Book: Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison

I just re-read this book. I have never done that intentionally before. I love how Jim Harrison writes. This is a beautiful novel, and while reading it, I wondered how others would react and if they would find it as compelling. To some, it might seem deceptively simple in a way. I think his writing is unique. His scenes and characters and dialogue make me peaceful.

The story takes place almost entirely in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. While I only drive through this part of the state occasionally, all the place names are familiar, and I would guess that many of the vignettes are taken from Harrison's personal experiences when he lived in the UP. So for us who have lived or are living in Michigan, there is the sense of home ground, of a known geography.

Donald is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and the book is partly that story but also the stories of his wife, his daughter and son and his brother-in-law. The days go by, with lovely descriptions of the natural world, of Lake Superior, of life in the small towns and in Marquette, of the history of the UP, and of bears and cabins and rivers and of the Anishinabe. It all just flows in a way that delighted me, maybe even more through this second reading. While most of his characters are likable enough, familiar in their foibles, mentally and emotionally organized or not, they are mostly ordinary people, but also extraordinary as they become vivid and real in Harrison's words, if that makes any sense. It does for me. It is the gift a good author has passes on to readers, a universality quotient that draws us in as we recognize ourselves and feel somehow comforted.

I wanted the book to go on and on, not to find out what happens to the characters, but because the pages were full of weather, water, the woods, spoken insights by one or another of the characters, or their mental observations on the state of things general or specific and, of course, what happens to Donald.

Here are a few sentences, chosen at random. The first is when K unexpectedly meets Sandra and her 18-month-old baby in a grocery store. (K's friend had killed himself after his young girlfriend becomes pregnant and he is charged with statutory rape.)

"The baby reached for me and I held her between the grocery aisles. The baby had my friend's green eyes and I was falling apart inside. The girl said that her family had moved to Newberry after the funeral mass. She said her family didn't believe in abortion and they couldn't give up the baby for adoption because it might have gone to an unchristian family. She said she was sorry every single day...I looked at her and down at the baby in my arms, who was fondling my pretentious Tibetan prayer necklace. 'I knew you was so close as friends.' Her bad grammar made it all more unbearable. I impulsively said that if she ever wanted to get away from her family I'd support her and the baby. She never called."

"If you were making five bucks a day at an American-owned maquiladora plant in Sonoran Nogales and stood on a hill outside your cardboard hut you could see a PizzaHut in American Nogales where you could make more than five bucks an hour. It was a no-bainer why people crossed the border."

One more...again chosen at random. I didn't have to look to find sentences that I liked because I liked them all:

"Ravens don't stand on the ground unless they're sure of themselves. Only once have I seen one dead by the road and it was pretty young. Deer and many other animals haven't figured out cars but ravens have....A real old raven had fallen slowly down through the branches of a hemlock tree over a period of two hours, grabbing hold of a branch now and then with his or her last strength, while around the bird about three dozen of his family were whirling. I heard the soft sound when he finally hit the ground...My family will be with me just like that old raven falling slowly down through the tree."