True North

by Jim Harrison

Book Overview

An epic tale that pits a son against the legacy of his family's desecration of the earth, and his own father's more personal violations, Jim Harrison's True North is a beautiful and moving novel that speaks to the territory in our hearts that calls us back to our roots. The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802142060
• ISBN13: 9780802142061
• Release Date: July 2005
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A difficult and unrewarding read

True North Jim Harrison 4 Stars It's all typical Harrison, too formulaic, too predictable. Soon as you start reading you can guarantee that Christianity will be mocked, female characters will be easy sexual marks two pages after being introduced, sexual trysts are as common and forgotten as meals served, and every character exhibiting virtue will undoubtedly be a Native American. Yes, Harrison can take you into the woods as well as any writer, including Hemingway, who Harrison jabs at around mid way through the novel. If you want to cast a fly fishing rod across a river, make love inside a giant white birch stump, or crawl through coyote dung, Harrison's your kind of writer. However, if you need to see redeeming qualities in the characters you are going to spend 386 pages with, don't count on it with this work. This might be the most dysfunctional lot since the ensemble of the Seinfield sitcom. It took seven months for me to read "True North", as I fought and fought myself to finish, feeling obligated by Harrison's reputation and celebrity status and my appreciation of his earlier works. After my hopes were dashed with Vernice, David's love interest introduced halfway through the narrative, my disgust and disdain for the novel grew to the point I had to let it sit for a few weeks again. When Vernice so flippantly tells David's Uncle Fred, a man she's met only once and probably is twice her age, "Your nephew is a fine young man except that he wants to ____ all the time," I had enough. I thought to myself, isn't there going to be any one who is truly good or realistic within the confines of this book? It could be me but I can't recall in my fifty years any female, young or old, speaking to me in such a caddy way. And yes there's significance in the rape of Vera, and Fred's conversion to Zen Buddhism, the liberated humanism of Vernice, and of course, David's long drawn out symbolic confession. The odyssey ends with apologies to Vera; a research project that condemns his father and his Anglo lineage publicly and the gruesome and cruel murder of his father for all his evil transgressions. In the end, without a hint of remorse, all that's left is the sister and brother, again like children, digging a hole in the sand to bury the ashes and fragmented bones of their mother. Thus, the cycle of life continues. When I finished the novel, outside of the dog-named Carla, I was left feeling empty about any of the other characters in the book. The pages are filled with nothing but drunks, embezzlers, whores, unfaithful spouses, who at any juncture, can showcase their sex organs and instantly gratify each other without a worry in the world. There's such a preoccupation with the male and female genitalia in this book; the mention of it alone could fill a couple of thick chapters. Though Harrison is the consummate craftsman, a writer of his stature needs to deliver more. As in any great work of literature, at least one character has to express our better

Gritty and consuming...Harrison's prose, imagery, and characters draw you in and stick in your mind

I purchased "Returning to Earth" simultaneously after a long absence of Harrison reading. Read "True North" first. "David" is the heir to a family that exploited Michigan's timber and mineral wealth and the novel covers his long effort to write of his family history, which he ultimately self-publishes in a few UP newspapers, but that matters only as one of numerous storylines within. Written from David's self-indulgent and overly critical perspective of his family history, Harrison weaves a compelling and consuming tale of David's dysfunctional family, his wives and lovers, the exploited timberland surrounding Lake Superior, and for good measure David's dog, Carla. Honestly, I read it in two days and called two of my friends who are Harrison fans. Wonderful.

A Strange but Intoxicating Journey to Delayed Adulthood

Jim Harrison is a writer's writer and a reader's writer and quite simply one of the best yarn spinners writing today. TRUE NORTH is a fine work of fiction that not only tells an intensely interesting story, it also exudes some of the more poetic prose and contemplative spiritual psychology that touches an audience of readers longing for books about environmentalism, about contemporary sexuality, about dysfunctional families, and about seeking sanity in a world apparently bent on squashing it. Briefly, this is the story of David Burkett, born to Robber Barons in the Upper Penisula of Michigan who gained their wealth at the expense of destroying the timber lands which in turn deprived the Native Americans of their space and created a desecration of the land through logging and mining that permanently altered the target of their greed. But David wants revenge on his family's history, a history which includes his immediate family - a mother so lost in pills and alcohol and high society that she is unavailable, a father who is also an alcoholic, a pedophile, and in general a detestable boor who buys his way out of recurring run-ins with the law for raping young girls only to spend and squander the family fortune for his insatiable hedonism, and a sister Cynthia who, though younger than David, is brassy enough to escape this detestable family and run off with a half breed to disgrace the family she loathes. David attempts to avoid his genetic disposition by committing to right wing religion, but eventually fails in that and finds himself lusting after every female he encounters - never finding love, but never really knowing how to love. He finally decides his only salvation is to write a book that tells the public the truth about the environmental murderers of his family and his attempts to accomplish this mission fill the pages of this wondrous novel. How he finally arrives at a stage of self-realization and leaves his obsession with destroying the influence of his family's influence to discover that wearing the sins of his father around his neck has prevented him from looking up and ahead and seeing the beauty of nature and the connection with the meaning of life that this allows is the remarkable journey Harrison creates. This story is never less than interesting and absorbing as a novel, but it is in the language of writing that Jim Harrison excels. His style includes free-association of sometimes a dozen thoughts and memories and observations in one paragraph. But he never loses us as readers. At times he stops for poetic words and the reader is strongly tempted to underline favorite passages as poems for re-reading later. "When you're sixteen your world is small and events easily conspire to make it even smaller. You have glimpses of greater dimensions but this perception easily retracts. Eros enlivens another world but not the simple world of masturbatory trance...Naturally during the act of love you're undisturbed by reality, a gra

A Son's Redemption Journey through Humorville

First of all, let say that I don't kno what book some of thesereviewers read. Esp. Publishers Weekly, Booklist,"Wendy" and "AShaggy Oedipus Joke" (don't you just love it, when someone uses jaded freudian jargon to hide behind??). It must not have been the same novel I read and loved. In each case, it seemed to say more about the reviewer than the book!! So, the novel: I found it exhilirating, fascinating, stretching how Harrison wove his tale of fathers and sons, and the emotional, psychological journey most of us have to take. And his use of current issues (like nuanced references to the DaVinci Code stirrings), theology, and especially right-wing christians were a scream (of course, unless you happen to be one.) Not to mention, his forays into sex. All in all, a masterpiece and long-awaited. It just took him about 20 years, (which proves its worth.)