REVIEWS

24 Works of Fiction to Read This Summer

 

Sun House, by David James Duncan

This novel of ideas, which took Duncan 16 years to complete, follows all manner of people who are staring down crises of faith. These lost souls — from cowboys to urban refugees — make their way to Montana and build new communities for themselves. “I’m really trying to portray something that might give some one hope,” Duncan said of the book in an interview with The Idaho Mountain Express. “When I shatter a heart, I try as best as I can to at least partially mend it as well.”

Little, Brown, Aug. 8

Sun House is a voluminous chronicle of a specific time in American history, this time spanning the turn of the twenty-first century, as the effects of unchecked capitalism and climate change start to take hold. Over seven sections, or “tellings,” the novel recounts the formation of the Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company, an unlikely collective of urbanites and ranchers—“broken-open lowly people”—and the fires and failures each member endures before joining this collective…READ MORE

To call Sun House by David James Duncan, a novel is akin to calling the sun a decent-sized campfire. This book, coming in at nearly 800 pages, commands attention. But the caliber of writing, at any length, would cause the reader to utter words like “epic,” “classic,” and “magnum opus.”

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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 … READ MORE

SUN HOUSE

by David James Duncan

reviewed by Hank Lentfer Author of Raven’s Witness and Faith of Cranes

Just twenty-six letters. In this language anyway. And none of them outlandishly different from any of the others. Haikus. Manifestos. Suicide Notes. Treasure Maps. Constitutions. Divorce Papers. The Bible. Postcards. And now, Sun House, David James Duncan’s long-anticipated novel, an epic tale heaving with heart and humor. Guided by Buddhist monks, Indian poets, Irish bards, and ‘Dumpster Catholic’ mystics, it wanders through Portland alleys, Seattle classrooms, Rocky Mountains, and Montana ranchlands. Along the way, Duncan’s meticulous arrangement of those twenty-six squiggly lines carry the spark and heat and intimacy of in-the-flesh, on-the-ground, camp-fire-infused, whiskey-enhanced experience. It’s a mystery how a story pinned so thoroughly to the flat page swells and floats, wafts and winds, sifts and settles into huge and unseen dimensions. READ MORE