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[The Jim Harrison Papers]

Jim Harrison, Returning to Earth
Grove/Atlantic, 2007

reviewed by Elizabeth Crachiolo

Jim Harrison's new book bears immediate comparison with As I Lay Dying—a northern Michigan family must bring their dead patriarch's body to his chosen resting place across the Canadian border—but unlike the southern Gothic atmosphere in Faulkner's novel, Returning to Earth is uplifting. Like Faulkner's novel, each character takes part in the narration. The first half of the novel deals with Donald's impending death from Lou Gehrig's disease. The second half unravels each character's feelings about his death, his literal return to earth.

This is a fun book to read, written in a stream-of-consciousness mish-mash in which scattered images, thoughts, and dreams pop up seemingly randomly. The characters are quirky and true to life, doubly fleshed out if the reader is acquainted with the earlier account of their lives in Harrison's 2004 novel True North.

The structure of the book seems simple, but in actuality, there are so many layers here it is hard to sort them out. There is the twist on As I Lay Dying, of course. There is the fact that the book is a continuation of the story introduced in True North. Beyond that, the title alone gives us a clue to the multitextual approach Harrison employs: Returning to Earth is also the title of his 1977 book of poetry, the title poem of which deals with themes also true of the new novel: aging, death, the cruelty of civilization. A reference to the title can also be found in True North. "After the wet evening with Laurie and my suicide night," says David, the narrator, "I returned to earth from wherever I was." Earth, in this case, as well as in the new novel, is a safe haven, a sanctuary from the hard human world.

To make matters more complex, Harrison also sprinkles quotes from his own previous works into the text. Donald's nephew K in Returning to Earth says, "I…[tried] to figure out a sentence from a dream, ‘Before I was born I was water.' I decided it was mostly a neural image evolving from a book I was reading, Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology." Actually, it's the first line to the poem "Water," in Harrison's book of poetry Saving Daylight, published just this year. The last line is "This is a round river / and we are her fish who become water." This recycled-text approach supports the larger theme of recycling bodies back into the earth (Donald, who is half Finnish and half Anishinabe, insists on being buried at the site of his vision quest—directly in the ground, no coffin). The novel is full of these sly allusions, Harrison's nod to himself.

There is a larger point to the connectedness of the texts as well, however, and that is to drive home the overarching idea of the novel: that everyone is connected through dreams, the experience of nature, and the experience of art, especially narrative, music, and dance. One of the liveliest passages takes place after Donald's death. David (Donald's brother-in-law), Donald's daughter Clare, K, and David's girlfriend Carol get stone drunk at David's cabin, dance all night, and pass out: "We were quite drunk by the time we collapsed before midnight except for K, who had the sense to go out and turn off the generator. Clare had never stopped dancing except for a few bites of food." The next morning, Carol vomits in the yard, and Clare takes a freezing skinny-dip in the lake, provoking the caretaker's comment, "That girl has nerve."

In one of the most obscure allusions in the novel, Clare and her brother Herald are lamenting the imminent passing of their father, and Clare cries and says, "There just aren't any people like them left." Meaning hard-working, independent, nature-loving folks who may be simple, but are most definitely not simple-minded. This echoes the epigraph to a poem by Anna Akhmatova (a poet Harrison loves and who is mentioned in the book) called "Our Native Earth": "There are not any people in the world—So simple, lofty, tearless—like us." The last lines of this poem embody the themes of Returning to Earth, and remind us of its title: "We lay into it and become it alone, / And therefore call this earth so freely—my own."

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Elizabeth Crachiolo received her B.A. in English and Peace Studies from Grand Valley State University. After a few rocky post-degree years (including five months in Alaska) and much deliberation, she's finally ready to go back to school for a Master's in Literature. She hopes to attend Northern Michigan University.