Dalva by Jim Harrison

What I am trying to do is trade in a dead lover for a live son. I'll throw in a dead father with the dead lover and their souls I have kept in the basement perhaps. The world around me and the world of people looks immense and solid but it is more fragile than lark or pheasant eggs, women eggs, anyone's last heartbeat. I'm a crazy woman. Why didn't I do this long ago? I'm forty-five and there's still a weeping girl in my stomach. I'm still in the arms of dead men--first Father then Duane. I may as well have burned down the goddamned house. Whether I see the son at least he is a living obsession.

Dalva is part-Lakota Sioux, a social worker living in Santa Monica. When she oversteps professional boundaries to protect a young boy from his abusive uncle, she finds herself out of a job and in danger of being targeted by the uncle himself, so she leaves Santa Monica to return to western Nebraska, where she spent her childhood, vowing to finally find the son she put up for adoption when she was only a teenager. Back in Nebraska, she and her current beau Michael--a dipsomaniac historian from Stanford--reconnect with the places and the people of her childhood, and we learn the story of her whirlwind romance with a boy named Duane Stone Horse, who gave her a child, then ran off and committed suicide.

Dalva has a funny three-part structure: the first and third sections are narrated by Dalva herself, but the middle section is narrated by the historian Michael, who has agreed to help Dalva find her son if she will give him access to the papers of her ancestor John Wesley Northridge, a 19th-century pioneer who became a friend to the Lakota and, as a consequence, despised by other white settlers and the U.S. army who took on the task of eradicating the Lakota from the landscape. Michael's narrative quotes heavily from Northridge's journals, which track the pioneer's turn from missionary to apostate, and give an overview of the sad and sorry history of American policy toward Native Americans in the latter half of the 19th century: broken treaties, forced emigration and starvation, bloodshed, etc. These journals contextualize the contemporary lives of characters like Dalva and Duane, who are both part white and part Lakota, though in ways I often found vague. As a narrator, Michael is funny and high-spirited; his scholarly focus is balanced by a wily capacity for ferreting out hidden liquor, and his amorousness gets him into quick trouble in the small Western town.

On the other hand: I read this book bit by bit over a long trip through the part of the country Dalva describes, and the ultimate effect of this structure was to alienate me from Dalva, who is the novel's emotional core. Dalva is a long and rich novel, thick with detail, but perhaps too thick, filled with digressions, literal wanderings to other places: Dalva's uncle's place in the Arizona desert, the Baja peninsula in Mexico, the Florida keys were Duane commits suicide--when all I really wanted was to return to the immediacy and importance of Nebraska. Perhaps this is more about the conditions of my reading than the book itself, but I enjoyed the first section the most, which I read on a long airplane flight and thus could really immerse myself in the thoroughness and vividness of Dalva's life.