"Returning to Earth" | In grief, giving family wings

"Returning to Earth"
by Jim Harrison
Grove, 280 pp., $24

Jim Harrison, already a force of nature in American letters, seems to carve out new emotional territory with each book. His 2004 novel "True North" examined the paralyzing cost to a family torn apart by the alcoholism and moral recklessness of a war-damaged father. The characters were forced to draw on their deepest reserves of dignity and compassion to see their way through the tragedy and its aftermath. Few quite succeeded.

It may speak to Harrison's own compassion for his creations that his newest novel, "Returning to Earth," revisits those same characters.

The setting is still Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula, but it is now some 30 years later. Donald, a rambunctious teen at the time of "True North," is now middle-age and stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease. A vigorous lifetime of working and exploring upper Michigan's wilder landscapes has given way to housebound reflection.

An intimate circle of family and friends, including Donald's wife, Cynthia (whom he rescued as a teen from the ruins of her family), and their two grown children, have gathered to see Donald through his last days. Their interwoven stories, told through four first-person narratives, explore the intimacies of some remarkable lives. Harrison's trademark prose, lyric and fluid, seamlessly melds perceptions, memories and dreams to capture his characters' inner lives. The narratives in turn pull readers into the underlying depths and currents of this tale with the quiet force of a river.

"Returning to Earth" is a watershed work for Harrison. More than his earlier fiction, it examines the powers of love and commitment to reconcile loss and death, and to heal wounds borne for generations.

Like a number of Harrison's earlier characters, Donald is a mixed-blood Indian, a Finn-Chippewa with a foot, as he says, in both worlds. A thoughtful but unlettered building contractor, he decides in his final weeks to pass on his family history to his wife, Cynthia, and their two children. Cynthia has turned her back on her own corrupt and tragic family history. She has raised their children with respect for their father's traditional — and ultimately saner — approach to life.

Harrison's fiction has always displayed an unsentimental respect for Native American history, custom and belief. His books are also deeply rooted in place, with keen attention paid to the natural world and its inhabitants. Like their author, his characters are frequently engaged with nature: fishing, gathering, working or wandering in the woods.

Donald and his extended family are no different. The family decides to help Donald end his life at the place of his choosing, a hillside overlooking Lake Superior where he had previously fasted for three days, caught a glimpse of his coming illness, and come to a kind of understanding and acceptance.

Acceptance is more difficult for those around him. His daughter Clare, devoted to her father, is unable to reconcile herself to Donald's premature illness and death. In desperation she turns to her father's Indian cultural practices, guided by his old teacher and leaving her family, friends and even her lover at a loss as to how to help her.

Ultimately she and they find their way through their current hardship. In the process, they come to terms with a shared past that hangs over the family like a curse.

Reflecting on his time alone on the hillside, Donald observes, "It was a gift indeed to see all sides of everything at once." In "Returning to Earth," Harrison offers a similar view of death and redemption that is as earthbound and humble as it is spiritual and profound.

Olympic Peninsula author Tim McNulty's most recent book of poems is "Through High Still Air."