Love’s powerful pull

Jim HARRISON’S “True North” opens with a virtuosic one-page prologue that seems straight out of a dream: A rowboat drifts off the coast of Veracruz. An old man is slumped at the stern, his hands severed at the wrists, the stumps bound with duct tape. A younger man on board wonders what to do. He’s missing a thumb. He has just one oar and can only drift with the current. A turtle swims by. Eventually, in a gesture of mercy, the young man pushes the old man overboard. He thinks: “What a strange way to say goodbye to your father.”

Few writers could set such a scene and then walk away from it, but Harrison does. Turn the page and “True North” opens as a sprawling family epic set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, about as far away from the tropics as you can get. “My name is David Burkett,” it begins. “I’m actually the fourth in a line of David Burketts beginning in the 1860s when my great grandfather emigrated from Cornwall, England, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan....” Creating powerful juxtapositions is Harrison’s trademark, and his opening ploy -- disorienting, suggestive, violent in its repose; everything we’ve come to expect from his fiction -- pays off magnificently. By the time the scene off the coast of Veracruz reappears verbatim almost 400 pages later, it is as satisfying as it is shocking.

When “True North” was still a work in progress, Harrison described the plot as a “tight little knot” combining greed, sex and religion. The task of untying that knot has fallen to the novel’s narrator, scion of a family of timber barons, who looks back on three decades of trying. When we first meet him, David Burkett is a hormonal teenager lurching into adulthood circa 1965, in a hothouse environment made all the more fervid by his father’s philandering, his mother’s pill-popping, the unbridled antics of his sister and the seductiveness of her friend Laurie. “When you’re sixteen,” David recalls, “your world is small and events easily conspire to make it even smaller. You have glimpses of greater dimensions but this perception easily retracts.”

Lonely, horny, smart and sensitive, David is part Holden Caulfield, part Stephen Dedalus -- a young man who has exchanged privilege for guilt. He knows that his work is to find a place in the world, but the finding isn’t easy. His girlfriends’ fathers don’t trust him; his best friend writes him off as a “rich kid.” Loneliness becomes depression, and depression borders on suicide. Giving the story to so lost a narrator is a risk for Harrison. David’s solipsistic bent might grow wearisome, were it not that Harrison’s concern for him is so convincing. One evening, when David and Laurie make love on a Lake Superior beach by the light of an electrical storm, David concedes a oneness with the universe, a connectedness he has never known. What sounds like an epiphany ripe for mockery is all the more touching for its comic sincerity as Harrison cuts between the storm, the sex and David’s tortured thoughts.

Harrison’s title, “True North,” refers to an idealized point on the compass that is perverted by magnetic north -- an appropriate trope for David, whose bearings are painfully skewed by his father: “[I]f you saw him in a bank or airport you’d think there’s a man who knows what he’s doing, always well groomed and tailored ... while inside there was only a decayed question mark, a living grave soaked with booze and desires so errant that all but a few people wished to run from him.”

As much as he may want to, David can’t run. His father’s “errant desires” (a proclivity for underage girls) and the Burkett family’s generational sins have an erotic charge that drives the plot, and when the father is caught with the 12-year-old daughter of his longtime aide, Jesse, the family explodes. All that remains for David is to find out “what went wrong with my family, or find out if it was ever right in the first place beginning with those big eyed, jut-jawed portraits in my father’s den.” Harrison’s picture of old money, of a debauched lineage, of the sins of the fathers, is not new, but he is especially rigorous in his regard.

Let Longfellow and Hemingway sentimentalize and mythologize its dark beauty; if ever there was a cursed land, it was the Upper Peninsula. In the 1840s, when surveyors worked their way through the vast wilderness, they were quickly thrown off by the wild fluctuations of their compasses, caused by large deposits of iron ore beneath their feet. The discovery hastened the industrialization of the entire continent, and by the time the 20th century arrived this slip of land lay in waste.

David embarks on writing a book -- what his uncle calls in mocking affection a “History of America” -- that will survey the last 150 years on the peninsula, a period that saw lofty 300-year-old stands of white pine and hardwoods felled to become shoring in mine shafts, fuel for furnaces, lumber for railroad ties and the architecture of distant cities. But while the Burketts grew rich, they also grew hollow.

As David explores the peninsula, wandering from fishing cabins to streams and into solitude, Harrison considers the mystical, religious and aesthetic character of the land. David’s journey takes him through marriage and divorce to simple canine companionship. One afternoon, while exploring near the village of Grand Marais, he discovers the grandest collection of white pine stumps he has ever seen. The largest straddles a gully, and he crawls beneath it: “I was enthralled,” he says, “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.”

The balm is short-lived. David’s attempts to repudiate his family only drive him closer to the source of his pain. In trying to live a life unlike his father’s, he has lost himself; and forgiveness -- not excusing the offender but overcoming the tyranny of the offender -- is his only recourse. Slowly, the novel turns on the troubled association between his father and Jesse, the aide who remained faithful even after his daughter was violated.

Harrison may well have started out to write a book about greed, sex and religion, but what he has given us is a story about love and forgiveness and the trials they entail. For all the hype about this writer’s machismo, a reputation that has dogged him from the early days of his career, Harrison consistently commands our attention for his humanity and his tenderness. That he can create such tension in the process -- a tension not released until the last page -- and in the end forge such violence shows his skill as a storyteller and makes “True North” a great achievement.

Is the past ever really past? In “True North” this question, the bane and fodder of American novelists since Hawthorne, is played for all it’s worth. Here lies the great paradox of American life: In a country created on the premise of escape and reinvention, there is no real freedom, and the dreams of one generation are often a curse for the next. Such is the peril of being an American: The more we understand the past, the more we are haunted by what can never be. Our lives are gripped by forces we only dimly understand. The real effort, Harrison implies, is to act in spite of those forces, correct for deviance and find our own true north. *