general and the Catholic church in particular, I wish that Duncan wasn't so skittish about talking about God in his writing. In fact, he seems to go out of his way NOT to ever talk about God or Jesus a lot of the time. This book is far less about God or Christianity than Brothers K or even the River Why. That's his prerogative, of course, but I'm simply less interested in he is in Sanskrit, Hinduism or Buddism, all of which he sees as being different paths up the same mountain. Again, he's welcome to write that, but I'm just a lot less interested in that than he is.
Finally, while I was intrigued by the ambiguity of the narrator's identity for a long time in the book, the reveal at the end was really underwhelming. I almost wish he had waited until the last page or so instead of twenty (ish) pages before the end. The reveal was unexpected and, like I said, didn't have that much of a payoff when it came. I guess I would have preferred the Holy Goat to just remain a mystery in the end.
All that having been said, here's what I really liked about the book. Duncan is a ridiculously inventive writer. His storylines are wild, always flirting right up against something approaching magical realism. Jamey's dog, for example, and it's mini Winnebago are fantastic, and I can't imagine many other writers coming up with a canine character that unique. His characters are, almost without exception, very fully-formed and three-dimensional. He mentions in the afterward something about wanting to write women well, and, while I don't remember thinking that he had issues with that in the past, I'm also not a woman, so what do I know? I think that the women that he created for this book are amazing. In fact, pretty much everyone is. If there's one criticism that I can make about his menagerie (his word, not mine) of characters, it's that there's not a normal human being in the bunch. Everyone is over the top in one way or another. Everyone is exceptionally talented, exceptionally good-looking, or both. That makes for good stories, but I found them hard to relate to.
The last thing I want to say is that Jervis is my favorite character in the whole book. Not just for his propensity to swear religiously, but because I simply loved everything about his character and his wholehearted devotion to Ocean. I felt like he was the character I most wanted to emulate, even though he would be the hardest character to emulate of all of them. I was sad that he faded toward the end of the book as things moved more and more out to Montana. I wish he could have played a bigger role in the EB&C. But he's the closest character to Christ I think I've encountered in literature since Allyosha in the Brothers Karamazov. I just loved him to death. I hope you do too.
In the afterward, Duncan explains what he was trying to accomplish with this novel. I wish he had said it in the beginning. I think that it would have framed the whole story nicely for the reader and made it even more clear what he was trying to do as he went. Without that, you've just got to have a hell of a lot of faith in DJD that he knows what he's doing because it sure isn't clear for most of the book, at least it wasn't to me. Fortunately, I had nothing but faith in him, and while I have some criticisms, I'm glad that I read the whole thing. And, provided your tolerance for Eastern spiritualism is high enough, you might be too.
So if you're wondering what I thought about it, here's what I've decided. Duncan is an amazing writer. But he has a tin ear for dialogue sometimes, and conversations just end up being people trading diatribes about one thing or another, sounding nothing like any human beings I ever converse with regularly. Some of his scenes read like Plato's dialogues, with one person holding forth at great length, and then another stepping in with a fully-formed opinion or argument, which then gets responded to point by point by the original speaker. There's very little give and take in these scenes when clearly Duncan wants to hold forth about something and is using his characters as his mouthpiece.
Second, Duncan is the quotiest writer of all time. He starts each chapter with a quote or two, which is sweet, but then when one of his characters are going off about something, they're quoting all kinds of people all the time, which is cool, but again, not actually particularly realistic. (Unless I just hang out with the wrong kinds of people altogether.)
Additionally, while I can appreciate Jervis' Dumpter Catholocism and its criticism of organized religion in general and the Catholic church in particular, I wish that Duncan wasn't so skittish about talking about God in his writing. In fact, he seems to go out of his way NOT to ever talk about God or Jesus a lot of the time. This book is far less about God or Christianity than Brothers K or even the River Why. That's his prerogative, of course, but I'm simply less interested in he is in Sanskrit, Hinduism or Buddism, all of which he sees as being different paths up the same mountain. Again, he's welcome to write that, but I'm just a lot less interested in that than he is.
Finally, while I was intrigued by the ambiguity of the narrator's identity for a long time in the book, the reveal at the end was really underwhelming. I almost wish he had waited until the last page or so instead of twenty (ish) pages before the end. The reveal was unexpected and, like I said, didn't have that much of a payoff when it came. I guess I would have preferred the Holy Goat to just remain a mystery in the end.
All that having been said, here's what I really liked about the book. Duncan is a ridiculously inventive writer. His storylines are wild, always flirting right up against something approaching magical realism. Jamey's dog, for example, and it's mini Winnebago are fantastic, and I can't imagine many other writers coming up with a canine character that unique. His characters are, almost without exception, very fully-formed and three-dimensional. He mentions in the afterward something about wanting to write women well, and, while I don't remember thinking that he had issues with that in the past, I'm also not a woman, so what do I know? I think that the women that he created for this book are amazing. In fact, pretty much everyone is. If there's one criticism that I can make about his menagerie (his word, not mine) of characters, it's that there's not a normal human being in the bunch. Everyone is over the top in one way or another. Everyone is exceptionally talented, exceptionally good-looking, or both. That makes for good stories, but I found them hard to relate to.
The last thing I want to say is that Jervis is my favorite character in the whole book. Not just for his propensity to swear religiously, but because I simply loved everything about his character and his wholehearted devotion to Ocean. I felt like he was the character I most wanted to emulate, even though he would be the hardest character to emulate of all of them. I was sad that he faded toward the end of the book as things moved more and more out to Montana. I wish he could have played a bigger role in the EB&C. But he's the closest character to Christ I think I've encountered in literature since Allyosha in the Brothers Karamazov. I just loved him to death. I hope you do too.
In the afterward, Duncan explains what he was trying to accomplish with this novel. I wish he had said it in the beginning. I think that it would have framed the whole story nicely for the reader and made it even more clear what he was trying to do as he went. Without that, you've just got to have a hell of a lot of faith in DJD that he knows what he's doing because it sure isn't clear for most of the book, at least it wasn't to me. Fortunately, I had nothing but faith in him, and while I have some criticisms, I'm glad that I read the whole thing. And, provided your tolerance for Eastern spiritualism is high enough, you might be too.
March 25, 2024
“I can’t name You or see You. But You have touched me. With the heart alone I just feel it! Keep touching me. I’m coming to you ...”
Actually, I can give you the name: David James Duncan.
He has charmed and inspired me with his earlier two novels, ‘The River Why’ and ‘The Brothers K.’ , and he is back thirty years later with an even grander project. If the first book was about youth, fishing, enthusiasm and romance, his second expanded into a family saga, baseball and romance and now, with the wisdom of decades under his belt, the author strives to encompass our whole planet, our whole humanity within these very pages.
“I need to express love for the remnants of a planet that isn’t yet dead, and grief for the countless places that are.”
It is clearly a labour of love for Duncan, and it pains me to say anything hurtful about this sensitive poet who makes here a passionate appeal to our better nature. I kept putting off writing about my experiences reading this massive tome for weeks, because on the one hand I am clearly one of the target audiences for his tales, so in synch with his concepts of spirituality versus organized religion, with his all encompassing love for mountains and for unspoiled nature, for mystic poets and for flower power communes. Duncan’s argument that individual people are basically good and helpful in a stressful situation, that empathy and kindness must replace greed and selfishness and that this redemption movement will never start from the corrupt top to trickle down to people but the other way around, with good people leading by example, resonates truthfully in my own aching heart.
“It will be the task of our generation not to seek great things, but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a prize from the burning building.” [attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer]
This is a book about hearts, and the author makes numerous appeals to discard our analytical minds and concentrate on the spiritual journey in the company of his fellowship of saints, as they gather from different corners of the continental US to a heavenly, if fictional, mountain valley in Colorado. Cue some of my favourite John Denver tracks here, please!
The Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company, five of whose founders are Lorilee Shay, Risa McKeig, Jamey Van Zandt, and Jervis and TJ McGraff, and that quintet, as the reader has surely seen by now, would fit in an old-school Western about as readily as a herd of pronghorns fits in an egg carton.
The first part of the book spends a lot of quality time with this quintet of artists and vagabonds, from childhood to maturity to their coming together to form the above named neo-hippie/’woke’ commune in Colorado.
For the same first half of the book, I was a happy reader convinced that Duncan still holds on to his magic pen as he deftly weaves together humour and tenderness and sharp commentary on art, religion, politics and relationships. Just like old times.
“We’re a multifarious bunch, HG. To limit us to any genre leaves out tons more than it includes. Depending on which person you ask, the E.B.&C. Co. is a tiny but estimable fraction of Vedic cosmic illusion, a toothless Zane Grey yarn undergoing feminist and metaphysical revision, a peephole into Elkmoon Lumi mythology, a stronghold of Dumpster Catholicism, a barrage of poetics ranging from free verse to cowboy doggerel to the godsongs of Maharashtran poet-saints to Chinese landscape poets to late-medieval mystic chants to bowdlerized dog-added Shakespeare plays to the sometimes heartrending chatter and songs of our own children. What single genre could cover all that?”
Instead of an attempt at plot synopsis, I have chosen the above quote from the Elkmooners Manifesto for a Better Planet. It is pretty accurate in describing the wild ride and the stylistic flights of fancy that the book offers. As an amateur student of comparative religions and ancient mythologies, one who believes an alternative to western philosophies about the supremacy of man over nature and about the supremacy of capitalism as an organizing social principle can be found in the contemplative texts of the Eastern mystics, I even adored the lengthy dissertations of the five ranch hands on Buddhism, Zen masters, Sufi metaphysical poets, Catholic dissenters and New Age musicians.
“Fair warning, Lore. My love of mysticism is extreme to the point of nerdy. If you don’t stop me I’ll be rattling on about Vedic sages, bhakti poets, and medieval Beguines, all of whom revere a ‘nothingness’ that sounds like Blue Empty to me.
It is the merit of the author to be self-aware of his own tendency to run away with an idea until it becomes nauseating, and to temper these excesses with subtle humour and mostly pertinent quotations from his favourite authors, some of whom I made note of for further study.
Note 1 : these bookmarks include the likes of Gary Snyder, Roberto Calasso, Giambattista Vico, Ursula K le Guin [‘Always Coming Home’], Wendell Berry, Ananda Coomaraswami, Dirk Willems, the Beguine movement in the 13th century. Plus several authors of Western novels, such as James Galvin – ‘The Meadow’, Terry Tempest Williams – ‘When Women Were Birds’, Bryce Andrews – ‘Holding Fire’
To make a very long story shorter, trying to fit it metaphorically into a nutshell, I must go back to the same Manifesto read as the charter for the Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company:
Though we Elkmooners are a diverse crew in matters of the spirit, it’s fair to say we each yearn, in our own idiosyncratic ways, for an inner and outer wholeness inseparable from Mother Earth’s life and wholeness.
>>><<<>>><<<
The Thing I loved the best about Sun House: Duncan’s argument that mountains are gateways to eternity. Like Grady and the other saintly Elkmooners, I never felt more alive, more in touch with my roots and with my sanity than on a high mountain path, carrying everything I need in a heavy backpack, enduring heavy weather and gruelling effort for that moment of wonder, of epiphany, once you reach the summit and look around at the brilliance and peace of the surrounding earth – a priceless perspective.
To put it plainly, Japh, Dogen is saying that mountains, if we love them deeply enough, are enlightened teachers.
I truly know how Risa feels, after years of searching for the meaning of life, to arrive at a humble meadow in the high country and to know she is finally home:
A door swings open inside her. Stepping through it, she arrives in a profoundly familial, pine-scented, Montana-meets-Sanskrit inner landscape in which she feels entirely at home for the first time in her life.
>>><<<>>><<<
Many writers are able to pinpoint the problems with the globalised economy and with the erosion of the social compact, with the destruction of both environment and morals. Duncan builds his novel around what he sees as a solution out of the crisis, not only what to move away from, but most importantly, where are we to be heading if we want to survive.
By his own confessions, this effort took sixteen years of reading and writing, endless revisions and updates to get the story where he wanted. The result is overwhelmingly articulate and passionate, but with a tendency to sound like an groan inducing long sermon delivered from a lofty pulpit. Like a savoury dish left in the oven too long, it might turn bitter for readers who are not already fans of the author.
I believe Duncan is aware of the problem, as he makes the alleged author of the text, the Holy Goat, exclaim at one point: ... made me wonder whether she was running on brilliant intuition or optimistic oblivion.
It’s a very thin line to thread from the sublime to the cringe worthy. I was myself suffocated by the artificiality of the discourse and of the monochromatic characterization [they are all saintly do-gooders], in particular in the second half of the book, which seemed interminable and utterly predictable, with too many repetitions of the arguments already established in the first half and with the plot devolving into a sort of New Age Scripture filled with miracles and good deeds.
I love how quiet it gets when my brain can’t answer my heart.
Indeed, my heart responded with much joy at the ideas embraced by the book, yet my brain refused to be switched off at the much too sweet and utopian paeans sung to the Elkmooners and to their ranch experiment. I guess you really need to take the good along with the bad. The balance for me tilts towards admiration. I just wish those pesky little critical devils on the other plate would quiet down, so I can finish my review. Something similar happened to me while reading 'The Overstory' by Richard Powers.
“Is it a miracle I’m alive?” he asked the old tree.
The maple didn’t speak, but neither did it turn away.
>>><<<>>><<<
The Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company is the basic unit Duncan imagines would bring about a much needed spiritual and material Rinascimento in our hour of need. Putting aside my nagging doubts that there are sufficient Paradise mountain valleys for all eight billion inhabitants of our Sun House, or that each group of enthusiasts going back to nature will have enough millionaires in their ranks to buy that promised land, I would like to focus my next remarks to a different Manifesto, expressed by the leading lady of the novel, Risa, as she attends art school in New York. She is , like the Holy Goat in his secret narrator disguise, a boombox for the artistic credo of Duncan, providing us readers with the author’s own commentary track for the novel. Here are several examples:
“John of the Cross said that words can be like a sun, doing for the heart what sunlight can do for a field. I want to make paintings that convey that heartward movement, and in a way I can’t describe, certain Sanskrit words and phrases lead me into that sunlit field.”
I feel as if things as fine as coral reefs are vanishing from people. Things like a general kindness. Quiet sensitivity. Sincerity.
Ironic humor relieves tension by treating what hurts as a joke. But when we equate irony and truth, some super weird stuff happens. Like, it suddenly feels uncool, or naive, or even wrong to sincerely believe in anything.
“In my book, a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indians who owned the land, and called it progress. If I had my way, the land here would be like God made it and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all.” [ this one is attributed to Charlie Russell, painter ]
Finally, as a sort of conclusion about The Importance of Being Earnest, and a defence of the sappy overload of the text with spirituality:
I don’t know about you all, but my bottom line in art, as in life, is to serve that irony-proof idiot the human heart. I like hearts because their pulsing is steadfast for billions of beats, never ironical, and we’re alive as a result. I like that hearts ache. I like that they yearn. I want ache and yearning in my art.
This we have aplenty in ‘Sun House’ and I would rather have a discussion, like Risa, with the dreamers who are looking for solutions instead of with the cynics who pride themselves in not believing in anything.
Thank you, David James Duncan!
Being pierced leads to living by intuition, Ocean strobes, myth tellings, openness to grace, the bardic wonders in Lore’s music, brown trout kissing, susceptibility to wild creatures, conversing with birds, incredibly unlikely friendships, and other wonders.
>>><<<>>><<<
Odds and ends that have been relegated to the Dumpster of Failed Reviews, yet I would be loath to misplace them, hearing that other argument of the author about the value of church dissidents and unusual ways of thinking.
“What a beautiful irony! To empower and enrich Holy Mother Church, Rome shitcanned so many wondrous truths, faiths, and peoples that the contents of the giant dumpster behind the Church became far more holy than the contents of the Church!”
So here are some of the things we almost lost in the dumpster fire:
Never in my life have I seen so many folks, the second they see the need of another, try to meet it so fast it’s like each person is out to be each other’s prayer answered.
... this very place and this group of people are going to help coax a way of life into being that will set an example of value to thousands.
“Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.” [attributed to Roberto Calasso]
Actually, I can give you the name: David James Duncan.
He has charmed and inspired me with his earlier two novels, ‘The River Why’ and ‘The Brothers K.’ , and he is back thirty years later with an even grander project. If the first book was about youth, fishing, enthusiasm and romance, his second expanded into a family saga, baseball and romance and now, with the wisdom of decades under his belt, the author strives to encompass our whole planet, our whole humanity within these very pages.
“I need to express love for the remnants of a planet that isn’t yet dead, and grief for the countless places that are.”
It is clearly a labour of love for Duncan, and it pains me to say anything hurtful about this sensitive poet who makes here a passionate appeal to our better nature. I kept putting off writing about my experiences reading this massive tome for weeks, because on the one hand I am clearly one of the target audiences for his tales, so in synch with his concepts of spirituality versus organized religion, with his all encompassing love for mountains and for unspoiled nature, for mystic poets and for flower power communes. Duncan’s argument that individual people are basically good and helpful in a stressful situation, that empathy and kindness must replace greed and selfishness and that this redemption movement will never start from the corrupt top to trickle down to people but the other way around, with good people leading by example, resonates truthfully in my own aching heart.
“It will be the task of our generation not to seek great things, but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a prize from the burning building.” [attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer]
This is a book about hearts, and the author makes numerous appeals to discard our analytical minds and concentrate on the spiritual journey in the company of his fellowship of saints, as they gather from different corners of the continental US to a heavenly, if fictional, mountain valley in Colorado. Cue some of my favourite John Denver tracks here, please!
The Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company, five of whose founders are Lorilee Shay, Risa McKeig, Jamey Van Zandt, and Jervis and TJ McGraff, and that quintet, as the reader has surely seen by now, would fit in an old-school Western about as readily as a herd of pronghorns fits in an egg carton.
The first part of the book spends a lot of quality time with this quintet of artists and vagabonds, from childhood to maturity to their coming together to form the above named neo-hippie/’woke’ commune in Colorado.
For the same first half of the book, I was a happy reader convinced that Duncan still holds on to his magic pen as he deftly weaves together humour and tenderness and sharp commentary on art, religion, politics and relationships. Just like old times.
“We’re a multifarious bunch, HG. To limit us to any genre leaves out tons more than it includes. Depending on which person you ask, the E.B.&C. Co. is a tiny but estimable fraction of Vedic cosmic illusion, a toothless Zane Grey yarn undergoing feminist and metaphysical revision, a peephole into Elkmoon Lumi mythology, a stronghold of Dumpster Catholicism, a barrage of poetics ranging from free verse to cowboy doggerel to the godsongs of Maharashtran poet-saints to Chinese landscape poets to late-medieval mystic chants to bowdlerized dog-added Shakespeare plays to the sometimes heartrending chatter and songs of our own children. What single genre could cover all that?”
Instead of an attempt at plot synopsis, I have chosen the above quote from the Elkmooners Manifesto for a Better Planet. It is pretty accurate in describing the wild ride and the stylistic flights of fancy that the book offers. As an amateur student of comparative religions and ancient mythologies, one who believes an alternative to western philosophies about the supremacy of man over nature and about the supremacy of capitalism as an organizing social principle can be found in the contemplative texts of the Eastern mystics, I even adored the lengthy dissertations of the five ranch hands on Buddhism, Zen masters, Sufi metaphysical poets, Catholic dissenters and New Age musicians.
“Fair warning, Lore. My love of mysticism is extreme to the point of nerdy. If you don’t stop me I’ll be rattling on about Vedic sages, bhakti poets, and medieval Beguines, all of whom revere a ‘nothingness’ that sounds like Blue Empty to me.
It is the merit of the author to be self-aware of his own tendency to run away with an idea until it becomes nauseating, and to temper these excesses with subtle humour and mostly pertinent quotations from his favourite authors, some of whom I made note of for further study.
Note 1 : these bookmarks include the likes of Gary Snyder, Roberto Calasso, Giambattista Vico, Ursula K le Guin [‘Always Coming Home’], Wendell Berry, Ananda Coomaraswami, Dirk Willems, the Beguine movement in the 13th century. Plus several authors of Western novels, such as James Galvin – ‘The Meadow’, Terry Tempest Williams – ‘When Women Were Birds’, Bryce Andrews – ‘Holding Fire’
To make a very long story shorter, trying to fit it metaphorically into a nutshell, I must go back to the same Manifesto read as the charter for the Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company:
Though we Elkmooners are a diverse crew in matters of the spirit, it’s fair to say we each yearn, in our own idiosyncratic ways, for an inner and outer wholeness inseparable from Mother Earth’s life and wholeness.
>>><<<>>><<<
The Thing I loved the best about Sun House: Duncan’s argument that mountains are gateways to eternity. Like Grady and the other saintly Elkmooners, I never felt more alive, more in touch with my roots and with my sanity than on a high mountain path, carrying everything I need in a heavy backpack, enduring heavy weather and gruelling effort for that moment of wonder, of epiphany, once you reach the summit and look around at the brilliance and peace of the surrounding earth – a priceless perspective.
To put it plainly, Japh, Dogen is saying that mountains, if we love them deeply enough, are enlightened teachers.
I truly know how Risa feels, after years of searching for the meaning of life, to arrive at a humble meadow in the high country and to know she is finally home:
A door swings open inside her. Stepping through it, she arrives in a profoundly familial, pine-scented, Montana-meets-Sanskrit inner landscape in which she feels entirely at home for the first time in her life.
>>><<<>>><<<
Many writers are able to pinpoint the problems with the globalised economy and with the erosion of the social compact, with the destruction of both environment and morals. Duncan builds his novel around what he sees as a solution out of the crisis, not only what to move away from, but most importantly, where are we to be heading if we want to survive.
By his own confessions, this effort took sixteen years of reading and writing, endless revisions and updates to get the story where he wanted. The result is overwhelmingly articulate and passionate, but with a tendency to sound like an groan inducing long sermon delivered from a lofty pulpit. Like a savoury dish left in the oven too long, it might turn bitter for readers who are not already fans of the author.
I believe Duncan is aware of the problem, as he makes the alleged author of the text, the Holy Goat, exclaim at one point: ... made me wonder whether she was running on brilliant intuition or optimistic oblivion.
It’s a very thin line to thread from the sublime to the cringe worthy. I was myself suffocated by the artificiality of the discourse and of the monochromatic characterization [they are all saintly do-gooders], in particular in the second half of the book, which seemed interminable and utterly predictable, with too many repetitions of the arguments already established in the first half and with the plot devolving into a sort of New Age Scripture filled with miracles and good deeds.
I love how quiet it gets when my brain can’t answer my heart.
Indeed, my heart responded with much joy at the ideas embraced by the book, yet my brain refused to be switched off at the much too sweet and utopian paeans sung to the Elkmooners and to their ranch experiment. I guess you really need to take the good along with the bad. The balance for me tilts towards admiration. I just wish those pesky little critical devils on the other plate would quiet down, so I can finish my review. Something similar happened to me while reading 'The Overstory' by Richard Powers.
“Is it a miracle I’m alive?” he asked the old tree.
The maple didn’t speak, but neither did it turn away.
>>><<<>>><<<
The Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company is the basic unit Duncan imagines would bring about a much needed spiritual and material Rinascimento in our hour of need. Putting aside my nagging doubts that there are sufficient Paradise mountain valleys for all eight billion inhabitants of our Sun House, or that each group of enthusiasts going back to nature will have enough millionaires in their ranks to buy that promised land, I would like to focus my next remarks to a different Manifesto, expressed by the leading lady of the novel, Risa, as she attends art school in New York. She is , like the Holy Goat in his secret narrator disguise, a boombox for the artistic credo of Duncan, providing us readers with the author’s own commentary track for the novel. Here are several examples:
“John of the Cross said that words can be like a sun, doing for the heart what sunlight can do for a field. I want to make paintings that convey that heartward movement, and in a way I can’t describe, certain Sanskrit words and phrases lead me into that sunlit field.”
I feel as if things as fine as coral reefs are vanishing from people. Things like a general kindness. Quiet sensitivity. Sincerity.
Ironic humor relieves tension by treating what hurts as a joke. But when we equate irony and truth, some super weird stuff happens. Like, it suddenly feels uncool, or naive, or even wrong to sincerely believe in anything.
“In my book, a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indians who owned the land, and called it progress. If I had my way, the land here would be like God made it and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all.” [ this one is attributed to Charlie Russell, painter ]
Finally, as a sort of conclusion about The Importance of Being Earnest, and a defence of the sappy overload of the text with spirituality:
I don’t know about you all, but my bottom line in art, as in life, is to serve that irony-proof idiot the human heart. I like hearts because their pulsing is steadfast for billions of beats, never ironical, and we’re alive as a result. I like that hearts ache. I like that they yearn. I want ache and yearning in my art.
This we have aplenty in ‘Sun House’ and I would rather have a discussion, like Risa, with the dreamers who are looking for solutions instead of with the cynics who pride themselves in not believing in anything.
Thank you, David James Duncan!
Being pierced leads to living by intuition, Ocean strobes, myth tellings, openness to grace, the bardic wonders in Lore’s music, brown trout kissing, susceptibility to wild creatures, conversing with birds, incredibly unlikely friendships, and other wonders.
>>><<<>>><<<
Odds and ends that have been relegated to the Dumpster of Failed Reviews, yet I would be loath to misplace them, hearing that other argument of the author about the value of church dissidents and unusual ways of thinking.
“What a beautiful irony! To empower and enrich Holy Mother Church, Rome shitcanned so many wondrous truths, faiths, and peoples that the contents of the giant dumpster behind the Church became far more holy than the contents of the Church!”
So here are some of the things we almost lost in the dumpster fire:
Never in my life have I seen so many folks, the second they see the need of another, try to meet it so fast it’s like each person is out to be each other’s prayer answered.
... this very place and this group of people are going to help coax a way of life into being that will set an example of value to thousands.
“Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.” [attributed to Roberto Calasso]
October 17, 2023
I’m not just bummed; I am angry I spent 54 days reading Sun House. So precious little within these pages rings true. Even the informal discourse between characters comes off as talking heads spewing stilted religious text, Wikipedia prose. See the talking heads in the chapter "Blue Empty" for example. PAINFUL!
Throughout the book the reader is called on to imagine what a changed consciousness “looks, feels, tastes, smells, sounds, and lives like,” but the characters’ often chapters-long explanations of their beliefs felt uppity and fell flat, and never failed to leave a bad taste in my mouth, a sort of “yeah, right” knee-jerk reaction on my part which Duncan has to explicitly ask the reader (via Risa) not to have. (vide chapter "On Irony")
Gah, I hated being preached at, and by an author I’ve trusted and admired, whose previous novel (published 31 years ago) sits proudly upon my shelf and comfortably within my Top 3 of all time. Michael Pietsch, Duncan’s editor (who, bless his soul, also edited Infinite Jest) needed to take a red marker sideways to this stack of pages: Sun House could’ve been a third of the size and accomplished the same awareness of diverse spiritual modes that it set out to do.
I’m done venting. I’m sorry for the hostility toward what the author might have felt could have been his magnum opus. But my feelings toward Sun House are that of a prisoner toward his guard, and my New Year’s resolution will be the grace to allow myself to DNF a bad book.
July 17, 2023
Fans of Duncan have been waiting for this novel for a long time, and it is well worth the wait. Sun House represents years of gathered wisdom from a novelist at the height of his craft. I can't imagine that the story of 21st century American literature will be complete without a chapter about the significance of Sun House, a book for our time. Once you begin to read, its enchanting allure is so powerful that it hurts to put it down. As always, Duncan is hilariously funny and deadly serious about the things that matter most, but Sun House goes farther and deeper than anything he has previously published to understand the tragic mystery and beauty of the human experience and the grounds for hope in the face of what lies ahead. I can't count the number of times its beauty and grace left me speechless.
August 22, 2023
I tried. I really tried. 31% DNF. I admit I kept skimming great swaths of the philosophical parts and tried diving into the story parts but it was too much work. The fuck, TJ.
September 14, 2023
Bloated, pretentious, overwritten, author-indulgent pablum. This is one of the most dense reads I've ever tried to tackle. Way too much highbrow pseudo intellectualism, irrelevant detail, and unnecessary tangents to wade through to get to the heart of the story. And I really didn't care for the two main characters, Jamey and Risa. Both were arrogant, self-important, snobbish, and a danger to others in their own ways. A doorstop of a book, at 764 pages it could have used a good editor. Maybe two or three editors. This was a long slog of a read and I'll never get back the time I invested in it. The only reason I give it two stars is that there were moments of brilliance in Duncan's writing. Unfortunately they were buried deep beneath the trash heap of authorial masturbation. SUN HOUSE would have been much better served at half the page length.
October 13, 2023
David James Duncan has written an extraordinary novel. While there are no dragons or wizards – well, there may be wizards, just not identified as such, I classify this as a fantasy, because it details my every fantasy from interpersonal relationships and connectedness with nature to a sustainable future for our planet and some kind of “after life” for our mortal soul. How does he do this? You must read the novel to see. I can tell you that I so sympathized with and related to every character that my breath rate increased with every passion and my blood pressure rose with every fury. Chapters allowed me to get to know characters throughout timelines before they, no spoiler here as I think it could be predicted, are ever brought together. It’s like DJD took his lifetime of experience, knowledge, reading, writing, parenting, traveling, practicing and synthesized it all into this opus that celebrates myriad spiritual traditions and honors the feminine and the masculine, all beings, and Gaia. It’s a pantheist hymn to living in the despair and doubt that rocks all who care about life and our planet while touching that part of us that says, love it all while we are here. Love it anyway. I love this book. When I look up from the pages, I remember to love the world and those in my circles more. What higher accomplishment is there for an author?
September 19, 2023
If I could give zero stars I would. I don't know that I've ever been so disappointed by a book; I finished it only because of his other two novels. I genuinely cannot say enough bad things about this book.
October 2, 2023
Mind Blown. Who knew?
One of the greatest books I have ever read.
Transformative, transcendent, beautiful, inspiring, magical.
A cast of characters that will forever live in my heart.
This one is for the dreamers. Thank you DJD.
I would have read another 800 pages.
( ( ( ( ( (!) ) ) ) ) )
One of the greatest books I have ever read.
Transformative, transcendent, beautiful, inspiring, magical.
A cast of characters that will forever live in my heart.
This one is for the dreamers. Thank you DJD.
I would have read another 800 pages.
( ( ( ( ( (!) ) ) ) ) )
October 9, 2023
One of my favorite books of the year -- perhaps though too early to tell one my favorites of all time!!! It is complex, it demands you take some time with it. It sometimes is in danger of being a little repetitive but then curves into an area not expected. It is inventive, ingenious, beautifully poetically written. Read it slowly. Try to read the first 70 to 80 pages in one sitting with as few distractions as possible. If you still aren't sure... read another 50 or 60 pages. If you aren't feeling it....then this book is NOT for you. That's okay... there are thousands of books to read. Most will likely be very glad to immerse themselves inside these characters and this book. Moving, touching, smart, and as others have said it is a book of healing but unconventional. The less you know about it going in, the more you are likely to be enchanted with the characters, the writing, the places it goes.
July 12, 2023
Masterpiece.
September 2, 2023
DNF - What pompous drivel. Don't understand all the glowing reviews.
December 4, 2023
Needed to be a 200 page book. I like the nature writing and philosophy but
a) nobody talks in the long monologue / screeds
b) 90% of the characters are so pure and altruistic
c) people don’t open up to each other within 90 seconds ALL the time
d) Risa’s dad, not believable. First that he was that big of a blues junky given his background pre Spotify. Or that he just abandoned her. Or that he has this spiritual awakening by digging through her box of books in his rafters.
e) Ora - not believable. She flew to middle of nowhere Montana and heard Lora based on what? And then just was so in love with what she heard she twisted her whole career around? Dumb
f) Grady and Trey show up again as good guys to their exes who are now besties? Seriously?
g) Risa spends hours studying spiritual texts but just picks up how to run a business and design buildings from natural talent? And goes to seven years of school and then tends bar?
h) sure is good luck about that insurance policy for TJ and Ocean man. They suck.
I) I want to like the Montana cowboy men but they are all cut from the same stock and annoy me.
J) the informant and others just wait around for Trey and Lora to show up and are total voyeurs to the point of taking pictures of them and interpreting their emotions? Where were they when she busted her ankle?
Just write a nonfiction spiritual screed and get it out of your system and give the readers a couple weeks off their lives back.
a) nobody talks in the long monologue / screeds
b) 90% of the characters are so pure and altruistic
c) people don’t open up to each other within 90 seconds ALL the time
d) Risa’s dad, not believable. First that he was that big of a blues junky given his background pre Spotify. Or that he just abandoned her. Or that he has this spiritual awakening by digging through her box of books in his rafters.
e) Ora - not believable. She flew to middle of nowhere Montana and heard Lora based on what? And then just was so in love with what she heard she twisted her whole career around? Dumb
f) Grady and Trey show up again as good guys to their exes who are now besties? Seriously?
g) Risa spends hours studying spiritual texts but just picks up how to run a business and design buildings from natural talent? And goes to seven years of school and then tends bar?
h) sure is good luck about that insurance policy for TJ and Ocean man. They suck.
I) I want to like the Montana cowboy men but they are all cut from the same stock and annoy me.
J) the informant and others just wait around for Trey and Lora to show up and are total voyeurs to the point of taking pictures of them and interpreting their emotions? Where were they when she busted her ankle?
Just write a nonfiction spiritual screed and get it out of your system and give the readers a couple weeks off their lives back.
October 13, 2023
I essentially quit at about 650 — skimmed the rest. Couldn’t take the endless enlightenment and ethereal mysticism anymore (and the exclamation points! Lord help us)… the characters I’d loved for hundreds of pages became unrelatable, and even objectionable. Somewhere within these 770 pages there are the remains of a five-star, unassailable 400-odd-page classic.
There is so much here that I sparked to: a generosity of spirit that far eclipses most of what passes for contemporary fiction, and a welcome focus on meaning and transcendence. After 25 years, I was not disappointed to encounter the author’s voice again.
But as Sun House approaches its resolution it bogs down into speeches and becomes more a treatise than fiction.
Sometimes when foreigners come upon an impoverished country they parachute in to fix things by establishing programs and non-profits and systems — never bothering to labor alongside the suffering. Sun House left me feeling like David James Duncan, to the country of spirituality, is that kind of foreigner.
There is so much here that I sparked to: a generosity of spirit that far eclipses most of what passes for contemporary fiction, and a welcome focus on meaning and transcendence. After 25 years, I was not disappointed to encounter the author’s voice again.
But as Sun House approaches its resolution it bogs down into speeches and becomes more a treatise than fiction.
Sometimes when foreigners come upon an impoverished country they parachute in to fix things by establishing programs and non-profits and systems — never bothering to labor alongside the suffering. Sun House left me feeling like David James Duncan, to the country of spirituality, is that kind of foreigner.
November 3, 2023
Best book I have read in sometime. I love David James Duncan’s other two novels so much. When I saw that he had another novel released that was 17 years in the making…I was beyond excited. This book is phenomenal. Sun House will sit with me for ever. It is a manifesto for the future. The menagerie is captivating to read about for its many hundreds of pages…I’m so sad it’s over.
November 8, 2023
This one was important to me. Here's the review I wrote for the The Reformed Journal:
When the Reformed Journal asked me to review David James Duncan’s new novel, Sun House, my response was immediate: “Respectfully, no way.” No novelist has meant more to me than Duncan, whose The River Why and The Brothers K gave voice to longings I never knew I had and offered characters who came to feel like old friends. His first novel in 31 years — thirty-one years! — was an occasion I wanted to mark privately, discussing it with a few trusted friends. After all, it might disappoint.
But after reading all 776 pages, I feel compelled to report that Sun House reads absolutely like a Duncan novel: sprawling, ambitious, imperfect, bursting with humor and sex and spiritual longing, drawing on ancient wisdom traditions of every kind and synthesizing them into nothing less audacious than a new nonreligion, which he calls Dumpster Catholicism (more on that soon). Best of all, it’s clear Duncan is having fun on the page, and, because of that, attempting a review struck me as fun too.
That little word, “fun,” in Duncan’s hands, becomes a term of immense spiritual substance. In a wonderful 2004 piece of “advice about writing advice,” he describes it as his artistic guiding star and “key to the door of the literary kingdom.” Fun, for him, contains room for playfulness, sincerity, and wild-eyed mysticism, all of which are present in Sun House. It contains room for fury about environmental despoliation and grief about violence that falls from the sky for no reason at all. It contains a sense of duty to write in service to a greater good, but also the knowledge that literary duty without playfulness is of little use to the world.
Read the rest at reformedjournal.com/sun-house-a-novel/.
When the Reformed Journal asked me to review David James Duncan’s new novel, Sun House, my response was immediate: “Respectfully, no way.” No novelist has meant more to me than Duncan, whose The River Why and The Brothers K gave voice to longings I never knew I had and offered characters who came to feel like old friends. His first novel in 31 years — thirty-one years! — was an occasion I wanted to mark privately, discussing it with a few trusted friends. After all, it might disappoint.
But after reading all 776 pages, I feel compelled to report that Sun House reads absolutely like a Duncan novel: sprawling, ambitious, imperfect, bursting with humor and sex and spiritual longing, drawing on ancient wisdom traditions of every kind and synthesizing them into nothing less audacious than a new nonreligion, which he calls Dumpster Catholicism (more on that soon). Best of all, it’s clear Duncan is having fun on the page, and, because of that, attempting a review struck me as fun too.
That little word, “fun,” in Duncan’s hands, becomes a term of immense spiritual substance. In a wonderful 2004 piece of “advice about writing advice,” he describes it as his artistic guiding star and “key to the door of the literary kingdom.” Fun, for him, contains room for playfulness, sincerity, and wild-eyed mysticism, all of which are present in Sun House. It contains room for fury about environmental despoliation and grief about violence that falls from the sky for no reason at all. It contains a sense of duty to write in service to a greater good, but also the knowledge that literary duty without playfulness is of little use to the world.
Read the rest at reformedjournal.com/sun-house-a-novel/.
December 12, 2023
I struggle with how to rate and review this book. I loved the writing and the characters. I loved the humor and the way David James Duncan describes the west.
But it's also too long. Perhaps I should have taken a break halfway through so it didn't feel like a slog. But by the time the characters are in Montana, every new character, side story, felt like a distraction to the overall story. At one point the narrator (The Holy Goat) describes his approach to writing the book, which was to try to pull together a bunch of disparate stories into something cohesive, but he gives up and just puts it all in there, which felt like Duncan excusing himself from actually doing any editing.
I loved the exploration of spirituality and religion and philosophy, especially the struggle to take the meaningful messages religion offers while at the same time recognizing the harm most major religious have done. But eventually the spirituality gets a little too woo woo for me and just made me roll my eyes. A little too - just vision what you want to happen and it will happen. Or "just listen to what the ocean/earth/spirit is telling you to do." And then often things happen that just seem so outside the realm of reality that I started taking the whole book less seriously.
I'm still glad I read it, and still appreciate Duncan's writing, but the more I read the less I loved it. Which is why it should have been shorter.
But it's also too long. Perhaps I should have taken a break halfway through so it didn't feel like a slog. But by the time the characters are in Montana, every new character, side story, felt like a distraction to the overall story. At one point the narrator (The Holy Goat) describes his approach to writing the book, which was to try to pull together a bunch of disparate stories into something cohesive, but he gives up and just puts it all in there, which felt like Duncan excusing himself from actually doing any editing.
I loved the exploration of spirituality and religion and philosophy, especially the struggle to take the meaningful messages religion offers while at the same time recognizing the harm most major religious have done. But eventually the spirituality gets a little too woo woo for me and just made me roll my eyes. A little too - just vision what you want to happen and it will happen. Or "just listen to what the ocean/earth/spirit is telling you to do." And then often things happen that just seem so outside the realm of reality that I started taking the whole book less seriously.
I'm still glad I read it, and still appreciate Duncan's writing, but the more I read the less I loved it. Which is why it should have been shorter.
Read
August 28, 2023That was a marathon. Need to sit with this one a bit before reviewing, or even rating.
Read
April 29, 2024I'm literally angry at this book. So angry, in fact, that I got to 82-ish% and quit.
It started out strong. The characters seemed complex and compelling and I was looking forward to seeing where & how their lives would come to intersect. The non-monotheistic spirituality was intriguing, too.
But most of the characters ended up going full Mary Sue, to the point that they became unbelievable, unrelatable, and oddly one-dimensional. Risa could quote sanskrit texts extensively (after only a couple years study) and expounded on them at length. She perfectly ran into TJ's business when he couldn't. She was the picture of intellectual piety, always journaling and navel-gazing and negotiating with the texts.
Lore was written just as unbelievably: near-perfect in her understanding and practice of Zen, able to quote poems and texts at length, stunning folk musician, mother to Mu, a kid who's written to seem like a zen master in a child's body. UGH.
Everything TJ did was touched by good luck and perfect timing (after receiving the worry dolls). He also has incredible knowledge about the Beguines and Catholicism. He's also an amazing chef - or so we're told. Despite being a major character, he nonetheless seems to exist at the margins of the story. Until money is needed, that is.
Roams is perfect dog that never barks or does anything remotely dog-like. No, he's a shakespearean actor who happily rides around in a bass case his whole life (ummm...this is Portland. People take their dogs everywhere). Grady's a himbo/class clown type character who, in spite of his connection to the Elkmoons, never grows as much as it seems like he should. Dave's atonement is so maudlin that I have no words, particularly as he just happens to buy and store everything this nascent non-commune commune might need.
And then there were the adversaries - NorBanCo & Tex. They were boring caricatures. I could almost see mustaches being twirled. Finally, let us not forget our unnamed - but easily identifiable - narrator who inserts themself into the story at what...about 40% in? [But why? Why was the narrator necessary? As Deadpool might say, "That's just lazy writing."]
Honestly the only character I found compelling from start to 82% was Jervis, I think because he ultimately recognized that he knew nothing.
By the time I was 75% of the way through - a not-insignificant time commitment, btw...where was Mr. Duncan's editor?? - I'd largely stopped caring about the characters. I'd still see flashes that kept me going, and I was hoping there'd be some sort of interesting climax. But no...everyone just kind of floated along to...co-housing. Which we all knew was going to happen because it's on the book jacket.
But the thing that made me quit in a rage? The breastfeeding scene. I saw it coming and started yelling, "Noooo! Don't do it! Don't you dare do it!!". But the author fucking did it. Look, I'm not kink-shaming here - to each their own. But a general fiction novel is probably not the place to be writing about one's kinks. That's all.
It started out strong. The characters seemed complex and compelling and I was looking forward to seeing where & how their lives would come to intersect. The non-monotheistic spirituality was intriguing, too.
But most of the characters ended up going full Mary Sue, to the point that they became unbelievable, unrelatable, and oddly one-dimensional. Risa could quote sanskrit texts extensively (after only a couple years study) and expounded on them at length. She perfectly ran into TJ's business when he couldn't. She was the picture of intellectual piety, always journaling and navel-gazing and negotiating with the texts.
Lore was written just as unbelievably: near-perfect in her understanding and practice of Zen, able to quote poems and texts at length, stunning folk musician, mother to Mu, a kid who's written to seem like a zen master in a child's body. UGH.
Everything TJ did was touched by good luck and perfect timing (after receiving the worry dolls). He also has incredible knowledge about the Beguines and Catholicism. He's also an amazing chef - or so we're told. Despite being a major character, he nonetheless seems to exist at the margins of the story. Until money is needed, that is.
Roams is perfect dog that never barks or does anything remotely dog-like. No, he's a shakespearean actor who happily rides around in a bass case his whole life (ummm...this is Portland. People take their dogs everywhere). Grady's a himbo/class clown type character who, in spite of his connection to the Elkmoons, never grows as much as it seems like he should. Dave's atonement is so maudlin that I have no words, particularly as he just happens to buy and store everything this nascent non-commune commune might need.
And then there were the adversaries - NorBanCo & Tex. They were boring caricatures. I could almost see mustaches being twirled. Finally, let us not forget our unnamed - but easily identifiable - narrator who inserts themself into the story at what...about 40% in? [But why? Why was the narrator necessary? As Deadpool might say, "That's just lazy writing."]
Honestly the only character I found compelling from start to 82% was Jervis, I think because he ultimately recognized that he knew nothing.
By the time I was 75% of the way through - a not-insignificant time commitment, btw...where was Mr. Duncan's editor?? - I'd largely stopped caring about the characters. I'd still see flashes that kept me going, and I was hoping there'd be some sort of interesting climax. But no...everyone just kind of floated along to...co-housing. Which we all knew was going to happen because it's on the book jacket.
But the thing that made me quit in a rage? The breastfeeding scene. I saw it coming and started yelling, "Noooo! Don't do it! Don't you dare do it!!". But the author fucking did it. Look, I'm not kink-shaming here - to each their own. But a general fiction novel is probably not the place to be writing about one's kinks. That's all.
October 15, 2023
Every time you have a choice between a dirt-simple truth and a God-thought, pick the dirt-simple. Dirt-simples are drops of Ocean. God-thoughts are just boinka-boinka. (Duncan, 267)
I’ll try to keep it to the dirt-simple. As tempting as it is, I won’t go academic and talk about the similarities between Duncan and Dostoevsky. And I won’t play the New Critic and wax eloquent about the drama and flair of Duncan’s prose style. I won’t go theological and talk about how Sun House has been making me think completely differently about God. I won’t risk losing your trust by gushing over the way Duncan’s novel gives me hope not only for my own spiritual seeking, but also for the generations to come. As tempting as it is to go boinka-boinka and “thinky thinky” about this novel, I won’t.
It’s a dirt-simple truth that Sun House by David James Duncan may not be for you. It’s long. It’s probably too much too much. Though, at the risk of getting boinka boinka, I doubt Duncan even cares.
You also might find the plot eerily reminiscent of the show Portlandia, absent the self-aware satire.
But it’s dirt-simple truth that the book made me laugh. And the book made me cry. The book held a mirror up to myself, and “my lordy” (to quote the character Kale) if Grady didn’t completely piss me off only to lead me to the realization that maybe I’d be lucky to learn what he learned.
It’s a dirt-simple truth that as long and complex as Sun House appears to be, I think it’s a great attempt to make me experience the truth Duncan is trying to convey. Like nesting dolls of storytelling, the main characters in this novel are storytellers struggling to tell their truth. Trying to do just that, Risa explains, “But words aimed at such an experience are trying to catch a thunderhead in the gopher trap of American English” (474). She instead decides that the best way to do justice to her story is to write “(((((((!))))))).” In my humble opinion— it makes perfect sense.
The dirt-simple truth is that stuff like ocean walks and second skin and the possibility of emptiness are some of the concepts these characters are exploring. And they are helping me manage my life today. I know Duncan didn’t make these things up (let’s give him partial credit for ocean walking, a twist on one of Father Zosima’s homilies), but thanks to his characters, these ideas now have my attention.
So read this book. Or don’t. The dirt simple is that I liked it.
I’ll try to keep it to the dirt-simple. As tempting as it is, I won’t go academic and talk about the similarities between Duncan and Dostoevsky. And I won’t play the New Critic and wax eloquent about the drama and flair of Duncan’s prose style. I won’t go theological and talk about how Sun House has been making me think completely differently about God. I won’t risk losing your trust by gushing over the way Duncan’s novel gives me hope not only for my own spiritual seeking, but also for the generations to come. As tempting as it is to go boinka-boinka and “thinky thinky” about this novel, I won’t.
It’s a dirt-simple truth that Sun House by David James Duncan may not be for you. It’s long. It’s probably too much too much. Though, at the risk of getting boinka boinka, I doubt Duncan even cares.
You also might find the plot eerily reminiscent of the show Portlandia, absent the self-aware satire.
But it’s dirt-simple truth that the book made me laugh. And the book made me cry. The book held a mirror up to myself, and “my lordy” (to quote the character Kale) if Grady didn’t completely piss me off only to lead me to the realization that maybe I’d be lucky to learn what he learned.
It’s a dirt-simple truth that as long and complex as Sun House appears to be, I think it’s a great attempt to make me experience the truth Duncan is trying to convey. Like nesting dolls of storytelling, the main characters in this novel are storytellers struggling to tell their truth. Trying to do just that, Risa explains, “But words aimed at such an experience are trying to catch a thunderhead in the gopher trap of American English” (474). She instead decides that the best way to do justice to her story is to write “(((((((!))))))).” In my humble opinion— it makes perfect sense.
The dirt-simple truth is that stuff like ocean walks and second skin and the possibility of emptiness are some of the concepts these characters are exploring. And they are helping me manage my life today. I know Duncan didn’t make these things up (let’s give him partial credit for ocean walking, a twist on one of Father Zosima’s homilies), but thanks to his characters, these ideas now have my attention.
So read this book. Or don’t. The dirt simple is that I liked it.
January 3, 2024
Sigh. Like so many others, I was, and am a total fan of Duncan’s previous two novels, and I was excited to see he had finally finished his third. There is so much to like in this book, but also so much that is exasperating. As his fans know, Duncan has his hobby horses, and generally one is a fan because one shares some or most of them. That is certainly true for yours truly. But, God help me, it just became too much. Too long monologues by too many characters, who increasingly sound too much the same: male, female, young, or old— doesn’t matter, they all become stand-ins for the author’s passionately held ideas and beliefs.
Ironically, I am really interested in and share many of them— but as the book goes on, the message increasingly overwhelms the story. I feel for Duncan. I get the sense that he is trying to express the ineffable, trying over and over (and over) to either get it right or to get it in the form he is sure will get through to the reader: to enlighten the reader, just as he was enlightened by the sacred texts he refers to and quotes from throughout the novel.
I said to a friend that the book is a noble failure, which seems a bit harsh in retrospect, but I do mean it to be as much a compliment as a criticism. I got a lot out of this book; I’m glad I stuck it out to the end; but this felt like a first or second draft that was still written for the author, rather than for his readers.
Ironically, I am really interested in and share many of them— but as the book goes on, the message increasingly overwhelms the story. I feel for Duncan. I get the sense that he is trying to express the ineffable, trying over and over (and over) to either get it right or to get it in the form he is sure will get through to the reader: to enlighten the reader, just as he was enlightened by the sacred texts he refers to and quotes from throughout the novel.
I said to a friend that the book is a noble failure, which seems a bit harsh in retrospect, but I do mean it to be as much a compliment as a criticism. I got a lot out of this book; I’m glad I stuck it out to the end; but this felt like a first or second draft that was still written for the author, rather than for his readers.
October 25, 2023
To channel one of the characters in Sun House: “The fuck, DJD? You wrote a book for the people who say ‘I’m spiritual’ when someone asks them if they’re religious.”
I say this in the most flattering and respectful way possible. Sun House is an incredible novel. It’s a spiritual book and reading it will make you float. It’s not an easy novel, though. It’s meant to be read in little bits, like the many works of theology and mysticism that inform the revolutionary spirit that inhabits these pages. Reading Sun House is like climbing a mountain: you have to pace yourself.
Make no mistake. It’s not a perfect novel. At times it felt more like reading a Socratic dialogue than a novel. Occasionally I was frustrated and annoyed. But, because I aspire to be more like the characters in this book who obey no created thing except love, I’ll stick with the positive and focus on the times when reading felt like I was reading selections of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, revised in a contemporary American setting. This is a good thing.
Ultimately, Sun House is DJD’s answer (perhaps his offering?) to the spiritually bereft, algorithm-addled society we live in. The one that happily destroys its home–the planet–for selfish and unjustifiable reasons. Whether or not you agree with DJD’s visionary antidote, Sun House is definitely worth the work.
I say this in the most flattering and respectful way possible. Sun House is an incredible novel. It’s a spiritual book and reading it will make you float. It’s not an easy novel, though. It’s meant to be read in little bits, like the many works of theology and mysticism that inform the revolutionary spirit that inhabits these pages. Reading Sun House is like climbing a mountain: you have to pace yourself.
Make no mistake. It’s not a perfect novel. At times it felt more like reading a Socratic dialogue than a novel. Occasionally I was frustrated and annoyed. But, because I aspire to be more like the characters in this book who obey no created thing except love, I’ll stick with the positive and focus on the times when reading felt like I was reading selections of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, revised in a contemporary American setting. This is a good thing.
Ultimately, Sun House is DJD’s answer (perhaps his offering?) to the spiritually bereft, algorithm-addled society we live in. The one that happily destroys its home–the planet–for selfish and unjustifiable reasons. Whether or not you agree with DJD’s visionary antidote, Sun House is definitely worth the work.
August 19, 2024
Finally accepted I wasn’t going to finish this one, made it about 60%. When I found myself halted to a crawl waiting for it to end, I accepted my fate. Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy.
My qualms are as follows:
Dialogue was unnatural and characters’ voices indistinguishable from each other. Philosophy, while certainly moving at moments, was more often heavy handed to the point of being tiresome. The whole thing was somehow plot driven but had also had no plot to speak of? The female characters… eye roll… the most gorgeous and sexy women you’ve ever seen but of course have no idea and don’t care at all about that stuff! Do male authors know they can write intellectual, creative, and spiritually-inclined female characters without making them hot or? Like they don’t have to be hot… you know that right? Mostly I gave up because there wasn’t enough relationship for me, at least not in the way that I feel actually gives access to the oneness and connection of all things that the author was really trying to drive home. Kinda felt like one guy talking to himself. Ironic considering the spiritual overtones of the entire novel. It was all just “and then this happened and then this happened, here’s another character, this happened to them and then this happened.” Maybe it’s a personal preference… this book just wasn’t my cup of tea.
My qualms are as follows:
Dialogue was unnatural and characters’ voices indistinguishable from each other. Philosophy, while certainly moving at moments, was more often heavy handed to the point of being tiresome. The whole thing was somehow plot driven but had also had no plot to speak of? The female characters… eye roll… the most gorgeous and sexy women you’ve ever seen but of course have no idea and don’t care at all about that stuff! Do male authors know they can write intellectual, creative, and spiritually-inclined female characters without making them hot or? Like they don’t have to be hot… you know that right? Mostly I gave up because there wasn’t enough relationship for me, at least not in the way that I feel actually gives access to the oneness and connection of all things that the author was really trying to drive home. Kinda felt like one guy talking to himself. Ironic considering the spiritual overtones of the entire novel. It was all just “and then this happened and then this happened, here’s another character, this happened to them and then this happened.” Maybe it’s a personal preference… this book just wasn’t my cup of tea.
January 6, 2024
If I could give this book 10 stars, I would. What a powerful story of compelling and lovely characters that culminate to form a new way of living, loving and being. The stories are webbed together in the most fantastic ways, with beautiful prose writing and heartfelt relationships.
Mr. Duncan, thank you for writing this magnificent novel that will hopefully spur change amongst your readers!
Mr. Duncan, thank you for writing this magnificent novel that will hopefully spur change amongst your readers!
March 23, 2025
Jesus Christ. This book almost ruined my life just because it was so long. I stopped enjoying it probably like 300 pages in but I wanted to finish it because Riley recommended it and I want to know her better. Yannick always said you should read the books that other people love to know them better. But anyway, I really appreciated the way this book made me think about spirituality and community and nature.
Coming back here and thinking more… I didn’t like the way the author talked about environment and how the overall message felt so easy to take away like yes the world is burning and we have to band together which I very much agree with and idolize a world where community comes from mutual hardship but it was just too on the nose sometimes and too pessimistic. Hmmmmmm
Coming back here and thinking more… I didn’t like the way the author talked about environment and how the overall message felt so easy to take away like yes the world is burning and we have to band together which I very much agree with and idolize a world where community comes from mutual hardship but it was just too on the nose sometimes and too pessimistic. Hmmmmmm
November 18, 2023
I love DJD's writing. The spirituality and love of nature that infuses his work speak to me in ways other writers can't. His characters are always written with such care and devotion. They're meaningful. It's a joy to spend time with them.
"The Brothers K" is my favorite book that I have read. Ever since I heard of the impending release of "Sun House," I had been ecstatic. I will try to give a quick objective review and then a closing thought.
This book is a tome. It is Stephen King-like in its size. On a related note, it does not read quickly like a King novel. I read books pretty rapidly but found myself unable to do so here. Part of that has to do with the multitude of characters in this story. I don't know that there is a true "main character." The story also covers an extremely large swath of time. And if you're familiar with Duncan's writing, there are a lot of asides and chapters that don't immediately clue you in to why they're meaningful until they lock into place later in the story. So it's not a fast read. I had to chunk it out and really ruminate over small portions. I think that might make it difficult for some people. If you're looking for an extremely tight storyline with a recognizable act 1, act 2, act 3 structure, you're not going to find it here.
On the other end of the spectrum, the writing is beautiful. There is a chapter describing why a character quit his journey into Jesuit priesthood that is maybe the most beautiful chapter I've ever read. EVER READ. I'm not being hyperbolic. Duncan also has the funniest jokes about religion that he will call back to when you least expect it. There's a bit about John Calvin and accountants that made me giggle out loud multiple times while I read it. If you're someone who (like me) still feels religious in a variety of ways but doesn't really hold to a lot of the more conservative traditions you specifically grew up in, Duncan's writing will affect you. I think about quotes from his writing all the time.
This book also deals specifically with fear surround climate change and the way nature is being destroyed by the ravages of man. Duncan is extremely adept at weaving that into the story. Feeling depressed at how little you can do in the face of conglomerate companies destroying the earth. Trying to make a difference as one person or a small group of people. He tapped into the feeling that I believe many people in this current age harbor about the climate situation.
In the end, I'm so glad I read this book. However, trying to describe it seems impossible though I just spent several paragraphs trying to do just that. I really liked it but, as a good friend of mine who also read the book and enjoyed it (I think) said, "I don't know who I'd recommend this to."
I don't know how to recommend it. But, if for some reason what I've said here caused you to maybe consider reading it, I hope you will. I think it's worth it.
I leave you with one of my favorite lines from the book. Something that describes my feeling about faith, hope, religion, being, and many other things in my life.
"The great joy is beyond understanding."
"The Brothers K" is my favorite book that I have read. Ever since I heard of the impending release of "Sun House," I had been ecstatic. I will try to give a quick objective review and then a closing thought.
This book is a tome. It is Stephen King-like in its size. On a related note, it does not read quickly like a King novel. I read books pretty rapidly but found myself unable to do so here. Part of that has to do with the multitude of characters in this story. I don't know that there is a true "main character." The story also covers an extremely large swath of time. And if you're familiar with Duncan's writing, there are a lot of asides and chapters that don't immediately clue you in to why they're meaningful until they lock into place later in the story. So it's not a fast read. I had to chunk it out and really ruminate over small portions. I think that might make it difficult for some people. If you're looking for an extremely tight storyline with a recognizable act 1, act 2, act 3 structure, you're not going to find it here.
On the other end of the spectrum, the writing is beautiful. There is a chapter describing why a character quit his journey into Jesuit priesthood that is maybe the most beautiful chapter I've ever read. EVER READ. I'm not being hyperbolic. Duncan also has the funniest jokes about religion that he will call back to when you least expect it. There's a bit about John Calvin and accountants that made me giggle out loud multiple times while I read it. If you're someone who (like me) still feels religious in a variety of ways but doesn't really hold to a lot of the more conservative traditions you specifically grew up in, Duncan's writing will affect you. I think about quotes from his writing all the time.
This book also deals specifically with fear surround climate change and the way nature is being destroyed by the ravages of man. Duncan is extremely adept at weaving that into the story. Feeling depressed at how little you can do in the face of conglomerate companies destroying the earth. Trying to make a difference as one person or a small group of people. He tapped into the feeling that I believe many people in this current age harbor about the climate situation.
In the end, I'm so glad I read this book. However, trying to describe it seems impossible though I just spent several paragraphs trying to do just that. I really liked it but, as a good friend of mine who also read the book and enjoyed it (I think) said, "I don't know who I'd recommend this to."
I don't know how to recommend it. But, if for some reason what I've said here caused you to maybe consider reading it, I hope you will. I think it's worth it.
I leave you with one of my favorite lines from the book. Something that describes my feeling about faith, hope, religion, being, and many other things in my life.
"The great joy is beyond understanding."
Read
September 21, 2023It is probably stunning and beautiful, important and wise. I have not read this book. Duncan is a fine writer, but I gave up on his second novel and this one failed (for me) at the gate. Totally unfair of me to write this. There are glowing reviews from people who label Duncan a genius. Stop here. What follows is personal rant and not in the least important.
March 27, 2024
David James Duncan helped show me, as an impressionable 19-year old, that religion wasn't just the right wing/evangelicals. The River Why & particularly The Brothers K were pretty groundbreaking books for me.
So now in my mid-30s I opened up Sun House after another spiritually draining day in corporate America and almost shed a tear when he was up to his usual tricks by page 17 riffing on how the sanscrit word ṣad means _to sit down inwardly, and breath, and attain the true_.
For about 400 pages I loved this book, and it contains way too many beautiful & wise things to even list. As somebody that also looks up at our giant pacific NW mountains on the daily, I particularly appreciated his thoughts on the zen teacher Dogen and mountains (page 257, ish).
Unfortunately, I also have to acknowledge that a lot of the philosophical segments after about the midway point were a slog to get through. This has a great central plotline, but the asides just got really unnatural, wordy and disorganized. Characters started to feel one-dimensional.
Also! This isn't super important but there were a few chronological errors that I feel editors should have caught. Someone is drinking an IPA in a bar in Portland in 1991--I wasn't there but I personally don't think people were drinking those back then. There's a dozen or so thing like that I noticed throughout the book.
I couldn't agree more with most of his sentiments but I wish a few hundred pages were edited out.
So now in my mid-30s I opened up Sun House after another spiritually draining day in corporate America and almost shed a tear when he was up to his usual tricks by page 17 riffing on how the sanscrit word ṣad means _to sit down inwardly, and breath, and attain the true_.
For about 400 pages I loved this book, and it contains way too many beautiful & wise things to even list. As somebody that also looks up at our giant pacific NW mountains on the daily, I particularly appreciated his thoughts on the zen teacher Dogen and mountains (page 257, ish).
Unfortunately, I also have to acknowledge that a lot of the philosophical segments after about the midway point were a slog to get through. This has a great central plotline, but the asides just got really unnatural, wordy and disorganized. Characters started to feel one-dimensional.
Also! This isn't super important but there were a few chronological errors that I feel editors should have caught. Someone is drinking an IPA in a bar in Portland in 1991--I wasn't there but I personally don't think people were drinking those back then. There's a dozen or so thing like that I noticed throughout the book.
I couldn't agree more with most of his sentiments but I wish a few hundred pages were edited out.
October 20, 2023
First, I'll just say that I only made it about 150 pages into this before I ran out of steam, so I probably have no business writing a review yet. Maybe I'll try it again later. Second, I'll say: man, I wanted to love this book. The Brothers K is my absolute favorite novel of all time. I keep at least two copies around so I can always give one away when someone asks me what they should read next. When I'm down to one, I go buy another. I've been been waiting (like everyone who loves Brothers K) literal decades for another novel from Duncan.
But wow, this book is exhausting. So far it's filled with characters that have conversations like no one ever converses, and scenes that are so overwritten I need a snack and a nap to get through each one. It feels like 50 essays on faith, spirituality, gender, politics, trauma, and Sanskrit, awkwardly jammed into the shape of a novel. I'm sure there's a story up ahead, but I won't get there.
I see the similarities with Brothers K - characters explained through vignettes, brilliant metaphors and pithy turns of phrase, and a rigorous exploration of humanness. But every literary device that feels sublime in Brothers K is used to the point of garishness in Sun House.
Duncan is one of the best writers I've ever read. The Brothers K was written to a perfect 10. I can't handle him dialed to 11.
But wow, this book is exhausting. So far it's filled with characters that have conversations like no one ever converses, and scenes that are so overwritten I need a snack and a nap to get through each one. It feels like 50 essays on faith, spirituality, gender, politics, trauma, and Sanskrit, awkwardly jammed into the shape of a novel. I'm sure there's a story up ahead, but I won't get there.
I see the similarities with Brothers K - characters explained through vignettes, brilliant metaphors and pithy turns of phrase, and a rigorous exploration of humanness. But every literary device that feels sublime in Brothers K is used to the point of garishness in Sun House.
Duncan is one of the best writers I've ever read. The Brothers K was written to a perfect 10. I can't handle him dialed to 11.
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