The Road Home - Hardcover

Harrison, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871137240 ISBN 13: 9780871137241

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000

Synopsis

Jim Harrison is one of this country's most acclaimed writers, and in "The Road Home," his first full-length novel since "Dalva" 10 years ago, he delivers a true American epic. "The Road Home" continues the story of his captivating heroine Dalva and her peculiar and remarkable family. It encompasses the voices of Dalva's grandfather John Northridge, the austere, hard-living half-Sioux patriarch; Naomi, the widow of his favorite son and namesake; Paul, the first Northridge son, who lived in the shadow of his brother; and Nelse, the son taken from Dalva at birth, who now has returned to find her. It is a family history 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.

About this title

Review:

With his 1988 novel, Dalva, Jim Harrison commenced an epic of the American Midwest--or more specifically, the Nebraska sand hills. 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 spiralling 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, Amazon.com

Review:

"Boston Sunday Herald"

The humor, conscience, and iconoclastic spirit of Mark Twain live on in Jim Harrison.

"Newsday"

"The Road Home" is a rapturous but unsentimental hymn of praise for the wonderous strangeness of life.

"The New York Times Book Review"

A graceful novel...To read this book is to feel the luminosity of nature in one's own being.

"Denver Post"

"The Road Home" confirms what his longtime fans already know: Harrison is on the short list of American literary masters.

"Boston Sunday Herald"

"The Road Home" is Harrison at the peak of his powers, a splendid combined prequel and sequel...very much alive and probably his best novel.

"Newsweek"

Each Northridge family member stitches in a piece of the family history. They are such good company you forget they exist nowhere but in Harrison's imagination.

"Library Journal"

Not only a compelling drama but a profound consideration of how one lives a meaningful life and faces death in an increasingly superficial, consumer-oriented culture.

"San Diego Star-Tribune"

Harrison gives us characters with heart and soul; keen-eyed and rarely sentimental, they are the sorts of people we'd like to be, and so our identification is immediate.

"The" (Memphis) "Commercial Appeal"

"The Road Home" is a bountiful, rambunctious, serious book about who we are and how we become that way, and its muscular, life-affirming story may open a few eyes and hearts.

"New York Daily News"

As you read Harrison, you sense that what he tells you about his characters is a fraction of what he knows. The reason they are so alive, so involving, is they reflect an enormous richness of experience

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0871137240
• ISBN 13: 9780871137241
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 446