It is at least ironic that in a collection of novellas Jim Harrison comments regarding an earlier project, “He had started a book of novellas, an unrealistic project with publishers.” True enough. The novella is a relative outcast among literary forms with few serious writers indulging in them. There are important exceptions, of course, Stanley Elkin and William Gass among them, but when the Harvard University Press announced a novella competition some years ago, the project was quietly shut down after a few months because of a lack of interest.
Harrison is interested, however, and “The Summer He Didn’t Die” is his fifth foray into the genre, which one senses he prefers to longer forms. According to Harrison, “Writing novels is a prolonged aggressive act,” while the novella, which can be more elliptical than a novel but more complicated and extensive than a mere story, seems gently rounded and subtle – at least in the hands of this writer. And Hrrison is by now successful enough that he needn’t concern himself with whether a publisher thinks his obsessions are realistic or not.
Having said that, “The Summer He Didn’t Die” is a mixed bag, at times maddeningly predictable, at others beautifully nuanced and often poetic, especially in descriptions of the natural world. The first of the three novellas, the title story, concerns an Upper Peninsula Indian named Brown Dog with bad teeth and an eye for the ladies. Fittingly he meets both needs by falling for an over-sexed dentist. Harrison writes of Brown Dog that he “was greatly drawn to women with none of the hesitancy of his more modern counterparts who tiptoed in and out of women’s lives wearing blindfolds, nose plugs, ear plugs, and fluttering ironic hearts.”
Readers of Harrison’s fiction will quickly recognize his biases here in favor of the working class, Northern Michigan, Native Americans and dogs at the expense of political correctness, academics and the middle class, not necessarily in that order. It’s not that this is wrong or even that right and wrong are relevant here, it’s just that we’ve been here before in Harrison’s fiction and there’s nothing quite as deadly as predictability in art.
Fortunately, Harrison saves the day by giving Brown Dog two adorable stepchildren to raise, one of whom, Berry, has been judged to be unfit to stay at home with her brother and father but must rather be removed to a state home in Lansing where her “socialization skills can be increased and one day she would find her place in society.” Such outrages do occur, of course, but in addition to giving Berry intuitive skills that others could only envy, the faceless state is too easy a target for a writer as talented as Harrison, who at least has the good sense to have some fun with these ideas before making Brown Dog and Berry disappear into Canada where more sympathetic tribal relatives welcome them.
If some of the characters in “The Summer He Didn’t Die” seem to have been taken directly from Central Casting, the same can certainly not be said of “Republican Wives,” a sendup of a particular kind of upper middle-class woman, or in this case three of them, who have shared a lover named Daryl since their time together at the University of Michigan in the ’60s. Narrated by each of the women in sequence, the novella begins with these words from Martha: “I think I may have killed someone, my lover in fact, but let me explain myself.”
This act, which some might almost call a mercy killing, given what we learn about Daryl and his relationships with women, sets the plot in motion as the two other protagonists, Shirley and Frances, scurry down to Mexico where Martha has gone to ground, to bring her back to Houston where her husband’s expensive lawyers will plea bargain her back to Grosse Pointe.
The problem here is that the ending is a given. Women like this don’t end up in jail and, of course, Daryl doesn’t die but just settles for enough money to live in an appropriate style with a new love. What comes through is Harrison’s disdain for the well-connected, though he does offer this from Frances in explanation for her behavior: “Since we were little our culture had shoved us into a consensual box from which most of us don’t want to be liberated. Our captious sexual natures must be contained at all costs for the good of society, and more so, the good of our class.”
Bargain basement sociology aside, however, one wonders why Harrison bothered to write “Republican Wives,” unless it was to demonstrate that he could. OK, point taken, but there’s no question it’s the weakest section in this collection. One need not be a camp follower of the GOP to think that such women are more complicated and interesting than they appear in this novella.
Which brings us to “Tracking,” which seems more a memoir of Harrison’s well-traveled experiences as a writer than an actual fiction, though it takes that form. Tracking the protagonist, also named Harrison in the current fashion, we follow the writer as a young man making his way in New York, Michigan and Boston before finally retreating to, you guessed it, the Upper Peninsula, where lives are real and people can be trusted to do what they say they’ll do. From my experience this is actually true of people in the Upper Midwest, but if Harrison thinks there are also good people in urban areas and universities, you’d be hard-pressed to prove it in his writing.
No matter. In “Tracking,” Harrison writes so lyrically of the forests and lakes, of hunting and fishing, of the pleasures of home and family, that the fact that he drifts back and forth between points of view, drops into cliché much too frequently and turns name-dropping into a fine art doesn’t affect the ultimately moving quality of this story about finding your way home and then somehow staying there.
Harrison’s descriptions of food preparation alone are worth the rest of the book, but that’s the least of the charms demonstrated in “Tracking.” Take this love letter to New York, for instance: “A friend from college helped him find a room on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx which he thought quite literary as it was only a few blocks from the cottage near the Grand Concourse where Edgar Allan Poe had lived. He walked for a week before he got a job at Marboro Books on 42nd Street. He walked from the middle Bronx all the way to Greenwich Village which took nearly a day at a sauntering pace. He checked out the East and Hudson Rivers for further close study and spent a couple of days at the Museum of Modern Art …”
There may be writers who write literary catalogs better than that, but I haven’t read one lately. In any case, “Tracking” lifts “The Summer He Didn’t Die” and makes it memorable. It is a remarkable story not only for the picture it provides of the apprenticeship of one of our most gifted writers, but by extension its insight into the artistic striving of all writers at all times. The fact that Jim Harrison writes so effortlessly and beautifully about his family and personal life is an extra pleasure, and if it makes the awkward middle section of this triptych all the more puzzling, this is a small price to pay for a work of art.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
The Summer He Didn’t Die
By Jim Harrison
Grove/Atlantic, 277 pages, $24
