At some point or other most of our lives get knocked off-kilter by a global pandemic or politics or illness or grief. In Leif Enger’s novel Virgil Wander, our eponymous hero is suffering from a serious concussion. His head hurts, and he may be seeing things. His balance is unreliable. His short-term memory is on the fritz. Worst of all, he’s forgotten his adjectives.
“The previous tenant,” as Virgil refers to his pre-concussion self, had hemmed himself in with the need to be nice — not to offend or ruffle any feathers. Concussed Virgil no longer has the strength for all of that. Not that he turns mean — far from it — but he becomes plainspoken.
Judging from the free pie, warm handshakes and curious questions he gets upon his return from the hospital in Duluth, Virgil’s neighbors in Greenstone, Minnesota, are fond of him. He returns the compliment by shouldering the responsibility for the vulnerable among them. He’s there for the scruffy 10-year-old who is hell-bent on avenging his father’s death on a giant sturgeon that lurks in the local waterways. He finds a way to anchor the 17-year-old who likes to surf alone in Lake Superior in all weathers. And he takes in the mysterious, kite-flying, old Norwegian who appears in town with his own sad mission.
Virgil is as honorable a man as you can hope to meet, with the unassuming sense of honor that puts the dignity of everyone else before what he himself might desperately want. Fortunately, the concussion knocks some sense into him in that regard, at least in terms of love. He also has a wry sense of humor that describes his best friend as a “high school athlete defeated by pastry” and makes him a wonderful narrator of his own tale.
I find this novel immensely comforting in my own off-kilter world. Not because Enger has prettified a small-town community but because he has not. There’s a malevolent character come to Greenstone, and locals who are weak-willed enough to be easily manipulated by him. It’s Virgil who recognizes the looming tragedy and stops it in time. As he wobbles through town, saying exactly what needs to be said, Virgil sets the whole community back upright. His fundamental decency and kindness win through in the end. We can all take courage from that.
Megan Koreman lives in Royal Oak, Michigan. She is a historian and author of The Expectation of Justice: France, 1944-1946 and The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe. A young adult novel, Dark Clouds over Paris, is forthcoming. Read more at dutchparisblog.com.