Megan Sullivan: What inspired the setting for So Brave, Young, and Handsome? Why did you choose this setting? Can you explain why you like Westerns so much?

Leif Enger: Until the age of eighteen, I never traveled further west than Glendive, in eastern Montana, but knew, from Dad and my brothers and from Zane Grey, not to mention Little Joe Cartwright, that the West was where everything is possible. There's just so much room in it! Even in the age of interstate highways and air travel the Great Plains are so large, so open—so unsupervised—that they must contain whatever a person needs, if the person looks hard enough. So it was easy to choose the West as a setting, and easier still to choose one of its prettiest and most melancholy moments, just before our entry into the Great War, when the cowboys were passing and the outlaws were looking around for easier work. Part of the beauty of the Western myth is that it offers no guarantee—you might get a happy ending or you might get a rattlesnake in your blanket. Either way you are out of the office.

MS: What's the significance of the boats? Building boats seems to redeem the characters. Are you a boat builder yourself?

LE: Well, ‘boatbuilder' is a term reserved for people with specific enviable skills; I am not one of those. But I did once build a canoe with my brother Lee, and helped each of my sons build small boats when they were younger, and enjoyed the shaping of wood pieces and the way they fit together to make a simple, beautiful shape. What line is more pleasing than a boat's sheer? And if there's any better proof of time redeemed than the pleasure of rowing the craft of your hands through calm water, I don't know what it is. Of course not everyone is happy in a boat, but many people are; paddling along a mossy shoreline at dusk is large medicine. So I'm not sure whether working on boats redeems these characters, but it gives them something pleasant to do and helps set their minds at ease.

MS: Explain the character of Siringo? Why does Becket remain with him?

LE: Charlie Siringo was a real Pinkerton agent of the time who wrote a terrific slam-bang memoir called A Cowboy Detective, which is still in print. Charlie was clearly a man with confidence about his place on the big stage—his tale spinning is magnetic, coarse and vulnerable, noble and cruel, and feels completely extemporaneous. It's also cheerfully self-serving; I suspect nothing made him happier than the care and feeding of his own legend. He's a layered old villain whose company is both harsh and fascinating. So Monte stays with him for any number of good reasons: initially fear, then a creeping curiosity, and at last, empathy.

MS: Is this a cowboy romance? Do you mean to point out the difference between the romanticized West and the real West? Glendon and Hood seem to represent these two disparate ideas.

LE: I'm not contrasting real and romantic so much as reconciling the two, marrying them together. Absolutely the West was brutal, unfair, and inhospitable, and its people commonly died young of deprivation and disease and violence. How many of them would've described it as romantic? But if romance is defined as a story or fiction of the wide and colorful world, in which conflicts are played out and character is revealed through action, then such bitter realities are not only inherent but necessary to the form. You actually can have it both ways—that's my hopeful proposition.

MS: Is Becket's writer's block autobiographical? It's been seven years since Peace Like a River. How difficult was writing another novel?

LE: Can it be called writer's block if you're writing hundreds of pages the whole time? The problem was, the pages didn't hold together. They didn't matter. It was as if there was some magic number of words I had to throw away. Then one morning Glendon rowed up the Cannon River in his little swift, and the story carried me off.

MS: So in a way, your experience writing this book mirrors Becket's writing experience. That was intentional?

LE: Not really. When writing a novel, you have to stay where the current is running. I found Monte Becket's voice to be the best entry to the outlaw/pursuit/redemption story I had in mind—it had spirit and doubt and momentum—so I went with it.

MS: What characters and places are based on real historical ones? Which character did you sympathize with most and which one do you expect readers will sympathize with most?

LE: Besides Siringo, some of the characters at the Hundred and One Ranch were real, and worked at the ranch at some point—the Ponca chief Iron Tail, Mexican Joe Barrera, and Colonel Miller, who owned the ranch with his brothers. The Hundred and One epitomized the flamboyant Wild West show, and it actually did flood in a dramatic way that sent monkeys climbing to rooftops, though I moved that event backward in time by several years. I chose to begin the story in Northfield, Minnesota, the town, for me, where the Old West transects the Midwest; the James and Younger gang attempted to rob the First National Bank there in 1876 and were rebuffed, an event Northfield still celebrates. Regarding the characters, I am especially fond of Glendon Hale, whose regrets have formed a man of character, Siringo for his pepper and wit, and Susannah, Monte's wife, who has the strength and confidence to send her man away. Who will readers like? I  honestly don't know—and experience counsels me not to guess.

MS: You focus a lot on identity, particularly with names. Many of the characters have alternate names and egos. Can you talk about the connection and why so many characters have different names?

LE: One thing the West offered was rebirth. If you'd failed elsewhere—failed to rise in society, or satisfy your family, or live within the law—you had the option then of getting on a train and acquiring a new name, a new self. That sort of clean beginning isn't available anymore. On the other hand, there were downsides to all those fresh-minted identities. It must've been awkward to invite old friends to visit. With new friends, you had to invent your history and then remember it. At bottom, though, people retain the soul assigned them at the beginning, and life becomes a matter of sloughing off whatever is not true, not genuine. I suppose that peeling away is inevitable, and not only for those who've consciously reinvented themselves. No wonder Glendon is worried that he never told God his true name. Who wants to die with explaining still to do?

MS: The women in your book seem more grounded than the men, especially Becket's wife, Susanna. She feels free enough to send off her husband for weeks and then to take off from home with little warning. Even Blue seems to know who she is and what she wants. Can you comment on that?

LE: I don't think men and women divide neatly into grounded vs. flighty, but do think that in couples where one is especially creative or romantically inclined the other is apt to develop a better hold on matters practical. In Susannah's case, she sees that it's important for Monte to go west with his friend; she understands he needs somehow to be made whole again, and so it is for her both a practical and a romantic consideration.

MS: Can you explain where the title So Brave, Young, & Handsome comes from?

LE: It's from a famous old song called "The Cowboy's Lament," which tells the story of a dying cowboy who fell in with wicked companions, took up card playing and drinking, and ends up killed. You may recognize the terrific melodramatic refrain:

So beat the drum slowly

And play the fife lowly

Play the death march as you bear me along

For we all loved our comrade

So brave, young, and handsome

We all loved our comrade, although he done wrong.