COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud

by Colette Bancroft

A Novel Worth Waiting For

TEN YEARS AFTER publication of his epic novel Dalva, Jim Harrison continues the story of the Northridge family in The Road Home. It is a book well worth waiting a decade for.

Harrison once again traces the web of relationships that so often provides the structure of his books: the beautiful and terrible bonds between America's native peoples and those who have all but replaced them; between humankind and the rest of nature; between men and women; between parents and children.

The Road Home is a more intimate book than Dalva. Despite its setting on the Northridge ranch in northern Nebraska, which places it in the heartland of the myth of the American West, and a time span ranging across much of a century, the new novel still is more personal in its focus. And although framed by two deaths, this is nonetheless a novel overflowing with life.

The novel's five narrators come from four generations of the Northridge family, their stories overlapping and reshaping one another, their voices unique yet linked.

The novel opens with John Northridge II, born before the turn of the last century, the son of the noble madman who was the clan's patriarch and his Lakota wife; the father of the lost scion John Wesley and the perpetual least-favorite son, Paul; the grandfather of Dalva. He is approaching his own death in his seventies, having suffered a massive heart attack after burying a beloved dog. (He begins his portion of the book with the notion, "It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.")

His memories range as far back as the deaths, days apart, of his parents when he was a boy, but they focus mainly on crucial events in his young adulthood and on Dalva's teenage pregnancy.

A brawler and drinker, a fierce father and a wildly successful trader in horses and land, Northridge is also a failed artist and a failed husband.

The first failure he blames on his own modest talents and on the death of a young friend, far more talented, in an idiotic accident during a camping trip in Mexico.

The second failure grew from his marriage not to the woman who was the love of his life but to her sister. His beloved, Adelle, is a lawyer's daughter Northridge meets when she is a teenager. They fall extravagantly in love, their unacceptable affair (Northridge is not just an uncouth would-be artist with limited prospects but half-Lakota) abetted by her mother and her sister, Neena.

Adelle is beautiful, passionate, original and barking mad. She and Northridge part after a white-hot interlude, and, for reasons he never, even as his life draws to close, understands, she drowns herself in the Missouri. He marries Neena in numb despair. She spends their marriage reading and drinking; he spends it drinking and bedding other women. Their only joint project, it seems, is two sons: reserved Paul, from childhood his mother's companion, and shining John Wesley, who will enchant everyone before he literally crashes and burns in the Korean War.

John Wesley leaves a widow, the lovely and strong-minded schoolteacher Naomi, and two daughters: Ruth, like her grandmother Neena, seems to hold herself apart from her family, but Dalva takes John Wesley's place as its star. (Her name comes from a romantic song, "Estrella Dalva," Portuguese for morning star.)

Northridge devotes himself to raising his son's children. Dalva's love affair at 15 with an angry Lakota boy named Duane Stone Horse and her subsequent pregnancy nearly tear the family apart and leave another hole in their hearts when they give up Dalva's newborn son for adoption.

Northridge's section of the novel knits these events together in the 1950s as he returns to his lost love of art in his last days and contemplates his own and the family's histories. The other four sections take place in the 1980s and revolve around the reunion of Dalva's son Nelse, now a man in his thirties, with his family -- the reunion whose first moments closed Dalva.

Nelse himself narrates one section and reveals himself a Northridge despite his resolutely middle-class suburban upbringing, both in his near obsession with the natural world and in his tendency to fall wildly in love with inappropriate people -- although his relationship with an ambitious young nude dancer works out much better than one might predict.

Two shorter sections, both of them poignant and wise, are narrated by Naomi and Paul. Since John Wesley's death three decades before, they have danced around their quiet love for one another, denying and then hiding it for many now unimportant reasons.

Naomi has acted to bring Dalva and son Nelse together at the Northridge ranch and glories in the streams of family connection finally flowing into a river: "What did I ever wish but that my family, torn apart in various ways, would come back together in this place." That reunion is genuine but as fleeting as any event in the slipstream of time the novel captures.

The last section is narrated by Dalva. So accustomed to losing those she loves most -- her father, her son, her lover, her grandfather -- she must learn how to welcome one of them back when Nelse comes into her life, and how to face death yet again when it turns out to be a heartbreakingly brief reunion.

Harrison interweaves his narrators' stories with surpassing skill, moving among the five characters and the events of almost a century as fluidly as a bird moves among the branches of a tree.

Always, the story is grounded in vivid observation of the physical world, the sound of birdsong and the quirks of dogs, the details of cooking and weather and lovemaking and wildflowers, the world in which redemption is found.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

Colette's List 13: Rick Harsch: Rust Belt Noir

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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