Despite graceful prose, novel is heavy-handed

True North, By Jim Harrison, Grove, 388 pp., $24

In the first chapter of Genesis, God anoints man as superior to the natural world. The passage reads in part, "And God said . . . let them have dominion over . . . all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

Some have called that verse a blueprint for plunder, a license for humans to trample on nature as they see fit. David Burkett's family took the verse to heart.

David is the self-deprecating narrator of "True North," a flawed new novel by Jim Harrison. David comes from a family of lecherous timber barons, whose legacy in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (the UP) is countless denuded acres and generations of locals who curse the Burkett name. David has plotted a retreat from his lineage; his story is both a coming of age and a coming to terms.

To untether himself from the crimes of his forebears, David sets out to write a tell-all about his family's exploitation of land and workers -- the reason that millions of stumps now dot the UP. Only by exorcising these demons can he get on with his own life.

He is hopeful. "I began to question if I still believed in Christ's resurrection and decided after two hours that I did," he says at one point. "Anything was possible on an earth that creates for itself such a fabulous landscape of forest, swamps, and rivers."

Or so he thinks. As his project drags on, David seems to get only more confused about what he's after and why. He gets tangled up in his ideas about Christianity, philosophy, and sex. He marries briefly, chases a flighty poet, grows ashamed by his lust. Who is David Burkett, exactly? He doesn't know, and we don't really, either.

David's animus is directed mostly at his father, a hard-drinking pedophile who lives a pathetic but tremendously monied life. Perhaps his father's most grievous crime is raping the young daughter of a longtime assistant to the family named Jesse, but there are so many it's hard to say.

David describes his father as "a shell . . . inside there was only a decayed question mark, a living grave soaked with booze and desires so errant that all but a few people wished to run from him."

So David wants to end the bloodline then and there. He recognizes that unlike his headstrong sister, Cynthia, who chooses simply to run, he won't find solace in estrangement. He never really achieves the full, public accounting that he had hoped for, but after nearly destroying himself he arrives at a certain peace.

Harrison is Michigan's writer, to be sure, and he is as fluent in the ways of nature as anyone. Through burly but graceful prose he gives us characters who practice a hardy, wind-in-the-face self-reliance. But if this was to be the long-awaited novel of Harrison's homeland, as it's billed, one hopes his next novel will be more worthy of the Harrison mantle.

"True North" has its moments, but by and large Harrison does far too much telling and not enough showing. One assumes he did that because he wanted readers to have every insight into David's thoughts and actions, no matter how trite.

But there are other methods -- through more dialogue, for one -- that don't come across as so contrived and didactic. Here's a quick example: As David is mulling over his father's transgressions, he muses: "There is the idea that this maze I live within is not designed to be escaped. It's life."

Perhaps "True North" would have been more effective had Harrison revealed the Burkett family's past in slow release, so that we swallow it as David does. The result of his heavy-handed approach is a narrative that doesn't warm us to David so much as recite in a clinical fashion what Harrison wants him to be. It makes him difficult to picture and to empathize with, and it robs the fantastical ending of any cathartic power.