True North by Jim Harrison

My name is David Burkett. I'm actually the fourth in a line of David Burketts beginning in the 1860s when my great-grandfather emigrated from Cornwall, England, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan which forms the southern border of Lake Superior, that vast inland sea of freshwater. this naming process is of no particular interest except to illustrate how fathers wish to further dominate the lives of their sons from the elemental beginnings. I have done everything possible to renounce my father but then within the chaos of the events of my life it is impossible to understand the story without telling it.

David Burkett hates his father for two distinct, but interrelated reasons. First, his father is the heir of a line of timber barons who have made their wealth from pillaging forests, exploiting workers, and being generally nasty. In this, author Jim Harrison draws from the true history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which often pitted industrial capitalists against the miners, loggers, and Native Americans whose labor their vast wealth required. I was interested to see the historical details crop up along the route of our trip recent trip through the Upper Peninsula. At one point, David's forebears are squarely blamed for a stampede in which hired goons yelled "Fire" in a crowded theater, crushing dozens of children, and which I read about during our visit to the Calumet National Historic Park on the Keweenaw Peninsula. The other reason is that his father is a pederast and a rapist, pursuing underage girls with the doggedness of the truly depraved, including raping the young daughter of his Mexican groundskeeper, Jesse, a crime that stands out in David's mind as the pinnacle and exemplar of all his crimes.

In part, David's response to this is to run from money, living simply in cabins and trucks throughout the U.P. He also responds by trying to write a thorough history of the U.P. in which his family's crimes will play a starring part. This effort is a Casaubon-like attempt that's destined to fail because there's too much history to uncover, and it's hamstrung by the fact that, as it turns out, David is a shitty writer. And yet, nothing he does seems to help David emerge, psychologically speaking, out from under the shadow of his father. As he grows from a teen into a man and begins to accumulate the ordinary sexual obsessions, he finds himself tortured by the possibility that his lusts will make him closer to his father than he would like. And yet, a series of women are on hand to give themselves sexually to David: the youthful Laurie, his abbreviated wife Polly, the poet Vernice, and others. Each of them encourages David, in their own way, to find a way to let go of his obsession with his father.

In this way, True North is very much a masculine novel in a kind of old-school way. Women never seem to say "no" to David, sexually speaking, or if they do, it's only contextual, no woman is ever just-not-interested, and they all represent stages of self-expression or self-growth, the woman as the extension of the man. But Harrison is a talented writer, and he brings them enough to life that you're willing to forgive this hoary old dynamic. I found the book ultimately very engaging and readable, and I was impressed with the way that Harrison keeps David's father largely off the page in order to keep the focus on the psychological damage that David himself carries around. It was a great pleasure to read on the Upper Peninsula (I actually read the whole thing on two long ferry rides to and from Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior), and it gave me a much richer sense of the heritage of the place: the Ojibwe, the Finns, the Cornish, the mines, the timber, et cetera, et cetera. Although it's telegraphed at the beginning of the novel, the extreme and out-of-place violence of the ending shocked me; I'm still not sure how to integrate it mentally with the rest of the novel.

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.