A strange, piercing longing

It’s been three decades since writer David James Duncan released his second novel, The Brothers K. In 2023 he came out with his third, Sun House (Little, Brown and Co.), a 700-plus page comedic epic about spiritual misfits and wanderers in the Pacific Northwest.

Duncan has never shied away from spiritual categories. In an era in which much contemporary fiction seems overly occupied with the political, Duncan’s fiction will be a pleasant ­surprise for readers who still bear an appetite for transcendence. That, after all, is what each protagonist in Sun House is searching for: a sense of the world beyond the world, or, maybe more aptly, the world of meaning and spirit that houses (hence the book’s title) the physical earth itself.

There’s Risa, the college student in Seattle who falls in love with Sanskrit literature. Then there’s TJ, the ex-Jesuit priest who is trying to make sense of how a providential and loving God could have allowed a terrible “freak accident” he witnessed involving the death of a child.

There’s Grady, Risa’s ex-boyfriend who becomes enraptured by the Elkmoon Mountain range and wrestles with how to reconcile his tech job in Portland with the spiritual freedom he experiences at high elevation. And there’s Lorilee, the mountaineering, dulcimer-playing woman who loves the poetry of the Beatnik Gary Snyder.

A group of Montana ranchers, led by a man named Kale, struggles with a corporate takeover of their land, where decades before, Risa’s father, Davy, grew up and fell in love with the area’s natural beauty. It’s here where all these characters, through their particular detours and trajectories, ultimately converge.

Sun House asks how one might find a spiritual home outside the Western, masculine, institutional form of religion. Incorporating Eastern thought with the writings of St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and Julian of Norwich, Duncan tries to meld Eastern and Western world­views into something of a cohesive whole. While the book is to be commended for taking spiritual reality ­seriously, criticism of traditional religion for being oppressive or self-righteous runs the risk of committing its own form of self-righteousness. As a result, sometimes Duncan’s characters come across as so enlightened and uniquely spiritual that they feel unrelatable, or a bit idealized. The book also has some bad language and sexual situations.

Sun House is nonetheless a deeply moving novel about a band of unlikely characters who are struck with a strange, piercing longing for “northernness,” or in Lorilee’s words, the “blue empty.” For me, reading Duncan ­awakened a desire for the great mystery, for transformative encounters with the divine, and ultimately, for the unsurpassable beauty and love of Jesus. While the novel doesn’t recognize Christ as the exclusive path to salvation, perhaps it will compel readers to at least start a long journey that, God willing, will lead them home.