A Trip Through Time and Nature : Jim Harrison’s Latest Novel Tracks Three Generations of a Family Over Much of the 20th Century

In “The Searchers,” the Alan Le May novel that inspired John Ford’s famous movie of the same name, Texas pioneers scour the Southwestern plains pursuing an elusive band of Comanches. They are Nawyecky Comanches, says an old Indian agent, “them who never get where they are going. . . . But don’t you believe it.”

The same might be said of another skillful perambulator of the Western plains, Jim Harrison. In his latest novel, “The Road Home,” Harrison picks up where he left off with the 1988 novel “Dalva,” tracking three generations of the Northridge clan who are descendants of a 19th century Nebraska homesteader and his Sioux wife.

Spanning much of the 20th century, the novel follows them as they travel from the banks of the Niobrara River in Nebraska to northern Minnesota, from Europe to Mexico. They are driven by doomed affairs and dashed ambitions as well as by a shared attachment to nature and a raging backlash against modern consumer culture.

The road home is most challenging to the youngest Northridge descendant, 29-year-old Nelse, who was given up for adoption by his mother, Dalva. Nelse is the product of an incandescent affair between Dalva and a Sioux roustabout who later committed suicide and who may be Dalva’s half-brother.

As Nelse struggles to find his place, wrestling with demons along the way, the novel advances obliquely, the old Nawyecky way, sloughing tension as it loops back on itself. Harrison unearths family secrets as if they were potsherds or fossil fragments, incomplete and subject to differing interpretation. He is less interested in revelation than reconciliation; his characters release themselves from the bonds of anger or remorse as they take comfort in each other, old dogs, grandchildren and the earth itself.

“[W]e can only go so far with thinking,” declares Dalva, “and then our minds must be refilled with the ‘thinginess’ of life, landscapes, creatures. . . .” Harrison’s creatures, birds, snakes, bears and coyotes, leave a strong scent. His characters take their cues from nature.

John, the Northridge patriarch, recalls the serenity of his Indian mother, a woman who lived through the infamous Sioux slaughter at Wounded Knee.

“To white people,” he muses, “life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother it was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky.”

John’s story is the most engrossing. He is the family’s force majeure, his reputation clouded by rumors of shady land deals and violence. Yet, he is content to live out his days reminiscing with neighbors and doting on his granddaughter.

“When you tell me stories about your life,” the little girl asks, “why do you always pretend you were such a nice person? Everyone in town says you were the scariest man in the county.”

There are shades of Lake Woebegone, Garrison Keillor’s Midwestern Arcadia, here in Nebraska, where the men are all interesting, the women strong, the dogs noble and the hired help idiot savants. These are not the plains of O.E. Rolvaag or Willa Cather or John Steinbeck. There are no locusts or blizzards. Farms don’t fail. People don’t crack from loneliness.

As likely as not, a Mozart record is playing on the Victrola. A newly opened French wine is breathing on the sideboard. A book of Keats is open to someone’s favorite poem. No one works much, and everyone seems to have an independent income.

“They were scarcely bourgeois,” John writes of his family. Haut bourgeois might be more apt.

The Indians in the story provide a bracing change of pace with their laconic, threadbare grace. They alight on the scene like a gust of prairie wind, riling the dogs and ruffling the graveyard grass. Their presence, too, attests to a macabre secret linking the histories of the tribe and the Northridges, a secret like an open grave that gives the family little rest.

In the end, however, “The Road Home” is about last rites, ceremonies in which indulgences are tolerated and encouraged. Wakes are famous for rambling, implausible elegies that leave lovely impressions. Harrison has done just that.