Review by Victor R. Volkman
At first glance, Joseph D. Haske’s North Dixie Highway is a rage-fueled trip through three generations of an Eastern U.P. family locked in a cycle of grinding poverty, trauma, and alcoholism. But beneath the surface there’s much more lurking as we follow this broken family of men who have served their country with patriotism and distinction and yet are consigned to an ever more difficult path just to get bread on the table. This is the book that Philip Caputo hoped to write with Hunter’s Moon, but Haske’s elegiac tribute to the hard life of working class U.P. men is by turns both searing and hopeful where Caputo is merely bitter and cynical.
The background is the story of a blood feud between two old families of the Sault Ste. Marie area, the Cronins and the Metzgers. This is slowly revealed as a long simmering dispute between the two patriarchs, grandfathers Lester and Colonel Henry, which is terminated by a fateful moose hunting trip to Canada. Only one of them returns, without the body of the second and without a story that seems to hold much credence. Thereafter, Buck Metzger, grandson and youngest member of the family swears vengeance while enlisted in the US Army.
The stories play out between two points in time: 1984 as Buck is young 13 year old making the transition to manhood in that distinctive way of the U.P., and 1994 as he is mustering out of the war in Bosnia. Buck’s father is a grizzled veteran of the Viet Nam conflict with sufficient cojones to take on a wounded bear with his bowie knife. Colonel Henry, the Metger patriarch, is a career military man having signed up slightly underage for Word War I which makes him 84 years old in the older timeline. All of them are severely bruised by their service, but Buck’s tour with the U.N. blue hats in Bosnia was marred by an incident where he was forced to kill an enemy sniper by dint of his being the only one with firearms experience in an observation post. His skills learned as a deer hunter have made him into a hunter of men.
The story begins as Buck is being picked up after his tour of duty in Detroit by his brother Johnny, who has a promising basketball scholarship, and Colonel Henry as they head back to the U.P. Buck is trying to find his way into college by way of earning money for it with odd jobs, but he is woefully unsuited for civilian life now. Now living in his car with a dwindling supply of cash as he plots revenge in an alcoholic haze, he is headed on a downward spiral.
Almost the entire novel takes place in the U.P. and you’ll find plenty of familiar landmarks and rites of passage. Buck’s Spring smelting trip ends in a near-death experience. His first deer kill is carefully choreographed. Much of the action takes place in and around Sault Ste. Marie where the older version of Buck stalks the streets and encounters the youngest of the Cronin clan bragging about his grandfather did in Colonel Henry. Thus the stage is set for revenge and dark deeds. Buck immediately begins to drown his guilt over killing an enemy combatant in Bosnia and seals his fate in the Metzger family tradition of drinking from sunup to sundown.
There’s a lot more to North Dixie Highway, which plays out as a stream-of-consciousness experience from Buck Metzger’s point-of-view as it bounces between the last two decades of the 20th century. Many of these stories were first published individually in more than a half dozen literary journals, so there is a recursive nature to episodes which are revisited in different ways to reveal new aspects of character, motivation, and plot. However dysfunctional and broken the generations of Metzgers are, there is a loyalty, courage, and unity which is admirable if only forged by the bonds of poverty and mutual hardships experienced. Haske’s debut novel is a paean to the working class man of the North, that taciturn tribe who will do whatever it takes for family, for countrymen, and their country regardless of the consequences.
Like the eponymous road system that meanders and wends its way from the Florida backwaters up through to the Sault Ste. Marie, Haske’s North Dixie Highway is a compelling coming-of-age story that examines what goes into the making of a man. I recommend this book for anyone looking for a story about family, sacrifice, and the struggle to make a living in the contemporary U.P. If you enjoy an occasional glass of Kessler’s whiskey, Haske’s book will be a great companion.
NORTH DIXIE HIGHWAY
by Joseph D. Haske
Pub. By Texas Review Press, 2013
ISBN 978-1937875268
