"The Summer" novella also contains an apt little foreshadowing to the second work, "Republican Wives," a thematic pendulum swing spottily poignant but gently and entertainingly mocking (with more broad-brush bromides than demonizing Dean-iac rants). As a perceptive state rover observes about life on the other side of the Mackinac Bridge, a prime benefit to living in the Upper Peninsula, unlike the more urbanized and affluent southern part of Michigan, lies in "discovering how slow the people were to complain about life’s brutal vagaries. The working class didn’t complain about hangovers because if you had enough money to get drunk in the first place you were in fine shape."
Not that mid-life desperate suburbanites Martha, Frances, and Shirley, well-off University of Michigan sorority sisters who had married even better, don’t have enough time, money, and inclination to indulge in a little drinking, Grand Ol’ Party life, and if-it’s-Tuesday-it-must-be-Bedlam mayhem (think Thelma and Louise meets Jennifer Wilibanks, the deer-in-the-searchlights Runaway Bride). Martha, married to Jack, who was "born a trust officer," is on the lam in Mexico and waiting for lawyers, guns, and money and the arrival of Frances and Shirley after having attempted to kill her long-time lover, the Svengali-like cad Darryl, Ann Arbor's counter culture ogre, who was "actually at odds with everyone on the left, and the right was simply beneath contempt"--and who was also having simultaneous affairs with Frances and Shirley.
It’s a lot to sort out, and it’s not really sorted out to complete satisfaction or consequence, though it does deftly showcase Harrison’s embracing capacity to take on a credible feminine angle, recalling a similar stance effectively assumed in the novella "The Woman Lit by Fireflies." There are some unexpected and welcome nuances that come in conjunction with the still-waters character of Shirley, who despite being the one who had been the most withdrawn and shy, has turned out to be the most realistic, activististic and insightful of the three, careful to not let herself fall into the trap of wanting everything "to be a pleasant blur." It’s doubtful, though, that Martha and Frances will undergo an epiphanic sea change in the manner of Brown Dog, or will ultimately heed the nagging of Martha’s teenaged daughter who berates them to "do something with your lives more than that simpleminded stuff you’re already doing. . . .Save trees or the green turtle. Anything but sitting around feeling your asses get bigger and your skin droop."
Harrison, of course, is anything but sedentary in his life or writing career. In the conclusion to his previous and full-length memoir, "Off to the Side" (2002), Harrison notes that he doesn’t feel an ounce of lifetime-achievement finality, saying "I’ll just see how far this life carries me. There’s a lot left to be described." The third-person autobiographical "Tracking" in the current book, then, doesn’t pick up the slack as much as it does expressively elucidate in his usual unpretentious and witty manner such struggles as "whether to stay in your head or go out and meet the world"--pitting prose that concerned only the self against literature that considered the immensity and complexity of life. But either way, Harrison notes, "It wasn’t a long story for which you needed a suit, job, hat, and quick banter like Cary Grant in New York City, learn to dance on chairs like Al Jolson, discover ancient temples of the Maya in the manner of Richard Halliburton . . ."
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.