The “true north” of Jim Harrison’s new novel refers only tangentially to the geographical compass point, for True North is the story of a young man navigating blindly in search of his own direction in life, and a metaphor for how our pasts serve as emotional hurdles and psychological barriers to self-discovery.
Narrator David Burkett is the unfortunate son of a monstrous father — a profligate, alcoholic pedophile who rapes the 12-year-old daughter of his loyal valet, dips liberally into his own children’s trust funds, and relies on the absolution afforded him by his “good” name, money and the American propensity to excuse the rich their “peccadilloes.”
But there’s more: Burkett’s meek, co-dependent mother spends most of the novel in a Judy Garland-like painkiller haze, wracked by mysterious, undiagnosable ailments; his relationships with four women throughout the course of the story are unmitigated failures; his sister, who successfully forges her own identity at a much earlier age, is initially as much a nemesis as friend; and his family of unapologetic logger barons and rapists of the environment has full control over his sense of self.
“Maybe I just wanted, absurdly enough, to take control of the past that was so directly painting the landscape of my present life,” Burkett says. “There was a glimmer of the idea that if I could see and understand this past clearly enough I could throw it away.”
Good idea, wrong approach. Burkett doesn’t have the tools to claim his own independence, so rather than cut out from his life the past and his father (as his sister does), Burkett instead tries to confront it head on. Thus begins his 20-year-long penance project to chronicle his family’s misdeeds in the UP — the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Burkett retreats to a cabin in the forest — ironically not cutting himself off from his family, but from society at large, emerging only occasionally over the next two decades for a disastrous relationship or two. This is both familiar geographic terrain and literary territory for Harrison, places and themes he’s visited before (Songdog, A Good Day to Die).
Rather than weigh the book down, however, that detailed familiarity results in some of the novel’s best sequences. The rivers, skies and forests (both denuded and otherwise) become an essential character, as well as a metaphor of our interior selves and the hope for our deliverance. Burkett chronicles his family’s rape of the land literally tree stump by tree stump, all the while taking for granted that the answer to his self-discovery lies in a more harmonious understanding of the forest (i.e., the natural order of all life) that remains, and his place in it.
In one of the novel’s most affecting scenes, Burkett stumbles upon a “stump shrine” deep in the forest, where he finds the “great mother of stumps. . . supported by roots so massive” he can’t get his arms (or mind) around them. This is the beginning of Burkett’s true awakening, which Harrison clearly notes: “There was a distinct feeling similar to when I had been baptized,” Burkett acknowledges.
With the help of a fiercely independent lover, Burkett begins to see more of the light. On a brief sojourn to France to visit her, he comes to realize that he “seemed to be acquiring a topographical view of the maze.” After initially seeking an apology from his father, Burkett realizes that he has been barking up the wrong tree: “Forgiveness wasn’t excusing the offender but unburdening yourself of the tyranny of the offender by seeing him in a full human perspective.”
The realization itself is a form of freedom; Burkett concedes that his “father had been a perverse anchor and I had cut the rope.”
It may be an epiphany for Burkett, but it’s also an ominous foreshadowing of the book’s chilling ending, when his father, chaste, sober and sorry, travels with his son to Veracruz, Mexico, to confront his own past by seeking the forgiveness of his rape victim. Of course the very notion of confronting a victim with her rapist is itself a cruelly selfish thing to do — just as Burkett’s constant battle with the past made him unbearably self-referential, i.e., selfish — and his father’s comeuppance is swift.
With more beauty, cogency and better writing than an aisle-full of self-help books, Harrison has stitched together an intricately written family history that suggests that our futures emerge only when the present is free of the past.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2004.
