The Road Home

I've been reading a lot of Harrison lately ( in fact ,nearly all his prose) and I must say that this is the best of the bunch. There are times when I was quite simply awed by the emotion he can evoke. While the beginning of the book is better than the ending( I cant say I was too crazy about some of the later characters) this is Harrison at the the height of his powers, which can be substantial ! At his finest Harrison rivals any American writer.

After discussing this book with several other literature-lovers, I've found that you either really love this book or you're so-so on it. Women love it more than men, which surprised me, but then, I'm a woman and really loved it and don't see how you can't. But I also love nature, which is BIG in Harrison, and psychological depth, and romance, and family ties, and it's all there.

The intimacy of the human experience provided in this book is to be savored.

After waiting for so many years for the next Harrison and worrying that he was through, now comes this gem. The Road Home is so dense and rich, with such fine descriptive language from this poet, I found myself rereading passage after passage. Harrison so beautifully and intimately describes the natural world that it is palpable. And, ah, the human heart, with both its humming body heat and its capacity for selflessness! Harrison knows it and can tell it like no other, with the possible exception of Andre Dubus. One must believe Harrison has lived it. Paul's kiss bestowed on his dying father, and Nelse's appearance from the side of the road to kiss his mother good-bye one more time, are simple and understated acts that go straight to the heart and the tear ducts. Dalva's expanding and redundant list of favorite things in her dwindling life leaves one wishing for such insight and grace in one's own life at the end. Nature writing, a wealth of historical, ethnic, and cultural observations, and the aethetic of the graphic arts enrich this novel. But what keeps the pages turning are the insights into the human condition and the mature recognition of the subjective. The technique of using five narrators to parcel out the same family history keeps the reader hurrying along to find the next narrator's take on a given event, and it made this reader crave renditions from other characters. Oh, to spend some time in Lundquist's mind! One who is prone to assuming that the world and its living components can be understood and summarized through observation and the application of taxonomies, as Nelse and Paul are wont to do, will perhaps feel less assured about that after seeing, for instance, old man Northridge from his angle and several others. The "monster" who felt a failure as the artist manque, who never got over the loss of his son, and who loved his granddaughter Dalva with such intensity and commitment, cannot be so easily categorized.Jim Harrison has given us another beauty of a novel that left this reader saying, "Thank you, thank you" at the end.

One must get into this book and have the time and sacred space in which to dwell in it. It is a book of everything the author registered and one way or another everything appears. This is to our delight, and, one might add, we expect and look for further books and poems from Jim Harrison. That said, this book is fullsome beyond that of the book to which it is a prequel, Dalva. A presentation of life in the plains area, it is necessarily filled with birdlore and nature. Nevertheless, only this author could have written it. Only he could have known that one does not speak to dogs with irony or that looking back on one's youthful diaries of Europe yields little of interest because the subject lacked the skill of a Henry James. Everywhere one reads there are lines, and ideas, of breathtaking suddenness.