True North

by Jim Harrison Narrated by Christopher Lane

Overview

An epic tale that pits a son against the legacy of his family's desecration of the earth, as well as his father's more personal violations, Jim Harrison's 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 malevolent father and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family by taking up with the son of their half-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes into to adulthood enlightened by three unforgettably intoxicating women, he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers' rapacious destruction of the wood of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as with the working people who made their wealth possible. With thirty years of searching for the truth of what his family has done while trying to make amends, David looks closely at the root of his father's evil-and threatens, like Icarus, to destroy himself.

Editorial Reviews

Anthony Quinn

This sprawling, rackety novel will not do a great deal for Jim Harrison's reputation as a stylist, but in his portrait of a father and a son he has made an indelible addition to the gallery of literature's ''bad dads.''
— The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

Brooding, occasionally brutal eighth novel, linked to the author's previous work (The Road Home, 1998, etc.) by blistering contempt for the diseased American polity and acute existential melancholy. To be sure, narrator David Burkett shares with other Harrison protagonists a hearty appreciation of food, drink, sex, and the pleasures of hiking, swimming, camping, and fishing in what remains of the American wilderness. But his wealthy family made its money by despoiling Michigan's Upper Peninsula with logging and mining, and David becomes obsessed as a teenager with the idea that he must research and record the Burketts' crimes. Younger sister Cynthia simply rejects their father, a vicious, alcoholic molester of underage girls who's pillaged his children's trust funds; she marries their yardman's son and builds a healthier life. David, by contrast, can't seem to escape the toxic family legacy. In a narrative that moves by fits and starts from the mid-1960s through 1985, he chronicles his anguished search for religious faith, a series of failed relationships with women, and his 20-year struggle to turn his "project" into a meaningful, publishable account of what his relatives have done to the environment and to those under their feet, who "weren't quite people or human" to the robber barons who forged capitalist America. These are grim themes, and since the only humor here comes from the grown-up David's caustic comments about the idiocies of his younger self, one has to admit that True North is not always a lot of fun to read. The first savage climax comes with the father's rape of a 12-year-old girl, daughter of an army buddy who has worked for him ever since; it closes with a reprisalmore gruesome than that in Harrison's famous 1979 novella "Revenge." Even David's charming dog Carla, the only female with whom he has a fully satisfactory relationship, dies in this somber book's saddest scene. Bleak and uncompromising, but stout-hearted readers will be impressed by Harrison's fierce passion and dark poetry. Agent: Bob Dattila/Phoenix Literary Agency

AudioFile

Lane succeeds in creating a sympathetic take on the young man as he navigates through making amends for his own comfort at the expense of the great woods around him…Both his humanity and his narration of Harrison’s beautiful nature prose make this an audiobook worth exploring.”

Seattle Times

The many pleasures embedded within make True North another necessary installment in the work of one of the finest writers working today.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Harrison combines a love of nature and life in the wild, which he describes in splendid, soaring prose, with a rich and troubled conscience tortured by the ambiguities of modern life…[Harrison] bursts through with splashes of true brilliance.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Harrison consistently commands our attention for his humanity and his tenderness…True North [is] a great achievement.”

Dallas Morning News

True North, with its tensions, tenderness, wisdom, violence and salvation, is a truly American novel.”

San Francisco Chronicle

His descriptions of flora and fauna stand at the head of the line of American writers. True North is no exception. When Harrison writes about a blizzard, you shiver. When he describes a thunderstorm, you see lightning.”

Houston Chronicle

Harrison’s forte is plumbing the depths of the human psyche, and in True North, he goes off the high dive, knifing toward the bottom of the deep end...[Christopher Lane] is pitch-perfect in this, moving with ease through Harrison’s lovely sentences. He never wallows in Burkett’s despair, but neither does he fail to take it seriously. He comes across as being as reflective and sensitive as Burkett.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169665123
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	06/26/2005
Edition description:	Unabridged

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