There are some things you can count on in virtually any novel by Jim Harrison. A Northern Michigan setting, saintly Indians, working-class Scandinavians who have taken to drink in defense against an unfair society, over-sexed males and their long-suffering but understanding women, some lyrical descriptions of the outdoors and mouth-watering renderings of various meals, often cooked over open fires. Characters sometimes communicate with bears and other animals. Dogs are more intelligent than most humans. The ingredients may be varied somewhat but those who love Jim Harrison and look forward to his books will know what I mean.
Of course, Harrison isn’t the only writer who works and reworks the same territory. Think John Updike, Philip Roth or even Anne Tyler. Jane Austen didn’t vary far from her patch of English soil. There’s a problem with sameness and predictability but a real artist can always make it seem new. Harrison doesn’t always, but it’s rare to read anything he writes that isn’t moving and insightful in places, even if in “Returning to Earth,” the places are few and far between.
An unpromising premise
“Returning to Earth” starts from a rather unpromising premise. The hero, a heroic Finnish/Indian named Donald, is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) so we know up front that the novel isn’t going to head in a good direction, even if death in the hands of an author like Harrison is always going to be self-affirming, especially if celebrated in the American Indian way.
The first section of the book is taken up with Donald’s recollections of a life lived hard with italicized interjections by his helpmate Cynthia who cares for him. There are descriptions of a great deal of eating, drinking and consorting with women, some of whom reappear at his death bed. Finally, Donald dies, and the whole family heads north to Canada to bury him, as he wished, in what we’re told is the Chippewa way, naked in an unmarked grave where he once hunted. Presumably the Great Spirit will find him there and take him to a better place.
The journey north is one of the more entertaining parts of the book what with digging the grave deep enough, outwitting the Canadian border patrol and getting everyone in place to share deep thoughts of life and death. After this, however, we’re left with narratives from various family members, largely memories of Donald, to fill the rest of this overlong book.
Some of the characters are carry-overs from earlier novels, like “The Day He Didn’t Die,” but those unfamiliar with the other books may occasionally feel a bit at sea with references to people like Donald’s ne’er-do-well father who don’t actually appear in this novel. Moreover, Harrison’s method is a kind of stream-of-consciousness mélange with each character making observations about any number of things, some of which are fascinating while others are mundane in the extreme. With Harrison, you buy the package.
At the same time, lyricism excuses a multitude of sins, and Harrison has lyricism covered, as in this passage: “It was hot in late May and the air conditioner worked poorly so that after a good dinner of a whole roasted fish we pulled the mattress out onto the deck … I got us chairs and we sat there watching the lights on the tiny boats far out in the harbor fishing for snapper in the night. As the thunderstorm got closer the boats started heading in … There were black birds on the cornice and in palm trees nearby that I later determined to be great-tailed grackles.”
A taste for eccentric detail
Here and elsewhere you hear echoes of Hemingway and that’s not surprising. Alas, too often in this novel, Harrison indulges a taste for eccentric detail in the absence of any noticeable plot. Another problem is that, with all the paeans of praise for Native Americans and the working class, none of the characters in “Returning to Earth” seems to have what one might call regular jobs and instead live off the ill-gotten gains of their robber-baron patriarch, traveling here and there, staying at luxurious hotels, eating well and all the while excoriating the rich.
Of course it’s always amusing to take shots at those who are at the same time looking down their noses at us, but ultimately it becomes tiresome since Harrison’s heroes and villains are almost always the same, book after book. “Returning to Earth” seems to run out of gas about two-thirds of the way through the narrative, and when, in the end, Cynthia and Donald’s daughter becomes convinced that he’s turned into a bear and is communicating with them, what is probably meant to be a moving metaphor for death in life becomes instead merely silly. This is too bad since there is much in Harrison’s writing to admire and to enjoy, but to his legion of fans, the failings of this novel probably won’t matter.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University.
—————————————-
Returning to Earth
By Jim Harrison
Grove Press, 280 pages, $24
