True North [Hardcover]

Jim Harrison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 8, 2004

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, 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 sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at fourteen by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes to adulthood, he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers' rapacious destruction of the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as with the working people who made their wealth possible. In the story of the Burketts, Jim Harrison has given us a family tragedy of betrayal and amends, joy and grief, and justice for the worst of our sins. True North is a bravura performance from one of our finest writers, accomplished with deep humanity, humor, and redemptive soul.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

“True North,” says the Boston Globe, “has its moments,” which sums up general reaction to this novel. Almost everyone found something to like, be it the passionate narration or the novel’s strong sense of place. However, most reviewers also found serious flaws. While some praised Harrison’s writing, a few pointed out its sloppiness. And nearly all were frustrated with the novel’s structure, complaining that Harrison reveals key events too early and allows the story to founder as Burkett painstakingly searches his soul. Harrison has called American readers “grotesquely plot-oriented,” and those who fit this description should avoid his newest novel. But for those who don’t mind a long walk through the woods, there’s True North.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 388 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st edition (April 8, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117732
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117731
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #410,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Story!, August 3, 2004

By 

Lori Paris "author and book lover" (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: True North (Hardcover)

True North is riveting reading. I must admit I was not familiar with the author, Jim Harrison, until I read a book review in the L.A. Times about True North. The review was so well written, I couldn't wait to buy the book. As soon as I started reading it, I was so pleased to discover a new (to me) author whose writing is so rich and captivating.

I was fascinated with the depiction of this severly dysfunctional family as seen through the eyes of the central character, David Burke. All the characters, whether you like them or not (and there is one you should detest), are multi-dimensional and complex. David grows up with parents who are role models for what not to be, and a fiesty younger sister who turns out to be the most stable and rational member of the entire family. Over a period of decades, we witness David's struggle with his family's legacy, and watch how it shapes not only his romantic relationships, but his sense of right and wrong. David's journey is not an easy one as he searches for the meaning of his own life while trying to reconcile the sins of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. What is it that he is really looking for? Justice or peace? Read this outstanding book and find out.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Strange but Intoxicating Journey to Delayed Adulthood, October 2, 2004

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: True North (Hardcover)

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 grace note I also found in trout fishing, but then lovemaking and fishing don't manage to dominate your life like you wished they could." "[Laurie] didn't so much die as withdraw, and her body under the sheet was still but there was an aura of departure that made me feel cold despite the warm room. Instead of pressing the button to call a nurse I listened to an aspect of emptiness I hadn't heard before as if her passing had stopped all other sound....When it was over I had nothing left about which to draw conclusions. My incomprehension was total. She was there and then she wasn't and though I understood the biological fact of death the whole ballooned outward from the mute sum of the parts." "...I recalled how a wonderfully cynical history professor had pointed out that when we came to America we were always discovering something like the source of the Mississippi that the Natives were already well aware of, but then our attitude to the Natives was not unlike Hitler's attitude toward the Jews. And the history of my family was not unlike the history of he United States. We were among the leading conquerors of a region and when we had thoroughly depleted its main resources we mythologized our destruction." "(Boating) With each stroke I'd think of something, say how all religions seemed to imitate and sacrifice themselves to temporal powers thus allowing greed to wrap itself in a semi-holy mantle, then after each strong stroke there was a long glide when I'd become utterly submerged in the sheer 'thingness' of life around me and be incapable of thought let alone comprehension: lake, water, sky, bird, my feet, my breathing." "I kept thinking that throughout the world there are sons and daughters with distorted wishes for what their parents should be, or hopeless wishes for what their parents should have been. Some of the most critical of us are afflicted with a paralysis over this, our brains too active with resentment to solidify function....My reaction had nothing to do with anger or curiosity but a mute acceptance of the human condition, the brain spinning tales before which we are quite helpless."

But one could continue quoting Harrison's writing and never touch on the moments of hilarity, of pathos, of tenderness, of unimaginable cruelty, all of which are blended in this amazing story. This is a novel to read again - like returning to your childhood to see if it really is what you remembered, or imagined. Highly recommended reading.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars True North bears careful reading, but bears rewards, August 12, 2005

By 

Matti (Academia, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: True North (Hardcover)

Though I can sympathize with them, the reviewers that complain about Harrison's rambling style and lack of focus in True North are unfortunately missing the point of the book. Those that stick with it will be generously rewarded.

This is first and foremost a novel of self-discovery and self-definition. Unfortunately, such journeys are not packaged neatly into a 3:15 song, a 90 minute movie, or 250 page tightly plotted novel (if someone knows the trick of discovering one's self in such a fashion, please post). And that's the poorly-kept secret of this book: a person's journey to find and perhaps save himself is a rambling, chaotic, often incoherent one and it's not going to fit well into our 20th/21st century indoctrinated idea of plot or novel.

In the hands of almost anyone else, such an approach would turn into a plodding, stumbling account of banalities, of burnt breakfasts and waiting in doctor's offices. This is not the case in True North. Harrison uses his wit, poetic training, and incredible clarity of observation to produce a wonderful inside view of David Burkett's struggle to make sense of his own life's story.

For those that couldn't stick with it, I suggest you put down your latest Dan Brown pablum and try True North again, this time with patience.