The Road Home
By Jim Harrison
Atlantic Monthly Press, $25
ISBN 0871137240

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Those who know Jim Harrison's fiction, poetry, and essays discuss the work with awe; those unfamiliar with his name light up when informed that he wrote the novella basis for the film Legends of the Fall. In his seventh novel, The Road Home, Harrison provides a spirited study of human nature, an epic bound by insight and love. Speaking in the distinct voices of four characters, all related by blood, marriage, and deep loyalties, Harrison delivers a textured questioning of life's headlong direction, its "what-might-have-been" sidetracks, its motives and mysteries, and, finally, its finality.

Set primarily in remote Nebraska over the past hundred years, The Road Home chronicles the spectrum of emotions and the events of lifetimes. We observe friendships built upon moments of insight and alliances of coincidence and happenstance. Expanding on characters from his intriguing 1988 novel, Dalva, Harrison also explores the attitudes of the region and the several eras that frame the narrative. His independent people stay close to the land and understand survival in the face of weather and isolation -- indeed, the family patriarch is half-Lakota -- yet are drawn to the world at large by world war, legal dealings, and quests of the heart. In vignettes tough and poignant, humorous and mystic, impulsive and melancholy, the tale becomes mythology for the millennium.

This is not to imply that The Road Home is difficult reading. This mansion is built of small bricks; the simplicity of the tale offers majesty. These people worry about war profiteering and, in the same breath, discuss bird sightings. The reader is gathered along by their acceptance of wealth and poverty, their inclination to roll with life's ups and downs, struggles with "common sense," and with what cannot be changed.

Over 35 years Jim Harrison has created six other novels, a half-dozen volumes of poetry, three novella trilogies, and an anthology of essays. This novel will satisfy Harrison's deserved audience and will, without question, expand it.

Tom Corcoran's debut mystery, The Mango Opera, was published this year by St. Martin's Press.