Review by New York Times Review
AS surely as any celebrity chef touting extra virgin olive oil to the masses, the novelist and poet Jim Harrison has made a vocation out of appetite. But the hungers he addresses are as much those of the spirit as the belly, not that he makes much of a distinction between the two. For Harrison, to tuck into a slab of bacon is to feed the soul. His books glisten with love of the world, and are as grounded as Thoreau's in the particulars of American place - its rivers and thickets, its highways and taverns. Bawdily and with unrelenting gusto, Harrison's 40 years' worth of writing explores what constitutes a good life, both aesthetically and morally, on this planet. On the basis of that work, which now includes the author's ninth and most recent novel, the quietly magnificent "Returning to Earth," we can extract what might be called Harrison's Five Rules for Zestful Living. 1. Eat well, of course, avoiding the ninny diets and mincing cuisines that demonize appetite and make unthinkable a tasty snack of hog jowls. We're all going to die. Might as well enjoy a little fat along the way. (In a 1971 "false memoir" called "Wolf," written while Harrison was convalescing from a fall off a cliff, he suggested curing heartbreak by broiling a two- to three-pound porterhouse, eating it with your hands, followed by a hot bath in which you consume the best bourbon you can buy until the bottle is empty. Then sleep for a day. Ladies and gentlemen, this works.) 2. Pursue love and sex, no matter discrepancies of desire and age. Romance is worth the humbling. Doing it outdoors on stumps, in clearings and even swarmed by mosquitoes is particularly recommended. 3. Welcome animals, especially bears, ravens and wolves, into your waking and dream life. An acceptance of our common creaturedom is essential not just to the health of the planet but to our ordinary happiness. We are mere participants in natural cycles, not the kings of them. 4. Rather than lighting out for territory, we ought to try living in it. 5. And finally, love the detour. Take the longest route between two points, since the journey is the thing, a notion to which, contaminated by the Zen-fascist slogans of advertising ("just do it!"), we all pay lip service but few of us indulge. While embodying these principles in the usual fashion, "Returning to Earth" represents an interesting new wrinkle in Harrison's novelistic inquiry. Whereas his fiction generally wrestles with the nature of a good life, this novel explores the theory and practice (to steal a favorite phrase of the author's) of a good death. At 45, Donald is wasting away from a particularly aggressive case of Lou Gehrig's disease. Beloved by his family and friends, he has a heroism that consists of thoroughly being himself-a lifelong resident of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, of Chippewa-Finnish extraction, a contractor steady in his affections, given to wry understatement and proud of his capacity for work. His young buddy, K, compares Donald to a tugboat, "slow to achieve speed but with an irresistible surge of power." His son, Herald, says of him, "There aren't very many people like my father anymore." In Donald's opening monologue, a rambling family history for the benefit of his children, recorded by Cynthia, his wife and teenage sweetheart, Donald announces, "It seems I'm to leave the earth early but these things happen to people." His mind remains clear while his body becomes "desiccated road kill," as K puts it. Barely able to swallow, he must sniff rather than taste a final meal of barbecued pork ribs. However, Donald doesn't rage against the dying of the light, nor indulge in the deathbed histrionics of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich. Dying seems to strike him as no more an aberration than birds returning to their roost at dusk. His mortality evokes the sense of a man going home at twilight, of - echoing the book's lovely title - returning to earth. A luminous, sad calm pervades this novel. Donald decides to die in his own way at his chosen time. He selects a Friday in June, the summer solstice, as his last day on earth. The family drives north into Canada to the site of Donald's vision quest several years earlier. K and Herald dig the grave, into which a medicine man tosses cedar branches. Wearing a bear-claw necklace, Donald perches at the edge of the pit, where Herald injects him with a fatal concoction of drugs. The family lowers him onto the boughs, where he reclines in his last moments, his wife beside him singing in his ear. Donald's dignified death is of a piece with his life (my father, a doctor, once said that in his experience people died as they lived, in character right to the end). This regal suicide marks only the halfway point of "Returning to Earth." The novel's subject now becomes an absence; Donald's survivors must learn to negotiate the hole left in them by his departure. The book's shape is thus revealed - that of a nautilus, spiraling around and outward from Donald's death, the hollow at its center. In treating the raggedy contours of grief, Harrison shows no patience with that banality known as "closure." "There's much talk about 'healing' these days before the blood is dry on the pavement," Donald's brother-in-law, David, complains. The family members reveal their suffering in distinctive ways. Donald's daughter, Clare, with whom he was particularly close, roams the woods, looking to commune with her father's spirit, which she believes has migrated into a bear. In winter, she decides to hibernate. While sitting in a grove of chokecherry and dogwood trees, brother-in-law David also senses the dead man's arrival in the guise of a bear. He reflects how "the death of a man who was so loved seems to exhaust everyone as if they're struggling in a vacuum and not quite enough air is being pumped in for survival." Donald's widow, Cynthia, typically a wiseacre, wastes away, mostly silent, unable to eat, burdened as well by her daughter's newfound obsession with bears. The dead don't go away; they merely change forms. The suspense here is of the homeliest and shyest kind: when will the ice of grief begin to break? Throughout the final section, the mourners persevere in the half-light of the underworld, shadowed by returns - memories, animals, spirits. David and Cynthia are haunted by their recollection of their father, to whom Donald stands as polar opposite: the "man on earth least like my father," according to Cynthia. The father came back from World War II an invisibly broken man who eventually raped and impregnated the daughter of his Mexican handyman. The justice he met is perhaps too sketchily described - one of the book's few flaws - but even he is granted a measure of compassion. As a rough rule, it seems that writers fall into two camps. There are those who delight in rousting the truth from its concealment amid pieties and convention. If they must strip-mine the world to expose its hypocrisy, they will do so, even if they leave a landscape barren of hope. Then there are those writers who prefer to remythologize life on earth, finding it rich with strange congruences and possibilities. Jim Harrison is a writer of the second type, and "Returning to Earth" is his extraordinary valediction to mourning. It sharpens one's appetite for life even at its darkest. Harrison's advice for living: Welcome animals into your waking and dream life. Will Blythe is the author of "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Mortality is much on the mind of the longtime chronicler of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and in his new novel, he gives eloquent expression to death and the grieving process through the character of Donald. A man of few words, Donald suddenly finds himself compelled to spill out his family history after being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease at the age of 45. His wife, Cynthia, sits at his side, recording his words for their two children. And the stories he tells about his Chippewa-Finnish father and grandfather, the kind of people gone forever, are tales of restlessness and the hard work of mining and ranching. By contrast, his own life has been more centered, revolving around his marriage and children and his Anishnabeg religion, although he feels a powerful connection to his people through their mutual reverence for the natural world. He faces his death with the same dignity with which he has lived his life. As the narrative shifts to record how Donald's family members cope with their grieving in the year after his passing, Harrison sounds the themes he has been working out over the course of his long and prolific career, including the healing power of nature and the deep connection between the sensual and the spiritual. In the tradition of Louise Erdrich and Thomas McGuane, Harrison displays a seemingly effortless ability to present abstract issues in earthy, muscular prose. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Dying at 45 of Lou Gehrig's disease, Donald, who is Chippewa- Finnish, dictates his family story to his wife, Cynthia, who records this headlong tale for their two grown children (and also interjects). Donald's half-Chippewa great-grandfather, Clarence, set out from Minnesota in 1871 at age 13 for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In Donald's compellingly digressive telling, Clarence worked the farms and mines of the northern Midwest, and arrived in the Marquette, Mich., area 35 years later. As Donald weaves the tale of his settled life of marriage and fatherhood with that of his restless ancestors, he reveals his deep connection to an earlier, wilder time and to a kind of people who are "gone forever." The next three parts of the novel, each narrated by a different member of Donald's family, relate the story of Donald's death and its effects. While his daughter, Clare, seeks solace in Donald's Anishnabeg religion, Cynthia and her brother, David, use Donald's death to come to terms with the legacy of their alcoholic father. The rambling narrative veers away from the epic sweep of Harrison's Legends of the Fall, and Donald's reticence about the role religion plays in his life dilutes its impact on the story. But Harrison's characters speak with a gripping frankness and intimacy about their own shortcomings, and delve into their grief with keen sympathy. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Time, memory, and the land all play key roles in Harrison's remarkable new novel, set, like much of his work (e.g., True North), in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. At the center of the story is Donald, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. His dignity, presence, and approach to life, deeply influenced by Native American culture and spirituality, have had a powerful effect on his family, and the novel is largely concerned with his feelings about his impending demise and his family's reactions to it. Along with the example of his life, his legacy is a family history he dictates to his wife, Cynthia, during his last days in order to preserve what memories he can for those who remain, including children Clare and Herald. After his death, the family must come to terms with how he has affected their lives and find their own ways both to honor him and to let him go. A deeply felt meditation on life and death, nature and God, this is one of Harrison's finest works. Recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/06.]-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Meditations on mortality and quasi-incestuous desire inform this thoughtful, occasionally rambling novel. Making his fictional return to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Harrison (True North, 2004, etc.) tells the story of a death and its aftermath through four different narrators. The first is Donald, a man of mixed Chippewa-Finnish blood, who reflects on his life as he suffers through the final stages of Lou Gehrig's disease. He's a 45-year-old man of deep spirituality and profound dignity, and he's determined to assume control over his last days. The final section's narrator is Cynthia, Donald's wife, who is still trying to come to terms with his death five months later. He had enriched her life in ways that her wealthy family never could, and she had married him because he was so unlike her pedophile father. These sections are by far the novel's strongest, leaving the reader to wonder how and why Harrison chose the two narrators in the middle. One is K, a free spirit with a Mohawk haircut, who is the stepson of Cynthia's brother, David. K helps Donald through his last days, while sleeping with Donald's daughter, Clare, and lusting after her mother. Though the familial ties are too close for comfort, Cynthia occasionally feels twinges of desire for her daughter's cousin/lover as well. The weakest section of the novel is narrated by David, who hasn't been able to come to terms with unearned wealth as well as his sister has, and whose life balances good works with mental instability. It seems that their disgraced father has somehow influenced both David's character and his fate. As the last three narrators resume their lives after Donald's death, it appears to each of them that his spirit has not died with him and perhaps is now inhabiting a bear. Studying Chippewa spirituality, daughter Clare comes to believe this most strongly, which makes one wonder why she and perhaps her brother weren't narrators instead of K and David. Death remains a mystery, as Harrison explores the meaning it gives to life. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
