Reading list: True North

On the first page of this novel, we read of a father and son in a rowboat. Father's hands have been severed and are wrapped in duct tape. His face is badly bruised and he can't speak. The son has lost a thumb, and with only one oar, is rowing in a circle. Father's eyes, Jim Harrison writes, "made his request clear and I pushed him gently over the back of the boat. It was quite some time before he completely sunk."
This page is typeset in italics. Is it a dream? A wish? Something that happened to someone else? Turn the page and the story begins.
David Burkett narrates True North in three parts, from the 1960s to the 1980s. He is a trust-fund baby living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. His great-grandfather was a timber baron, and the family maintains vast real estate holdings.
Burkett's father is an alcoholic with a predilection for under-age girls. (He might have killed his brother, too.) His mother, heiress to her own family's fortune, is addicted to pills and runs off to Chicago regularly "to see a doctor." Burkett's younger sister openly despises the father, choosing at age 14 to have nothing more to do with him.
Burkett has his own obsessions. He intends to atone for his family's destruction of the UP by writing a tell-all family history. This mission consumes him through his 20s and 30s. His other obsessions are fishing and rowing his boat. Harrison tenderly describes the beauty of the region's lakes and forests.
True North is a grand soap opera about the dissolution of a biological family and how, as individuals grow older, they create their own families from among like-minded friends and relatives. It's a social commentary on the ruling class and the working class. Late in the book, Burkett says, "It's inexplicable how poor people are less greedy than the rich." I also like this line: "Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about." That's spoken by a college-senior botany student that Burkett, now in his 40s, encounters in Montana.
As the novel comes to its end, it becomes clear what that first page is all about.

Here are snippets of favorable and unfavorable reviews from Metacritic.com:

Harrison consistently commands our attention for his humanity and his
tenderness. LA Times.

David's—and Harrison's—real mission is nothing less than pure transcendence; the social, political and psychological clear-cutting at which he diligently labours away is ultimately only the necessary starting point for the sowing of an elusive, spiritually regenerative seed. Toronto Globe and Mail

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.'' NY Times

David's account of his soul searching and various sexual grapplings is strangely flat and listless, which is surprising, given Harrison's reputation for acute and well-rendered insight. Library Journal

His constant feelings of remorse and anxiety can be tiresome reading. When he stumbles to conclusions they seem trite. Chicago Sun-Times

I don't disagree with any of the reviews quoted above. Burkett's wailings are tiresome at times. I think the characters are clearly drawn, and the conflicts are sharp. I do recommend this novel.