Multi-generational saga, prequel and sequel to his earlier Dalva (which I must also read). Received this as a Christmas present from my husband and have not yet finished it - my bedtime reading. It's a book to savour slowly.

Finished almost two years later! This should come with a printed notice: Read Dalva first. I started it and really liked the writing style, but felt a bit lost among all the characters, despite the Family Tree at the beginning.
So, I recently read Dalva then re-started this one and read almost day and night to the end. I'll write a separate account of my thoughts, as I have quite a lot I want to note down, but first want to take issue with the publishers about the cover.
I was attracted to the book because of the photo, which is not credited anywhere but which, after some research, I discovered to be John Comes Again in ceremonial dress, by Heyn, and he must have been in the Pine Ridge or Rosebud reservation. What disturbs me is that any Sioux mentioned in this book are just ghosts - skellingtons in the family closet, one might say - and a better cover pic would have been a Nebraska landscape, a thicket, a shelterbelt, a ranch, birds - or a woman in jeans, boots and old chamois shirt on horseback - Dalva. Because it is mainly set in the 1980s, and it is all about Dalva and her family. Not about Indians.

I’m treading very carefully here because I don’t want to give a spoiler, so this is a rather “detached” account.

Aged 16, Dalva gives birth to a son, by her half-brother (or maybe half-cousin) Duane. We are never sure whether Duane is the son of Dalva’s father John Wesley III, his brother Paul, or their father John Wesley II, as they all had affairs with Duane’s mother Rachel. Duane was well aware of his parentage, but Dalva suspected nothing of these family ties.

Dalva’s “problem” is handled by her authoritative but beloved grandfather and her mother Naomi, who give the child up for adoption. Suitable parents are found, and the boy’s wellbeing is surveyed throughout his childhood, from afar, by JWII. Duane is sent away, he fights in Vietnam and eventually drowns himself off the Florida Keys, after reuniting with Dalva whom he marries so she will get his army pension.

All the above is recounted in the book entitled Dalva. I can’t help but think that if Dalva had been born 20 years later she would have fought to keep the baby, and maybe modern readers might find her attitude too passive. But that was the 1960s which I remember well, and we were not yet, quite, rebels.

“Home” is the farm founded by JWI in Nebraska, near the Niobrara River, now belonging to Dalva. Gradually, all the surviving characters are drawn together back to this one place.

The narrative is made up of the journals of JWII – a manuscript of his memoirs at the end of his life – of Paul, of Naomi, of 45-year-old Dalva now searching for her son, and of the son himself, Nelse, searching for his mother. We “hear” their different voices, often recounting the same incidents, the same encounters, from different points of view, building up overlapping layers; it is like reading private diaries, gathering bits of information from here and there and building up the story for yourself. Each “voice” is very distinct and masterfully achieved. I have read several reviews of the books and many people say they found it hard-going at first. Understandably – the first narrator JWII admits to his “old-timey” way of speaking, educated as he was through old books, and his own father. Some readers find Nelse’s voice to be “whiney”; I just felt that his (very small) percentage of Sioux ancestry always wanted to push through his bourgeois upbringing, apparent in his love of the nomadic life, his closeness to and awareness of Nature, his claustrophobia.

I like the way the characters mention books they are reading, which has led me off into digressions to look them up (and some I MUST read e.g. Rachel Carson The Sea Around Us) and gives them all another dimension. Sometimes a sentence makes me stop and I have to re-read it several times, wanting to hold it in my mind for ever
p. 74 “There’s nothing so nude as a girl eating an apple in an orchard”.
p. 136 words of advice from a shaman friend of the grandfather:
“He said I should pray for Dalva and not bother her spirit with my worries”
p. 149: “All through life one hears nitwits bleating their versions of wisdom. I rather like Keats’s notion of negative capability, where one cherishes and nurtures the thousands of contradictory ideas in one’s head, rather than trying to reduce them to functional piths and gists”.
And I have picked and adopted up the word “captious”, which is used many times.

I would like to ask Jim Harrison a question bearing on the very end of the book. Dalva has made a list of things she has loved about the earth, putting in the first three places her mother, her father and her sister, Ruth (one of my favourite characters, she is clever, warm and funny). But in the last lines of her journal, Dalva says “I send a kiss and a goodbye to those I love so much. Naomi, Paul, Lundquist, Nelse and J.M.” I read this last night just before turning out the light and all night long it has been gnawing at me, why didn’t she mention Ruth? If I were Ruth I would feel so hurt to be left out. Maybe it was just an oversight on JH’s part? I’m annoyed with myself for worrying about it so much, but at least it goes to demonstrate just how much a book can “inhabit” me.

All this is very lengthy and I realise I have not really said what the book is about. A dynasty. Family ties, family secrets. An overwhelmingly great sorrow in the way the American government treated the native peoples. But it is mainly about death. Or rather, a serene acceptance of the end of life?

Lent to Janet who read it twice; now it is safely back home with me.