Reviews

If the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, what should a son do to provide moral recompense? In Harrison's earnest, initially riveting new novel, narrator David Burkett decides as a teenager in the 1960s that he must rectify the ecological damage done to his beloved Upper Peninsula area of Michigan by his rapacious timber baron ancestors. More immediately, he vows to tell the world about the rapes and abuses committed by his alcoholic father, a charismatic Yale graduate with an egregious sense of entitlement. After a foray into organized religion, David finds spiritual solace in the stark natural world, described by Harrison in soaring prose. Unable to sustain emotional connection with any woman other than his older sister, David has brief liaisons with four women, but he feels more pain over the death of his dog than of his marriage. Meanwhile, he spends decades working on a history of his despised family, only to realize that he is a dud as a writer. By this time, he's in his late 30s, a man who has never achieved maturity because his father hangs like an albatross around his neck. A master of surprise endings (Dalva, etc.), Harrison pulls off a bravura climax when David attempts to reconcile with his feckless father. By this time, though, the reader may have tired of the monochromatic narrative, composed mainly of David's anguished introspection and depressed dreams. Still, Harrison's tragic sense of history and his ironic insight into the depravities of human nature are as potent as ever and bring deeper meaning to his (eventually) redemptive tale. Agent, Bob Dattila at Phoenix Literary Agency. (May) Forecast: Like his well-received memoir, Off to the Side, this meaty novel gives Harrison-screenwriter, food critic, journalist and prolific novelist-the room to explore his native Michigan and its complicated citizens in rich and lengthy detail. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Narrator David Burkett gets right to the point on the first page of this book, proclaiming "My father was so purely awful that he was a public joke in our area." And truly the man is a monster: he rides roughshod over his family, rapes the daughter of his faithful valet, sells off a cabin willed to David by a black-sheep uncle, and presides over a family logging firm that has been despoiling Michigan's Upper Peninsula for decades. David can't quite stand up to him, though he begins avidly researching his family's misdeeds; his neurasthenic mother merely drifts about. His sister, Cynthia, is the only one with any gumption, cheekily telling off her dad while getting pregnant by the mixed-blood Finnish-Chippewa son of the family gardener (and this is the not-quite-liberated mid-Sixties, for goodness' sake). One wishes that Cynthia had narrated, for perhaps she could have redeemed this tale. David's account of his soul searching and various sexual grapplings is strangely flat and listless, which is surprising, given Harrison's reputation for acute and well-rendered insight in his numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (e.g., The Road Home). There will, however, be definite interest where Harrison is popular.-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.