[In the following favorable review of Dalva, Kakutani compliments Harrison's narrative abilities.]

Nearly a decade ago, Jim Harrison wrote “Legends of the Fall,” a fluently orchestrated novella, whose brief pages opened out to disclose epic vistas: Through one family's fortunes, a full half-century of American history stood revealed. Now, after several novels that proved either less ambitious (Warlock) or less persuasive (Sundog), Mr. Harrison has returned to some of the themes and narrative methods that served him so well in “Legends.”

In his latest novel, Dalva, he attempts to give us a mythic portrait of America—from the Indian wars of the last century through the confusions of Vietnam and the cynicism of the 1980's—by chronicling the life and memories of a single woman. Through the prism of her experience, we see refracted the events that shaped five generations of her pioneer family; and through their adventures, the fierce (and often bloody) forces that helped transform the wild innocence of this continent into the country we know today.

As she almost immediately informs us, Dalva received her unusual name after her parents listened to—and fell in love with—a Portuguese song called “Estrella Dalva” or “Morning Star.” And the name, with all its romantic connotations, proves a fitting one for a woman who would spend her life wandering America and the world, searching for something or someone to fill the hole in her heart, left when she was 16, and ceded both the boy she loved and their child to the demands of society and decorum.

In the years since, Dalva has ventured beyond the bounds of her family's hermetic, Edenic world—there, in the beautiful, desolate back country of the northern Midwest. She has had dozens of affairs, she has traveled to France and England, Mexico and Brazil, but always she has returned to America—to New York or Los Angeles or to “areas so remote that my friends in those cities found them laughable.”

When we first meet Dalva, it's 1986, and she's living in Santa Monica, Calif.—at 45, still an impulsive, willful girl, reluctant to compromise her feelings or edit her thoughts, and increasingly obsessed with finding her son, whom she gave up for adoption some 30 years earlier. The baby was the product of a passionate romance with a young cowboy named Duane, a half-Sioux teen-ager who turns out to have been her half-brother. Duane, Dalva now knows, is dead—having committed suicide after being wounded in Vietnam; their child may or may not be alive.

In searching for her lost son, Dalva joins forces with one of her lovers, a professor named Michael who wants to use her family's papers as the basis for a scholarly study about “the advent of farming in the Great Plains and the final solution of the Indian question.” And as the two of them proceed with their research, we are slowly, inexorably, drawn back into the past.

We meet Duane, the product of a brief fling between Dalva's father and a young Sioux woman—an angry, sullen teen-ager, said to have “secret powers,” who “could beat up the toughest men, ride his horse at night while standing on it, and talk with wild animals.” We meet Dalva's father—a sketchily drawn fellow, who's killed in Korea and abruptly disappears from this story; her uncle Paul, a kind and compassionate man, disguised as an adventurer out of The Treasure of the Sierre Madre; and her grandfather, a rich old man, who thinks nothing of spending ＄10,000 on a horse but regards a car as “nothing more than a vulgar convenience.”

Haunting the lives of all these characters is the indomitable figure of great-grandfather Northridge, a strange, solitary man, trained as a missionary and a botanist, and sent west to the Great Plains “to help the native population, the Indians, to make the inevitable transition from warriors to tillers of the soil.” In the waning days of the 19th century, Northridge grows skeptical of his mission—a front, as it were, for the naked appropriation of the Indians' land. Instead, he earns the trust of the Sioux, becomes a student of their language and dialects, and in the shadow of the showdown with Custer, begins to be troubled by intimations of their doom.

We receive Northridge's story—like that of his great-granddaughter Dalva—in bits and pieces, from his journals, and from reminiscences delivered by members of his family. Meanwhile, Mr. Harrison is busily cutting back and forth between the past and present, weaving in information about Dalva's current life and her relationship with Michael the professor. Some of this information is extraneous and needlessly melodramatic. A gruesome case of child abuse and rape, handled by Dalva in her capacity as a social worker; a messy seduction scene between Michael and an underage girl that results in a bloody fistfight with her father—such events have a contrived, sensationalistic air about them, and they also serve to distract us from Dalva's real story.

When Mr. Harrison sticks to this narrative thread, however, his storytelling instincts are nearly flawless. Whereas the characters in Sundog devolved into blunt, easy-to-read symbols, the people in Dalva emerge as full-blooded individuals, who almost incidentally embody much of the innocence, carelessness and urgency that played so large a part in the settling of this country. Best of all, perhaps, are Mr. Harrison's descriptions of the land—the untamed deserts, plains, forests and arroyos of what was once the Western frontier. Unlike many nature writers, he adamantly refuses to sentimentalize the landscape, but instead takes it on its own terms, delineating—in tough, but rhapsodic language—both the physical beauty and danger of those empty spaces, and its effect on the people (the Sioux, and other Indian tribes, as well as the farmers) who lived there and made it their home.