Seasons Turn

By John Skow

LIMITS OF THE LAND by Curtis Harnack Doubleday; 232 pages; $8.95

Travelers write, doctors write, clerics and politicians write incessantly, admen confess and pilots deplane their fears, soldiers are addicted memoirists. But real farmers do not write, and, of course, writers do not really farm. It may be a question of mentality, but probably not; the reason would seem to be that writers need idleness and farmers lack it.

Thus Curtis Harnack's Limits of the Land, a convincing, brooding novel of life on a small Iowa farm during the 1940s, is a rarity whose value extends beyond its considerable literary strengths. It is a message from an unknown country. Harnack's narrator is a middle-aged dirt farmer named August who left Iowa in his youth, then returned, half unwilling, to the quarter section staked out by his grandfather. He, his wife Maureen and their 13-year-old daughter Sheila fester in the tedium of rural isolation. Each seeks a refuge, separate and traditional for his role: Maureen's is an implacable and sex-freezing religiosity, Sheila's is whiny neuroticism, and August's is his land and his work. By mid-March of the year in which his story begins, August is worn down.

He muses about love and death, "absolutes, this time of year, not merely tendencies . . . Sows farrow and now and then eat a piglet who looks particularly delicious ... In the barnyard cattle mount each other, milch cows on top of milch cows, eyes rolled in mindless passion; and the bull prowls restively, the juice high in him. The terrible force of all this creation began to weary me -- perhaps because I was getting too old for it. This year the groundhog had seen his shadow, and long ago I'd seen mine."

The turning of the story begins when August's sister-in-law Winnie, who lives on a nearby farm, dies in a flash fire.

The death may be suicide, perhaps even murder. For family reasons, August and Maureen are persuaded to hush up these possibilities. Soon afterward, August lets himself get hooked by a blackmailer who knows about Winnie's demise. As plot devices, death and blackmail may be somewhat forced, but it is the passivity of August's response that is the author's real subject, and here his touch is sure.

Maureen's stolid acceptance is similar when she learns that she is dying of cancer, and so is Sheila's as she rides out the hormonal storms of adolescence. Harnack's points gather force with each chapter: that the earth owns men, not men the earth; that all creatures are bound by nature and predicament; that as the seasons turn, strong and weak turn with them.

Harnack grew up on a family farm, the dust jacket advises, and still owns part of it, though he does not live there. His list of professorial assignments, foreign travels made and books written (including We Have All Gone Away, a memoir of his farm boyhood, and a couple of previous novels about Iowa) show him to be something other than a farmer now. His portrayal of farm life is, therefore, an artful re-creation --harrowing recollected in tranquillity -- but it is a vividly effective one. Harnack's sense of the farmer's ineluctable journey through time gives depth and gravity to his book. -- John Skow

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