SUN HOUSE, by David James DuncanAt least give David James Duncan credit for an eclectic and well-nourished sensibility: Not every writer would quote Walt Whitman and Fran Lebowitz in consecutive sentences. His ambitious new novel, “Sun House,” takes its title from an imagined nomadic tribe’s name for Earth, but Duncan is surely alluding to the real-life Delta bluesman Son House, whom one of the characters recalls seeing in performance. In this multiperspective epic about an “unintentional menagerie” of seekers and strivers in a Montana valley, Duncan name-checks John Cheever and Frank Zappa, Anne Carson and Glenda Jackson, Teilhard de Chardin and Jabba the Hutt, as well as Eastern and Western mystics from Gandhi to Catherine of Siena. Gary Snyder makes a cameo appearance, we hear Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris sing a song of Duncan’s invention, and a Border collie named Romeo plays the fool — literally — in a production of “King Lear.”A similar high-low range of reference once enriched the wry and witty fictions of Donald Barthelme, but Duncan is bereft of Barthelme’s worldly sense of irony — for him, no bereavement at all. In a chapter titled “On Irony (Yeah, Right),” one character ventriloquizes what seems to be Duncan’s own aesthetic credo: “My bottom line in art, as in life, is to serve that irony-proof idiot the human heart.”In “Sun House,” idiocy is theodicy, holy foolery transcends the “thinky” intellect, and “dumbsaint notebook” entries, scrawled by a student of Sanskrit, muse on “Unseen Unborn Guileless Perfection” and “a nothingness out of which compassion, empathy & generosity flow & flow.” Such “mind-stopping paradoxes” are Buddhism 101, but if given enough of them — and we’re given far more than enough of them — an agnostic might convert to heartless rationalism out of sheer annoyance.

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Persons: David James Duncan, Walt Whitman, Fran Lebowitz, ”, Duncan, John Cheever, Frank Zappa, Anne Carson, Glenda Jackson, Teilhard de Chardin, Jabba, Gandhi, Catherine of Siena, Gary Snyder, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Romeo, “ King Lear, Donald Barthelme Organizations: SUN Locations: Montana