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Untamed
Returning to Earth
by Jim Harrison
Grove Press, 2006. 280 pages.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Johnson
Swedish professor and bishop Nathan Söderbloom (1866-1931) once wrote that a “poet is an interpreter of creation . . . his characters possess in thoughts and shapes something of the inexhaustibleness and the riches which characterize creation.” The characters Jim Harrison imagines are largely untamed by suburban ways of life. Even as they enjoy their meals and notice sublime scenes in nature, one notes that Harrison’s creations have not been smoothed by money, business, fashion or technology. Haunted and challenged in a number of ways, they struggle against themselves and against one another in settings of rural isolation. A character in Returning to Earth says, “There aren’t very many people like my father anymore. . . .” To which another replies, “Well, I thought that too, but then I supposed that if you went far enough off the interstate you’d find some people with similarities.”
The author of five volumes of novellas, a memoir and assorted other non-fiction books, eight collections of poems, and as many novels—notably Legends of the Fall and True North—Harrison is a stubborn literary outlier. A writer of sensuous experiences in immediate contact with the earth and its creatures, he might remind readers (even in his personal appearance) of Hemingway. Well known as a gourmand and food writer, his prose carries the earthy humor of a man who enjoys conversation over food and wine.
Returning to Earth tells—in several narrative voices—a story of Donald, a Chippewa-Finnish man who is dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. The first part of the book is Donald’s dictation to his wife Cynthia of his life and of his ancestors’ rural lives in Michigan. Subsequent parts tell of Donald’s loved ones’ struggles with one another and with their own histories as they come to terms with his death.
The novel reaches out for the spirit of the earth and its creatures. The narrative opens up before us the life-force of animals as, for example, ravens and skunks pause to listen to a human life in review, and bears and dogs are sketched and rounded with impassive personality. An uncertain and undefined earth spirituality runs through the narrative, most of it streaming from Donald’s religion, based on Chippewa beliefs which he cannot or will not put into words. A spare poetic transcript of his three-day ordeal and vision ends part one of the book, concluding with these words: “It was good to finally know that the spirit is everywhere rather than a separate thing.”
A heavy curtain of death hangs over the book, and the characters struggle for redemption from the earth as they try to comb out the tangles of their own memories and experience. They find peace in the place where Harrison’s readers often find pleasure: in simple perceptions of ordinary activities, the display of stars in the sky and the aroma of food carefully prepared. The pop and jangle of the domestic life of more or less solitary individuals in close contact with a few other people provides the dramatic center of the novel. The characters bump up against religious institutions and doctrines as wild animals, prowling around at night, might wander close to inhabited buildings. One character, a graduate student, muses: “People used to take religious denominations very seriously. Maybe they still do. It’s not something you’d notice at the University of Michigan.”
An accomplished poet, Harrison’s prose paragraphs sometimes read with the dynamics of a poem, building to epiphanies or cascading to memorable bursts of controlled emotion and hard-won insight. The content features that Harrison’s readers hope to find in his fiction are to be found in Returning to Earth: brutality and remarkable depravity beside robust physical pleasure and unexpected human tenderness. Just under the surface of Harrison’s loud and bawdy prose lies reverence for life and an impression of stillness before the wonder of earth and its creatures.
Jeffrey Johnson is pastor of Peace Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Wayland, Massachusetts. He is the author of Acquainted With the Night: The Shadow of Death in Contemporary Poetry and Harbors of Heaven: Bethlehem and the Places We Love. His poetry and essays have appeared in The Christian Century, First Things, Christianity and Literature, Nimble Spirit, and other publications.
Read Jeffrey Johnson’s poetry here and here.
Buy his books:
Harbors of Heaven: at Powell’s; at Amazon
Acquainted with the Night: at Powell’s; at Amazon
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