With The Summer He Didn't Die, Jim Harrison solidifies his position as a seasoned chronicler of outdoor life and inner turmoil--of the "mental heat, experience, jubilation" of a fully engaged existence--with a work about models, starlets, ballet dancers, and puppets. So to speak.
Noting that novelist and friend Tom McGuane once characterized the Midwest as a place where "Mortimer Snerd must have bred five thousand times a day to build that heartland race," Harrison went on to note of his much-loved native Michigan: "True, but the land as I find it, and daily walk it, is virtually peopleless, with vast undifferentiated swamps, ridges, old circular logging roads; a region of cold fogs, monstrous weather changes, third-growth forests devoid of charm, models, and actresses, or ballerinas, but somehow superbly likable."
This elemental sentiment, reinforcing Harrison’s highly-regarded and vividly-rendered sense of place, also has implications for character traits and development in the expressed aim to "give full vent to all human love and disappointment." The sense that we are where we live and have been is evident throughout his forty year career as poet, essayist, and fiction writer in such works as Legends of the Fall, (1979), Dalva (1988) and The Road Home (1998), and is especially prominent in last year’s True North, where the main character tries to come to terms with the sins of his robber-baron forefather’s ecological despoliation of Upper Peninsula woodlands.
Now with a new volume of short works--two novellas and a seemingly tossed-off but insightful memoir--Harrison concentrates his efforts in a casually-structured, widely divergent and character-rich novella collection of more substance than mere happenstance for being rooted in Wolverine State life. And with the threat of protagonists being unwillingly displaced from the land they call home, some added suspense.
The title novella, displaying an abundance of humor and heart, takes up again the saga of Brown Dog (B.D.), a hapless half-breed in northern Michigan whose tale was most memorably recounted in 1990’s novella collection The Woman Lit By Fireflies.
Now back home at God's little idle acre after some comically picaresque and felonious adventures during which he took on an imprisoned, alcoholic wife and a couple of stepchildren, B.D. is just trying to survive at the fringes of subsistence as a wood pulp cutter while he pines for his lesbian social worker and happily indulges the voracious sexual appetite of the local dentist.
B.D. is suddenly threatened, however, with the removal of his sweetly-natured seven-year old brain damaged stepdaughter Berry by the state, which wants to transfer her to a public boarding school in Lansing. Wary of such dead-end efforts, worried of "what will become of her in a world that has so little room for outcasts," the bighearted and beleaguered B.D. takes an uncharacteristic and valiant course of action by helping to elaborately plan and execute a long-term escape with Berry into Canada. Such heroics are emboldened by newly emergent feelings of familial love, responsibility and hope: "In a lifetime noteworthy for its lack of domesticity the last nine months had nearly crushed him. He had developed an intense sympathy for all of the ordinary folk who had followed the nesting imperative and spent so much energy raising another generation. It simply enough filled their lives like it did his own and there were no longer those thousands of hours indulged in the dimension of stillness, the fishing and hunting and directionless wandering . . ."
Article comments
1 - John Spivey
It's interesting timing to have a review of Harrison occur at the same time as a review of Peacock considering their close relationship.