I’ve been feeling slightly wicked for reading this Nebraska-set novel by Jim Harrison, which I found one day in the hallway outside my apartment. A woman had signed it inside, but now was giving it to strangers in her apartment building from the magazine exchange case outside my door. Why was it making me feel so guilty? After all, I have read very few books taking place in Nebraska. I can think of only two excellent works: Black Elk Speaks, and Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
If that’s not it, is it the fact that I have a pile of library books that seem to frostily accuse me of fickle vagrancies? Perhaps, but it might also be because the central character, Dalva, was either talking about sex, listening to stories about it or participating in it with abandon throughout the novel! This was not, however, distasteful since it was filled with humor, warmth and honesty. She found her beauty a burden when she was young and heckled all the time at school, but fell for the one boy who respected her as his friend for two years before giving into his passion.
Now Dalva, at age 45 in California in the beginning of the novel, says she is writing this for the son she gave up thirty years earlier, who she wants badly to find if he’s still alive, to touch his face and hear that he’s happy. It is her dream, which becomes our dream for her, too, so she may find peace and completeness in her tattered soul.
In the first section, we are sent back to her memories of this young, Sioux father who she lost her virginity to when she was fifteen. When the boy asked her Grandfather about marrying her, he found out he was her half-brother and ran away in dismay. We see Dalva’s struggle to deal with this mystery while carrying his child, not to mention how it changes her family’s lives. By the end of the section this man contacts her, saying he needs her because he’s not feeling so good. Immediately she journeys to Key West where he and a war buddy have become fishermen and he is dying. Now he will marry her so she can have all his war medals and benefits. Now he can shoot himself dead on his horse in the sea while she slept off the drinks they celebrated with.
The second section is about a professor who asked to read the journals her Great Grandfather kept during his mission to the Sioux in the nineteenth century. Dalva at first was very much against it, but then she thinks he might help find her son. The Great Grandfather wrote of how the white man destroyed them, forcing them to become unskilled farmers. We learn that Black Elk, a holy man, was in his eighties picking potatoes when he died. Crazy Horse, as the missionary himself, was jailed and then released when forced to by protests, but Crazy Horse was then shot. It’s going to make this professor’s career to publish them, but the romance he has with Dalva falters when an enraged father unhinges his jaw.
The last section, called ‘Going Home,’ is again in Dalva’s voice as she returns to Nebraska after her husband’s suicide. She enlists the help of a friend to help find her son and he gives her the name and address of the couple from Omaha who adopted him. Not even seeing a picture of him, she comes back to hear that someone looking like her husband as a young man was spotted in town. Finally at the end of the novel, they meet shyly with the blessing of her mother (Naomi).
Thoughts and Observations
If I wasn’t so excited to learn something of Nebraskan history, I would’ve replaced the book on the rack outside after the first few pages. Dalva changed subjects two or three times in a paragraph as she let all her thoughts gush out on the page. It was confusing, especially when she called her mother Mother and Naomi, too. Sometimes she would switch from past to present to past again within a page. After a while, though, the story was all in the present and her mother was always called Naomi.
Jim Harrison does a superb job of capturing a woman who is trying to make sense of her life by finding the son she gave up, her only child. She speaks with typical wit, yet from a sensitive heart as we read here and which also brilliantly reflects the essence of the novel:
This time, however, I was distracted by the James Dean poster, so old now the edges were crinkled and frayed. Duane had thought James Dean was wonderful and bought the same red windbreaker Dean wore in Rebel Without A Cause. I adored him, too, despite the obvious and curious mixture of fatalism, bravery, arrogance, perhaps ignorance. I caught myself being drawn ceaselessly into a past that I wished mightily to emerge from—I had come to know only recently that one could emerge without forgetting, and that to remember need not be to suffocate. It was unfair but funny to look at the poster and wonder what kind of as*hole he would have been as a grown-up…I thought of a question a Cree had pointedly asked—“What do stories do when they’re not being told?” pp 307
I wondered at first why Dalva changed her mind about letting her Great Grandfather’s journals become public, but I decided it was part of her letting go of the past and moving into her future, hopefully with her son. She may have been too much of a seducer of men, as was Michael of women of all ages, but she was missing her husband, the first and only one to seduce her. It, therefore, showed how they were in transition, between loves. Indeed their sexual appetite is never sated, but often frustrated.
To put it bluntly, Harrison’s writing is never dull as his characters demand your attention. There are lots of them, very likable and real people with their own dreams, so you better not skim around as I found out!
Dalva, named after her parent's favorite Italian song, ultimately is a woman I can call ‘friend’ after sharing so much nobly-borne anguish without whine or dramatic effusions. Even though she was baptized in the Niobrara River just before her assignation with her Sioux lover, that was done in fear of the end of the world and now she uses the “Lord’s” name in vain frequently. As three critics noted inside the cover call this fascinating and one, a woman, “an unabashedly romantic love story,” you can see this is not a depressing novel, but rather one of hope for Dalva and all of the characters. You just know that she and her son were meant to be together and will be okay from now on. You will smile, trust me, if you read this book. :-)
Jim Harrison also wrote Sundog and The Woman Lit By Fireflies under the Washington Square Press label.
From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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