This novel, exploring many of the same characters as those in his nine-years-earlier novel Delva, reflects changes in its author’s perspective from that decade of living. His interest in death is stronger and his sense of death’s inevitability. At the same time the horror of death has weakened, leaving in its place more the sense that it is a natural part of life and curiosity of what not being will be like.
Perspective interests Harrison. Frequently in both his novels and his novellas he tells his story in more than one character’s first person voice, both retelling material already presented by a predecessor but with that different point of view or pushing along the narrative in a different voice and different set of emotions, modes of thought, and reaction patterns.
In Dalva, largely told by its title character he also let Michael narrate a portion of the story. In The Road Home five characters share in telling the story. My favorite is Dalva’s grandfather, John Wesley Northridge II, to whom Harrison gives 150 pages of his 446 page novel. What I especially enjoyed about this character was the feeling of his mellow emotional balance and affectionate regard for many of those in his life. Imagine my surprise on reading how many other characters who had known him as a young man remember him as a sort of monster rogue, over riding any who opposed him, appropriating both land and lives when it suited him, and using his great physical strength to rule and punish as his volatile temper flared. The difference between the young and old John Wesley Northridge II came from his devastation at the loss of his favorite son in the Korean War.
I’m still wondering whether such a sudden complete reversal is possible since I’ve always been struck by how slowly and slightly the personality changes with time and event, even when considerable effort pushes for change. I would give a pretty to read the narration of some of the story by the young John Wesley Northridge II, a compliment to Harrison’s skill in character development.
The second part of the novel, 131 pages, belong to Nelse, Dalva’s illegitimate son, a young man after his author’s heart, who hates cities, human greed, confinement in career or place, and relishes what’s left of the wilderness, preferring to sleep under stars to ceilings, and to eat food he has caught himself—especially trout—to anything in a restaurant. He’s one of these what-you-see-is-what-you-get people, and his journal is a delight:
I was pretty sure I felt the earth moving beneath my back. The sensation happened several times within an hour or so. The stars were wiggling a bit and intermittently blurred, my vision addled by fever: Virgo with Spica, Leo and Regulus, Bootes less defined except by overwhelming Arcturus.
Maybe I did and maybe it was an illusion. I can’t say much for the difference which is a fine point we primates are always trying to transcend. It isn’t a case study and neither am I….
Not surprisingly, considering his youth, Nelse falls in love with a determined bang despite his differing and conflicting differences in personality and life style preferences from those of his nubile and winsome J.M. Much of his section is devoted to careful and penetrating consideration of this conflict, not taking sides but presenting each of the young people’s case fairly.
J.M. wanted to drive my truck so I simply sat there, a rare thing in my solo career. I developed a lump in my throat just looking at her legs and the way her hem hiked further up when she worked the clutch. There was no indication that this ache was mutual but my mind was certainly foggy as we drove along. I agreed readily to anything she said in her chatting such as that we had to live together for a full year before we mentioned the word “marriage,” and then she repeated she was finishing her BA which would take up the coming year in Lincoln. My pecker was swollen enough that no iron curtain dropped at the word “Lincoln.” I don’t mind any city if it’s a quick in and out which wasn’t what she implied in her next suggestion. Why didn’t I finish my degree since I was so close? The lump in my throat began to take on a different nature and I tried mightily to observe the landscape. Finally I said that all I had to do was totally rewrite my senior paper but I was unwilling to do that. I added that my dead Ponca informant would rise from the dead and strangle me if I left him out by changing the paper to jerk-off academic specifications. They could shove the mortar boards up their asses sideways before I’d do that.
She reddened, stiffened and slammed on the brakes. “It must be nice,” she said, “to throw away something that the rest of us work hard for.”
Harrison gives Naomi only thirty-five pages to tell her perspective on the novel’s character and events, to my regret because I enjoy Naomi and her hard wrought reasoning voice:
Which brings me back to Nelse, who seems cut from the same cloth [as Dalva, her father, and grandfather] as we used to often say before people stopped making their own clothes. When he appeared that early summer morning in a peculiar green pick-up with lightning bolts on the door panels I had, of course, no idea who it would be other than a seasonal employee of the Department of the Interior and that seemed odd as we had done a bird survey only a few years ago. He had barely taken a step out of the pick-up before I recognized him to be the son of Dalva and her misbegotten lover. What else could a mother think when her fifteen-year-old daughter becomes pregnant? His immediate mannerisms were almost too male. There is such a thing, God Knows. When he came toward me from the truck I actually prayed I’d like him as the opposite was possible. Shyness and arrogance can both be close to narcissism and he seemed to possess both, though I very soon recognized that like a few of my students over the years Nelse rather than being arrogant, had simply made up his mind about too many things when he was too young.
Without spelling it out, Harrison uses Naomi to make the case for parents who often agonize over their children’s dilemmas without being able to do much to alleviate their pain. In this case Naomi and her father-in-law had made a pivotal decision for Dalva and like Dalva are faced with its consequences. I agree with Naomi’s assessment that either one of the two choices Dalva was faced with would have brought pain, probably a lifetime of it. But she and her father-in-law seem to be tossing the blame of it back and forth like a hot potato.
Paul, Dalva’s uncle, Naomi’s surviving son, given forty-one pages, seems quite different from the man Dalva and Naomi spoke of in Dalva. But this might be because he is narrating, and largely concerned with his desires for and hopes of a committed relationship with Naomi, and also possibly the difference is indicative of the passage of time, bringing with it Dalva’s adulthood and life as an adult. Harrison is sensitive to and skilled in revealing time and event’s effect on personality, one of the reasons undertaking to read both these novels repays the reader’s effort.
The novel’s final seventy-eight pages belong to Dalva who relates the process of getting acquainted with the son she had known only for minutes just after his birth. The mix of emotions, the tentative probing, the musing—all are there.
At age forty-six I can stand at the kitchen sink and look out at the barnyard where the event occurred and feel overwhelmingly blessed that I found my son. Both his parents were problematical and I suppose his mother still is. I conceived him out by the creek in a wet baptism dress at age fifteen. The father, Duane Stone Horse, was sixteen and has drifted far backward in time but is not the less vivid for being so long dead. I wonder if anyone can stand back from earth and get a clear look for more than a few minutes at a time. Though we are one body in some respects I am not fool enough to think I am his mother in the truest sense, the woman who raises and presumably nurtures you day by day. We are what is left of his father and my father except for Ruth who was too young to remember. I think Niles and I are becoming the closest of friends and perhaps something else for which there is no category. When I see him out the window at dawn or twilight when the light is a bit blurred. I think he could be either my father or Duane. After he drove me home on the day I had lost my job and when by evening I became quite miserable with delayed rage we sat by the fire and he took my hand and held it. That has to be enough.
Where Delva relates the Sioux story, The Road Home is entirely about its people and their relationships, the kind of book I relish most. Reading both is a favor to yourself.
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