"And the history of my family was not unlike the history of the United States. We were among the leading conquerors of a region and when we had thoroughly depleted its main resources we mythologized our destruction." - David Burkett, True North

A regional food writer once called Jim Harrison our poet laureate of the appetite, and Harrison's books reliably feature characters with equal lusts for food and drink, hunting and fishing, sex, spirituality and roaming the woods and roads (his recent memoir sets aside a chapter for each). But these appetites are not dim hedonism so much as the subjects of a writer who also qualifies as the poet laureate of the human mammal - the only species with foreknowledge of its own death.

People deal with mortality in as many ways as there are lives - religion, denial, overworking, restlessness, seeking oblivion, you name it. Harrison's balms, then, can be seen as acts against the void. That said, there's never any shortage of old-goat libido and gluttony either, but then who wants to be a prig while dancing on mortality's stage?

His new novel, True North, traces three decades in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where David Burkett grapples with the demons of his father and predecessors who accumulated great wealth by scarring the land for timber and iron ore while exploiting people for labor. From Page 1, Burkett's torment is evident when he qualifies his name by noting that he's actually David Burkett "the IV" but says, "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."

The statement isn't as overwrought as it sounds. David's father is a father only by name and genetics; otherwise, he's the alcoholic bully in the house with a fateful appetite for teenage girls and "an unfounded belief in the innate superiority of his bloodlines" who sees "all existence only in terms that related to him right down to the weather forecast."

Father Burkett never attempts to redeem himself, and his predatory behavior sets in motion the brutal, mythic ending that's years in coming. He's the dark anchor of the book because David is understandably concerned about what kind of man he'll become: "My father had closed the windows to the world, and I was spending my life struggling to open them."

David's ferocious sister Cynthia will have none of that and understands that her "father" is a creep to be renounced; she sleeps with her door locked and, at one point, beats him away with a garden stake. Call it female intuition. When she leaves home, she leaves her father there.

Their mother emerges into herself once she escapes to Chicago and her own life. During David's youth, she's beleaguered by her husband's misdeeds and floats along a tide of pills and booze.

As a miserable and very hormonal teen, David decides his life's work is to explore and record the source of evil in his family, which leads to years of obsessive research about logging, mining and the history of the Upper Peninsula. It's rarely a bad thing for a person to learn more about where he lives, but David is blind to how self-referential his project is; he eventually publishes it to a dull thud of a reception in a local newspaper.

If this sounds tedious, it should be. But as with most of Harrison's books, there's a powerful intellect and energy pushing the story and a voice that sounds like the subconscious murmur we all hear daily about dreams, perceptions, things to do and memories. Harrison's ability to interweave bumbling comedy, mortality and the search for a meaningful life - often in one paragraph - has never been in better form. "The plot" is often the vessel built to be filled with wonderful perceptions and asides about religion and nature:

"I don't expect more from any form of religion than I do from people. Grandeur wallowing in smut."

"I heard a coyote out on a forested promontory called Lonesome Point and a single dog answering from the village. My heart fluttered when I flushed a plover from a thickish stand of beach grass. There was a dense smell of wild roses mixing with the odor of coldwater."

Like many of Harrison's protagonists, David is a conflicted pain in the butt and he knows it - "The sound of our marriage had been my subdued whine" - but this refusal to trot out armor-clad characters is why Harrison's fiction is often so powerful. These are people who, like everyone, are wounded along the way through life, but what's unique is how differently they bear the scars. For much of the book, David is reacting to life, particularly his father's legacy, rather than shaping his own.

David, and the book, would sink without the myriad strong and feisty men and women who surround him. His uncle Fred and two men who work for David's family, Clarence and Jesse, form a paternal trinity that teaches David even while he stubbornly insists on his own quagmire. "Fred liked to say that people who had nothing to do had nothing, that the long-range product of greed was emptiness."

If David listened enough, that line would have stopped his research project dead in its tracks. Fred is a soulful man, recovering alcoholic and failed minister who takes great delight in obliterating David's precocious ideas.

Clarence, half Chippewa and Finnish, and Jesse, a Mexican man from Veracruz, live far from white culture. They teach by example; Jesse possesses a Latin stoicism of epic proportions, while Clarence teaches David that something as simple as rowing a boat can save his sanity.

Harrison, a longtime student of American Indian cultures, has always recognized the strength and decorum in older cultures, whereas modern American culture, "which wishes to come to conclusions in order to rush on to what's next," often seems to be regressing at warp speed. A brief but touching scene of Chippewas mourning further underscores Harrison's point about the shallow waters that white culture often treads. It's worth considering that today's popular television shows label blatant sadism as "reality." Thankfully, David notes, "there are many worlds in the United States if you stray very far from freeways and stay away from television."

As in most of Harrison's work, the women are strong-willed people whose waters run deeper while the males thrash around in their troubled thickets.

David grinds an early marriage into dust by the sheer force of his misery and then falls in love with Vernice, a poet and free spirit with a razor-sharp eye for cutting through David's murky woes, which he's largely unable to free himself from. She tears through his isolated life like a force of nature and leaves him gasping for air in the vacuum, saddened at the loss yet more alive: "I had found a woman who could gracefully handle what I was but then I wasn't enough for her."

It's easy to get annoyed with David's feckless misery, his rampaging teenage libido, his uncertainty, but it's a small and honest price for a work that takes a magnifying glass to the mental and spiritual costs of this country's ascent at the expense of the poor and the land. David's father's fate is prophetic in this sense.

During his research project, David begins counting the stumps of trees logged near his remote cabin. One day he comes upon a massive one with roots holding it above a gulley and enough room to crawl beneath it: "I was enthralled, and there was a distinct feeling similar to when I had been baptized. I thought that this was as close as I could come to finding a church for myself in our time."

Tyler D. Johnson is a multimedia producer for the Rocky Mountain News.

Back to Top