The Road Home [Hardcover]

Jim Harrison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1998

The sequel to Harrison's bestselling "Dalva", written ten years ago, and a magnificent story of the American West, "The Road Home" tells the story of a family drenched in suffering and joy, imbued with fierce independence and love, rooted in the Nebraska soil and intertwined with the destiny of whites and Native Americans.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With his 1988 novel, Dalva, Jim Harrison commenced an epic of the American Midwest--or more specifically, the Nebraska sandhills. In The Road Home his eponymous heroine returns in search of the son she abandoned 30 years before, only to find herself more deeply enmeshed than ever in the coils of the family romance. (Quite literally, by the way: the father of Dalva's son was her half-brother.) Now, a decade later, Harrison continues her story in The Road Home. Ranging over an entire century, this second installment encompasses both Dalva's ancestry and her valedictory impulses in the face of death, circa 1987.

As he did in the earlier book, the author passes the narrative baton from one character to another. There are five highly individual voices at work, including not only Dalva's own but that of her grandfather, mother, and son. This makes for a dense, Rashomon-like structure, in which events are revisited by one generation after another and truth is a relative thing--in every sense of the word. Harrison leavens this spiraling saga with splendid passages about everything from the Lakota Sioux to bird hunting, from the complexities of art to the simplicities of the wandering life: "There's a sweet, vaguely scary feeling in disappearance," notes Dalva's son, Nelse. And as always, the author can convey both the surprising beauty of a landscape and an almost suffocating sense of its abundance. "It is neither more nor less endurable in May," says Dalva of the lilac-encircled family cemetery, "when it is enshrouded by the heavy-scented purple and white flowers, a smell that on warm evenings is so dense as to be almost visible.... The sound of the crickets arrived one by one until they were a chorus, and if you walked down the gravel road toward the Niobrara the frogs from the lower, marshy areas were so loud as to be barely endurable." --Bob Brandeis

From Publishers Weekly

A decade after the stunning Dalva, Harrison returns to the Northridge family of Nebraska in a saga that spans three generations of stoic loss, intermittent happiness and a healing proximity to the natural world. Tough old patriarch John Northridge narrates the first and strongest section, an apologia for the life he has led, first as a youth between two cultures (he is the son of a white father and a Lakota Sioux mother), then as a sensitive art student and, for most of his life, as a formidable rancher and cattle farmer, husband, father and grandfather. Northridge's life has paralleled the development of the Great Plains, and his intimate connection with the land humanizes his often cruel behavior to his wife, who left him, and his surviving son, Paul (his favorite son, Dalva's father, was killed in the Korean war). Other narrators are nomadic Nelse, the son Dalva gave up for adoption when she was 15, who finds her when he is 30; Naomi, Dalva's mother; Paul; and the still headstrong Dalva herself. As one expects of Harrison, the characters all share an instinctive love for the their native landscape and for the horses, dogs and birds that evoke their most treasured memories. With an unforced lucidity, the novel explores the tension between the Native American and white cultures, the effects of art and poetry on one's conception of existence and the very purpose of existence viewed from "the grace of the divinely ordinary" life. Two miscalculations flaw the novel. One is the sameness of the narrative voice, with all the characters, male and female, speaking in the same indistinguishable Midwestern cadences. The other is that, in attempting to reflect the quality of Nebraskan life, Harrison lets his characters describe their mundane experiences in meticulous but often pedestrian detail. While he thus stitches a fabric of impressive strength and depth, the narrative sometimes becomes tedious. Yet readers who let themselves be captured by the novel's breadth?from the late 1800s to 1987?and the memorable depictions of stalwart people striving to understand their destinies, will be rewarded by a deep and nourishing story.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 446 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1st edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871137240
• ISBN-13: 978-0871137241
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #734,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Surprising Find, November 13, 2000

By 

vortexreader - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Road Home (Paperback)

I was completely surprised by the quality of this novel. I expected something along the lines of the only other work I have read by Jim Harrison,'Legend of the Falls'. While 'The Road Home' has some cross references to that earlier, slighter work, it is a substantially greater novel. The characters are so well defined they feel like relatives, people you have known for a lifetime. Harrison manages to evoke so much compassion for his characters that they are truly three dimensional, sometimes threatening to jump right off the page. Harrison's description of the American West is convincing and detailed (and fascinating to a reader like myself from another country). I recommend this work without reservation...as a reader of Harrison you can rest assured you are in the hands of an author who knows his craft, know his characters and story and knows how not to disappoint his readers.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Road less Traveled, July 8, 2002

By 

Keith Moore (Oxford, MS United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Road Home (Paperback)

There is no writer in the world that can write like Harrison. Look, I have read every book by Faulkner, Hemingway, Larry Brown, Rick Bass, and Cormac McCarthy; some three times.And not one story has the poetry, humanity, sex, Spirituality,and reality ,mixed with humor and philosophy of Jim Harrison at his best. I know this is saying a great deal. But the thing is, I've got to tell it like it is. Of course many will disagree. Read this story, "The Road Home", then read "Dalva", then read "The Road Home" again. The read "Light in August" and "Joe, "Winter", and "The Crossing". And then read "A Woman Lit By Fireflies". Then you write a review.

Enjoy.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible Experience, September 2, 2002

By 

Jill M. Eichner "jillme" (VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Road Home (Paperback)

After discussing this book with several other literature-lovers, I've found that you either really love this book or you're so-so on it. Women love it more than men, which surprised me, but then, I'm a woman and really loved it and don't see how you can't. But I also love nature, which is BIG in Harrison, and psychological depth, and romance, and family ties, and it's all there.