desire to see a wolf in broad daylight, is central to no one but himself. Having thus offered his apologia, he proceeds to enmesh the reader in the tangles of people and places that have affected his narrator, Swanson. When Swanson is introduced, he is on a weeklong camping trip in northern Michigan’s Huron Mountains. In the course of the novel, he is alternately lost in the woods and lost in his own mental mires as he reflects on the “unbearably convulsive” life he had led between 1956 and 1960.

Swanson’s wilderness excursions constitute a correlative for his sallies into the mainstream. When he is in the woods, his hikes produce a configuration resembling a series of concentric circles; he is guided largely by his instincts and his familiarity with certain reference points. Similarly, his treks to Boston, New York City, and San Francisco have a cyclical cadence, and his itineraries are dictated more by his primal emotions than by conscious planning. In both environments, he assumes the stance of a drifter who is searching, against the odds, to discover an ordering principle around which to unscramble his conflicting longings.

A careful reading of Wolf reveals that the tension between the freewheeling and nostalgic selves energizes the entire book. By coming to the woods, Swanson is attempting somehow to resolve the dualistic longings that have colored his first thirty-three years, to “weigh the mental scar tissue” acquired during his various rites of passage. While in the woods, he is constantly recalling the head-on crash that killed both his father and his sister; the pain of this memory is undisguised and serves as a counterweight to the bravado with which he depicts his adventuring.

Appropriately, the dominant chord in Wolf, as in most of Harrison’s work, is a sense of dispossession and loss. Throughout the book, he emphasizes the ways in which greed, technology, and stupidity have led to the despoliation of the wilderness and endangered not only species but ways of life as well. Noting that the “continent was becoming Europe in my own lifetime,” Swanson recognizes that the “merest smell of profit would lead us to gut any beauty left.” It is this understanding that leads him to depict governments as “azoological beasts,” to conceive of the history of the United States in terms of rapine and slaughter, and to indulge himself in fantasies of depredation that come to fruition in A Good Day to Die.

When one reaches the end of the novel, however, one senses that Swanson has resolved very little. During his week in the woods, he has not only failed to see the wolf but also failed to illuminate a route “out of the riddle that only leads to another”; even as he labels his urban adventures “small and brutally stupid voyages” and accepts the fact that he longs for the permanence once provided by the remote family homesteads, he acknowledges that he will continue to drift, to “live the life of an animal” and to “transmute my infancies, plural because I always repeat never conquer, a circle rather than a coil or spiral.”

A Good Day to Die

A Good Day to Die, as William Crawford Wood observes, constitutes the second part of the song begun in Wolf. The novel, which takes its title from a Nez Perce Indian saying regarding war, chronicles the journey of the nameless narrator (who bears a marked resemblance to Swanson) from Key West to northern Arizona and on to Orofino, Idaho. As in Wolf, Harrison relies heavily on flashbacks and melds the narrator’s memories with ongoing events; the novel is then less a correspondence between two periods than the route by which the narrator comes to accept life’s capriciousness as a matter of course.

The nascent urge to avenge nature present in Wolf comes to fruition in A Good Day to Die. While the narrator, in retreat from his domestic woes, is vacationing and fishing in Key West, he is befriended by Tim, a Vietnam War veteran whose philosophy of life is fatalistic and whose lifestyle is hedonistic. In the midst of an intoxicating evening, the two formulate a vague plan to go west and save the Grand Canyon from damnation. En route, they stop in Valdosta, Georgia, to pick up Sylvia, Tim’s childhood sweetheart, who is the epitome of idealized womanhood—beautiful, innocent, and vulnerable—and who, in the course of the journey, unwittingly evokes the basest emotions and reactions from both of her cohorts.

The improbability that such a threesome could long endure is mitigated by Harrison’s ability to capture the conflicting urges and needs of all three. While Sylvia may be too homey to be entirely credible, she does assume a very real presence. Throughout the novel, she functions as a counterweight to her companions and serves to underscore the risks inherent in not controlling one’s romanticism. While all three have a tendency to delude themselves, she seems the most incapable of grounding herself and perceiving her situation clearly.

Farmer

In Farmer, Harrison frees himself from his tendency to write false memoirs in lieu of novels. There are passing references to a nephew who resembles the author, but these serve to underscore Harrison’s familiarity with the people and the milieu he is depicting. The portraits are especially sharp and clear in the cases of Joseph, a forty-three-year-old farmer and schoolteacher, and Dr. Evans, a seventy-three-year-old country physician. Equally crystalline is Harrison’s portrayal of the northern Michigan environs in which Joseph’s long overdue “coming-of-age” occurs.

Against the advice of his twin sister, Arlice, and his best friend, Orin, Joseph has remained on the family homestead in northern Michigan “not wanting to expose himself to the possible cruelties of a new life.” Crippled in a farm accident at the age of eight, he has used various pretexts to avoid travel; he has lived through books rather than opening himself to firsthand experience. While his reading has kept him abreast of events in the world, it has done little to sate his hunger for a fuller existence. In fact, his preference for books dealing with the ocean, marine biology, distant wars, and the Orient has contributed to his growing dissatisfaction; he longs to visit the ocean, to partake more fully of the life about which he has only read and dreamed.

Against this backdrop Harrison develops a strain that is present in both of his previous novels: the counterpointing of characters. In this case, the restrained but steadfast Rosealee is set in contrast to the urbanized and impetuous Catherine. Rosealee and Joseph, both reared in the provincial backwaters, have been about to be married for approximately six years. Joseph, who has made love to only a few women in his lifetime, impulsively enters into an affair with Catherine, his seventeen-year-old student, who is attractive, experienced, and willing.

Structurally, the novel moves from June, 1956, back to the events that transpired between October, 1955, and the following June. The affair begins as a self-indulgence, but Joseph becomes increasingly light-headed and childlike, reveling in a swell of sensations and previously unknown emotions; he becomes embroiled in the kind of sexual morass that he had previously associated with the fictional worlds of Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence. Only in retrospect does he understand the risks he has taken in order to free himself from his spiritual torpor; he has nearly destroyed Rosealee’s love.

In the hands of a lesser writer, the story that Harrison unfolds could quickly become melodrama, the tone maudlin. That it does not is a measure of Harrison’s talent. Farmer, far from lacking ironic distance, as some critics have charged, constitutes a parody of the Romantic novel; throughout the book, Harrison burlesques Joseph’s inability to attain “a peace that refused to arrive” and with mock seriousness describes self-pity as “an emotion [Joseph] had never allowed himself.” Using Dr. Evans as a foil, Harrison unearths Joseph’s buried resentments and fears and concludes the novel in such a way as to confirm the doctor’s earlier statement that Catherine “is not even a person yet” and that the dallying has simply served as a diversion for both of them. The fact that Joseph cannot come firmly to this conclusion on his own clearly distinguishes him from the protagonists in Legends of the Fall.

Legends of the Fall

Legends of the Fall, a collection of three novellas, confirms Harrison’s fascination with those elemental and primal emotions that defy logic, are atavistic, and propel one into the “nether reaches of human activity” despite the attendant risks. Cochran in Revenge, Nordstrom in The Man Who Gave up His Name, and Tristan in Legends of the Fall operate in defiance of consensual reality; each builds his own fate, guided more by inner compulsions and a taste for the quintessential mystery of existence than by rational planning.

All three of the main characters are blessed with “supernatural constitutions” and a wariness that allows them to survive against the odds and to perform feats of strength and cunning. Running like a chord through all three of these novellas is Harrison’s sense of the gratuitousness of any life plan, his belief that events are “utterly wayward, owning all the design of water in the deepest and furthest reaches of the Pacific.” There are countless chance meetings and abrupt turns of plot and any number of catalytic conversions. Whereas in longer works such confluences might strain readers’ ability to suspend disbelief, in these novellas one is swept along and becomes a willing coconspirator.

Revenge is, in some respects, the weakest of the three pieces because the reader is asked to believe that Cochran, who spent twenty years in the Navy as a fighter pilot, is so transported by his affair with Miryea that he is blind to the warnings issued by her husband, whose nickname, Tibey, means shark. In the service, Cochran had earned a reputation for being “enviably crazier and bolder than anyone else,” but he had also maintained the instinctual mindfulness of the Japanese samurai, insisting on understanding “as completely as possible where he was and why.” Once he meets Miryea, however, his circumspection is superseded by his romanticism and his “visionary energy.” He conceives of her in terms of an Amedeo Modigliani painting, the quintessence of female beauty and charm; he is plummeted into a “love trance” that “ineluctably peels back his senses.” Failing to comprehend the meaning of Tibey’s gift of a one-way ticket to Madrid and seven thousand dollars, Cochran sets out heedlessly for a weekend tryst in Agua Prieta, where he and Miryea are beaten unmercifully by Tibey and his henchmen.

Opening with a visage of the badly wounded Cochran lying in the desert, Harrison neatly discounts the pertinence of biographical data and summarily explains how Cochran arrived at his unenviable state. The focus of Revenge then comes squarely to rest on Cochran’s attempts to avenge himself and recover Miryea. Despite the novella’s sparsity, the reader is given sufficient information to comprehend the separate agonies that Cochran, Miryea, and Tibey are experiencing and to understand the emotional flux that resulted in the die being “cast so deeply in blood that none of them would be forgiven by their memories.”

The events that transpire, a mix of the comic and the deadly serious, come to a head when Miryea, succumbing to her own agony, becomes comatose—a development that allows Cochran to discover her whereabouts. The denouement follows quickly; Cochran and Tibey journey together to perform what amounts to a deathwatch. The epilogue is deftly understated so as to capture the enormity of Cochran’s loss—he mechanically digs a grave “with terrible energy, methodical, inevitable”—and the meaning of the Sicilian adage “Revenge is a dish better served cold” becomes clear and indisputable.

Harrison’s ability to write economic and yet sufficiently comprehensive novellas is more fully realized in The Man Who Gave up His Name. While again Harrison provides minimal biographical data to explain how Nordstrom, once a prominent Standard Oil executive, has come to be a cook in a modest restaurant in Islamorada, Florida, he focuses the work in such a way as to make Nordstrom’s conversion convincing and compelling. Nordstrom, like Joseph in Farmer, gradually awakens to his lassitude and, unlike Joseph, decides to do something positive to change his life and to get back in touch with the elemental pleasures that had sustained him when he was growing up in Reinlander, Wisconsin. What enables Nordstrom to make the transition is the fact that he has retained a healthy capacity for wonder. The novella opens with the image of Nordstrom dancing alone so as to recapture the metaphysical edginess that his years of success have denied him. Harrison then provides an overview of the pivotal experiences that have left Nordstrom dissatisfied with himself “for so perfectly living out all of his mediocre assumptions about life.” In the course of two short chapters, Harrison introduces Laura, Nordstrom’s former wife, and their daughter Sonia, who, when she was sixteen, had jolted Nordstrom out of his lethargy with the observation that he and Laura were both “cold fish.” This observation prompted Nordstrom to resign his Standard Oil job and take a less demanding job as vice president of a large book wholesaler and to seek fulfillment through any number of expensive purchases and avocations.

Nordstrom’s quest for the “volume and intensity” that had been lacking in his corporate existence is accelerated when his father unexpectedly passes away in October of 1977. As he is grappling with his own sense of loss and “the unthinkable fact of death,” he is compelled to question why he has conformed to all the normative expectations that have so little to do with the essence of life. To the amazement and horror of friends and family, he resigns his position and tries to give his money away, even making a contribution of twenty-five thousand dollars to the National Audubon Society, “though he had no special fascination for birds.” At the behest of his broker and his ex-wife, he sees a psychiatrist, and it becomes clear that he has exchanged the inessential insanities fostered by the American Dream for the essential insanities that will allow him to free himself from stasis and fulfill personal desires.

The defiance of social expectations that lies at the heart of Nordstrom’s transition is even more central to an understanding of Tristan, the main character in Legends of the Fall. Unlike Nordstrom, however, Tristan has never paid obeisance to anyone. Having abandoned any sense of cosmic justice at the age of twelve, Tristan has steadfastly made his own rules and run his life according to personal design. He emerges as a legendary voyager, propelled by a seemingly genetic compulsion to wander; spiritually he is the direct descendant of his grandfather, who at the age of eighty-four is still engaged in high-seas adventuring. Like Cochran and Nordstrom, Tristan has chosen to “build his own fate with gestures so personal that no one in the family ever knew what was on his seemingly thankless mind.” Accordingly, Tristan is fated to live out certain inevitabilities.

Legends of the Fall is an episodic saga with perimeters that are staggering in their breadth. In the course of eighty-one pages, Harrison manages to imagine into being a multigenerational extended family, recount several complete cycles of events, and examine the ramifications of these sequences as they affect each member. The action spans several decades and several continents, and it is a measure of Harrison’s mastery that he can cover this range without sacrificing context or character delineation.

The tale opens in 1914 with the departure of Tristan and his brothers, Alfred and Samuel, from the family homestead in Choteau, Montana; accompanied by One Stab, they travel to Canada to enlist in the war effort. Using several complementary techniques, Harrison economically contrasts the personalities of the three brothers; it quickly becomes clear that Tristan and Alfred are polar opposites and that Samuel, a romantic naturalist in the tradition of Louis Agassiz, is fated to die in World War I.

Just how opposed Tristan and Alfred are becomes a central thread in the novella. After Samuel is killed, Harrison makes a point of underlining the grief and guilt experienced by Tristan and Ludlow, their father; Alfred’s response is virtually nonexistent, since “as a child of consensual reality” he alone escaped feelings of guilt. Equally important for understanding the distance between the two is that Tristan’s career moves him from the status of horse wrangler to outlaw, while Alfred goes through all the “proper” channels, beginning as an officer and ending as a U.S. senator. Finally, the response of Susannah, who is first married to Tristan and then to Alfred, is telling; her breakdown and ultimate suicide are responses, in part, to the impossibility of ever regaining Tristan’s love.

The “legends” that constitute the heart of the novella are Tristan’s, but the dominating spirit is One Stab’s “Cheyenne sense of fatality.” Samuel’s death is the first turning point, and, while Ludlow is consumed by his own powerlessness, Tristan is compelled to act. That Samuel’s death was the product of the Germans’ use of mustard gas serves not only to justify Tristan’s revenge—scalping several German soldiers—but also to convey Harrison’s antipathy for the grotesqueries justified in the name of modernization.

Tristan’s legendary status is enhanced by his joining and then succeeding his grandfather as the pilot of a schooner that traffics in munitions, ivory, and drugs. Rather than dwelling on the specifics of the seven years that Tristan spends at sea, Harrison merely provides a glimpse of the first year and an outline of the next six, noting that the substance of these years is known only to Tristan and his crew. The next leg of Tristan’s journey is also neatly understated. It begins when he returns home, “still sunblasted, limping, unconsoled and looking at the world with the world’s coldest eye.” It soon becomes evident, however, that the wounds that the sea could not assuage are virtually washed away by his marriage to Two, the half-American Indian daughter of Ludlow’s foreman, Decker. The seven-year grace period that Tristan experiences is elliptically treated because “there is little to tell of happiness”; Harrison quickly shifts to the coup de grâce that kills Two and leaves Tristan inconsolable, “howling occasionally in a language not known on earth.”

With a growing realization that he could never even the score with the world, that his losses have far exceeded his ability to avenge the capriciousness of either Samuel or Two’s death, Tristan nevertheless becomes embroiled in a final sequence of death-defying events. Again the denouement is quick, but it involves an unexpected turn as Ludlow assumes the active role. As in the other novellas, the epilogue adds a sense of completeness and juxtaposes the modernized ranch owned by Alfred’s heirs with the family graveyard in the canyon where they once had found “the horns of the full curl ram.” It comes as no surprise that, “always alone, apart, somehow solitary, Tristan is buried up in Alberta.” So ends the legend.

Warlock

In his 1981 novel Warlock, Harrison melds the tone and techniques of the “false memoir” with those associated with the genre of detective fiction; what initially appears to be a marked unevenness in the pacing of the book is a direct result of this unconventional wedding. The first part of the novel contains minimal action and is used primarily to develop the central characters; the second and third parts, on the other hand, are packed with action and abrupt turns of plot. What unifies the work is Harrison’s adept use of several comic devices, including a great deal of what Sigmund Freud called “harmless” wit and humor.

When he is introduced, Warlock, at the age of forty-two, has recently lost his well-paid position as a foundation executive and expends much of his time in self-indulgent reverie and experiments in creative cookery. He is a Keatsian romantic who began his career as an artist “on the tracks of the great Gauguin,” finds resonance in the nobility and idealism of works such as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957) and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), and spends countless hours dreaming of a new beginning. He and Diana have moved north to Michigan’s Lake Leelanau Peninsula to maintain “the illusion that one lived in a fairy tale, and everything would work out,” a motive that makes him an unlikely candidate for top-secret sleuthing.

Diana, on the other hand, appears to be relatively stable, with a nature almost antithetical to Warlock’s. It becomes clear, however, that she is not really any more able to decode the enigmas of reality than he. Although she is repeatedly depicted as a pragmatist, this trait is counterbalanced by her affinity for Asian mysticism and her infatuation with genius. While she is an ardent feminist and an excellent surgical nurse, she is equally drawn to the charades that animate their sexual life and constitute a variant of the living theater in which Warlock later becomes the unwitting star.

It is the dynamic tension between Diana and Warlock that leads him to accept a position as a troubleshooter for Diana’s associate, Dr. Rabun; while both acknowledge that Rabun is an eccentric, neither knows the extent of his idiosyncrasies. From the onset, Rabun lets it be known that he does not like to reveal all that he knows; it is his very elusive nature that energizes the last two parts of the novel. How little either Diana or Warlock knows about him becomes clear only after both have been sufficiently beguiled to prostitute themselves and do his bidding.

The initial meeting between Warlock and Rabun and its immediate aftermath resemble slapstick comedy. In addition to the absurdist context into which Harrison implants their clandestine meeting, there is the brusque repartee and the importance each attaches to the inessentials. The contents of a briefcase that Rabun entrusts to Warlock are telling; in addition to two folders outlining Rabun’s holdings, there are copies of Modern Investigative Techniques, a guide to tax law regulations, and a sensationalized, paperback best seller on business crime. Warlock is given two days to study the material and write a brief reaction to it. Warlock’s behavior is no less comic; he arrives home and promptly secretes the briefcase in the refrigerator for safekeeping and deludes himself with grandiose dreams that his life is beginning to merge “with a larger scheme of affairs,” a truth that, unknown to him, constitutes a pithy double entendre.

Warlock’s father, a top detective in Minneapolis, tries to warn his son away from the position with Rabun and, failing at that, offers a good deal of advice and assistance. Their conversations are peppered throughout and serve to infuse the novel with a droll midwestern humor and to underline Warlock’s comic naïveté. Warlock’s unpreparedness and vulnerability quickly become a dominant chord; while he conceives of himself as one of the “knights of the surrealistic age,” the author makes it clear that, as a knight-errant, he lacks the purity of motive that spurred Don Quixote and the equivalent of a Sancho Panza. Instead, he has only his most unfaithful dog, Hudley, as his “Rozinante though without saddle or snaffle.”

Part 2 opens with an image of Warlock setting north on his first mission, completely undaunted despite the fact that he is en route to walk a two-thousand-acre area in the Upper Peninsula in search of lumber poachers. While he has the appropriate sense of adventure for the mission he undertakes, his idealism repeatedly blinds him to clues that should be obvious to the most amateur sleuth. During the third part of the novel, Warlock abruptly discovers that reality is far more evanescent than even the most fleeting of dreams. Sent to Florida to “get the goods” on Rabun’s estranged wife and his ostensibly homosexual son, who appear to be cheating Rabun out of millions of dollars, and on a society dame who has filed a seemingly outrageous suit against Rabun for injuries incurred when one of his health spa machines went wild, Warlock finds himself in a veritable house of mirrors.

The events that transpire during his Florida sally are unexpected and outrageously comedic. Again, Harrison relies on “harmless” humor and evokes compassion for the hapless hero. As a result of Warlock’s adventures, Harrison abruptly turns the tables and destroys his preconceptions by unmasking Rabun as a perverted swindler and forcing Warlock to the realization that he has been “played for the fool” by almost everyone, including the charmed Diana.

After recovering a modicum of equilibrium, Warlock takes the offensive; reading only children’s books, “to keep his mind cruel and simple,” he launches a counterattack that is simultaneously programmatic and impulsive, the former aspects resulting from the work of his father and the latter from Warlock’s own primal energies. There is a good deal of mock-heroic action on Warlock’s part, but in the end, Rabun is brought to justice and Warlock and Diana are reunited. Like his spiritual heir who returns to La Mancha after having been bested by the Knight of the White Moon, Warlock rejects a job offer to track down a Moonie and returns to his pursuit of Pan.

While Warlock is not a “representative” novel, it contains many of the elements that unify Harrison’s oeuvre. Warlock, like Swanson in Wolf and Joseph in Farmer, is a romantic and a dreamer; he is a man ruled by elemental desires who repeatedly becomes embroiled in ill-conceived liaisons and who “belongs” in northern Michigan despite the fact that he has a habit of getting lost in the woods. All of Harrison’s central characters seem to have a “capsulated longing for a pre-Adamic earth” and a nostalgia for the unsullied woodlands of their childhoods.

Sundog

With the publication of Sundog, Harrison returned to his technique of employing the almost all-too-present narrator. The novel hopscotches between revealing the life of Robert Corvus Strang and chronicling the misadventures of the narrator, who bears a strong resemblance to the persona Harrison created in his earlier works.

The narrator meets Strang during what he describes as a “long voyage back toward Earth,” a voyage that would put him in touch with the quintessential American. Strang pursued the American Dream only to be crippled in a fall down a three-hundred-foot dam. His experiences, no less than his persistent refusal to accept defeat, make Strang worth knowing. He is, as Harrison describes him, “a man totally free of the bondage of the appropriate.”

It becomes clear that Strang and the narrator are kindred spirits—two sides of a single being. Both have more than average appreciation and respect for the forces of nature, even if the narrator is far less willing to plunge heart, soul, and body into its incomprehensible eddy. Both have unbounded passions and lusts, even if the narrator seems less in control of his anima or animus than Strang and more prone to succumb to melancholy, confusion, and despair. Both harbor a deep need to make sense of their own biographies and to plumb the depths of forgotten events that have unmistakably marked their personalities and approaches toward life. The hint of a biographical connection only strengthens their correspondences.

Robert Corvus Strang, as the reader comes to know him, is a man who has been involved on an international scale, building bridges, dams, and irrigation systems since his debut involvement in the construction of the Mackinac Bridge, despite the fact that he developed epilepsy after he was struck by lightning at the age of seven. His has been a life influenced by the polar personalities of his father, who traveled the revival circuit, and his older brother, Karl, who viewed truth as largely situational. His understanding of mechanical and electrical principles is balanced by his understanding of people, most of whom suffer, in his estimation, “because they live without energy” and can accomplish nothing. Strang, on the other hand, even as he attempts to recover from the side effects of a local remedy for his epilepsy, lives with great energy and maintains his commitment to regain his health and resume his career as a contractor on an upcoming project in New Guinea.

His self-imposed cure requires him to regress to a preadolescent state so as to “repattern his brain and body,” the physical corollary to what the narrator asks him to do on a more personal and emotional level. At the novel’s conclusion, Strang’s attempts to begin again can be seen both as a therapeutic renewal process and as an exorcism through which he conquers the artificial barriers imposed by both modern medicine and those who profess to care for him.

Among the personal dramas of Strang’s early life and his current battles, Harrison interweaves a sense of wonder that also serves as a leitmotif in each of his earlier works, again claiming the Upper Peninsula as his own. Against this setting, Harrison offers counterpoints of urban violence, corporate greed and venality, and the unbridled insensitivity and martyrdom of missionaries. The novel’s ambiguous denouement only serves to underline Harrison’s conviction that life resembles a “crèchelike tableau, a series of three-dimensional photographs of the dominant scenes, the bitterest griefs and the accomplishments.” Harrison captures these images in his portrayal of Strang, whose life is keynoted by “love, work, and deathheld together by wholeness, harmony and radiance.”

Dalva

Despite its multiple plot lines, Dalva is also held together by a wholeness and a humanitarian spirit. The novel, in some ways, is Harrison’s most ambitious undertaking. It is ambitious not only because it seeks to communicate a multigenerational family history but also because two-thirds of the novel is told from a woman’s perspective. Harrison’s use of Dalva as the primary narrator, no less than his use of Clare as the major force in The Woman Lit by Fireflies, demonstrates his capacity to transcend the masculine point of view and enter into a world that, according to the majority of critics, he has never even conceptualized. Dalva, like her mother Naomi, emerges as a woman capable of acting and reacting with equal amounts of certitude.

From the beginning it is clear that, despite caprice and mistreatment, Dalva is not about to “accept life as a brutal approximation.” Having lost her only child to adoption, and Duane, the only man she ever loved, to circumstances (and later death), Dalva is caught amid conflicting emotions—knowing what she has to do to earn her own freedom but fearing the consequences and the pain she could cause others. She is also mired in a family matrix that defies easy explanation.

Harrison structures Dalva as a three-part novel, centering the first book on Dalva’s longings and aspirations, the second on Michael’s misbegotten attempts at scholarship, and the third on the events leading up to Dalva’s eventual reintegration of the various aspects of her biography. While each of the books has a completeness on a superficial level, the three are ineluctably associated with Dalva’s grandfather and his allegiance to the American Indians.

Grandfather’s journals allow the reader to comprehend a period of history that has long been whitewashed in American history textbooks, and his sage advice allows Naomi, Dalva, Rachael, and others to make sense out of the tragedies that pepper their lives. His attitude is one born of pragmatism and necessity; having seen the less seemly side of American culture, he fully understands that “each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable and we must not destroy ourselves or our passion to escape this aloneness.” It was this same uncanny understanding of the human condition that allowed Grandfather to coexist with the Sioux, who found his ethic toward the land and his rapport with people akin to their own.

The Woman Lit by Fireflies

The ongoing vulnerability of the American Indians is a theme that dominates Brown Dog, the first of the three novellas that constitute Harrison’s 1990 publication The Woman Lit by Fireflies. Harrison’s tone, however, is distinctly different. Rather than delving into the historical record, Harrison highlights the insensitivity of modern Americans to Native American traditions and culture and lampoons a legal system that defends the denigrators of history. While his sympathies remain the same as in his earlier works, the approach he takes is more reminiscent of Warlock than of Dalva.

Because of the seriocomic tone of the work, the book is dominated by characters (both living and dead) who are not entirely believable and who serve, instead, to buttress an assault against the materialism and insensitivity of the modern world. That Harrison casts his story through the filtered lens of Shelly, an aspiring anthropology graduate student, tips his hand from almost the first page. While it is clearly apparent that Brown Dog may well need an editor, Shelly serves as a deflector rather than an editor.

Brown Dog, as a typical Harrison protagonist, is a man trying to cope with middle age. When he finds a three-hundred-pound American Indian chief at the bottom of Lake Superior, he responds with the same degree of maturity that destines Warlock to his misadventures. Like Warlock, he stumbles through life, but unlike Warlock, he lacks an intelligent counterpart. Instead, Brown Dog is teamed with the female equivalent of Dalva’s Michael. Shelly is opportunistic and insensitive to the values that make certain areas off-limits to outsiders. She is not unlike Brown Dog, however, as both are comic characters obviously unprepared to deal with the modern world. What she has over Brown Dog is that she comes from a wealthy family and can generally extract the results that she desires.

The ability to buy oneself out of trouble is also a theme that dominates Sunset Limited, the second novella in The Woman Lit by Fireflies. Sunset Limited, unlike Brown Dog, reads as a parable in which one is forced to reconsider the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle. It is an abbreviated retrospective akin to Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1989), in which the reader is reacquainted with 1960’s radicals and forced to deal with the ways in which their pasts have shaped their presents. Gwen, who seems like an unlikely revolutionary, is teamed with two individuals who have clearly abandoned any insurrectionary thoughts and another who has merely retreated from the fray. That their quest is to gain the freedom of a tired gadfly of a revolutionary who has been hanging on long after his time is both relevant and beside the point. Harrison rather heavy-handedly points out in the final chapter that this is a fable, and, as in most fables, there is a moral that has to do with basic values and the risks of renouncing those values at the expense of the immediate community. Hence, once Billy confesses to his past complicity with the authorities, it comes as no surprise that if a life must be spared, it will be his. Riches, in the elemental world in which Harrison dwells, guarantee very little.

As if to reinforce this point, but from a very different perspective, Harrison closes this set of novellas with The Woman Lit by Fireflies, which leaves the reader with no illusions about the protections offered by money. The Woman Lit by Fireflies may silence those critics who cannot see Harrison as a universal novelist. His appreciation for the lot of women—their failed expectations, existential angst, and lack of challenge—comes through quite clearly. Clare is a woman wearied from “trying to hold the world together, tired of being the living glue for herself, as if she let go, great pieces of her life would shatter and fall off in a mockery of the apocalypse.”

Clare is not an extraordinary character, yet she has the courage to abandon a marriage that has betrayed her expectations decades before. The impetuous escape that she half-consciously orchestrates constitutes a psychic rebirth, a coming to terms with her childhood, adulthood, and future. In relinquishing the creature comforts to which she had always been accustomed, Clare finds new sources of strength as she conquers the dangers of finding shelter, water, and mental balance in a world that is dominated by elemental urges and necessities. Clare is not renouncing money or creature comforts, although along the way she does prove that she can live without them; instead, she is renouncing the predatory ethic of dominance. As she says at one point, “I want to evoke life and [Donald] wants to dominate it.”

Julip

Julip expands Harrison’s manly image by leaping past the tradition of maleness to address tender life issues. Like Legends of the Fall, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, The Beast God Forgot to Invent, and The Summer He Didn’t Die, the book is composed of three novellas. The title story focuses on the stressful attempts by Julip to retrieve her brother Bobby from jail. Surrounded by adversity, an alcoholic father, a cold, calculating mother, a crazy brother, and a nymphomaniac cousin, the tough and resourceful Julip resorts to the gentleness of training dogs and readingEmily Dickinson’s poetry to gain solace from the madness surrounding her. Julip attempts to convince her incarcerated sibling to plead insanity as a ploy to be released from his sentence, the result of his killing three men—Julip’s past lovers. The ever-continuing conflict between her parents creates a young woman full of doubts and confusion.

In The Seven Ounce Man, Harrison renews themes and characters from earlier works. Brown Dog, the epitome of the American existential hero, reminisces of his love for an anthropologist who attempts to desecrate an American Indian burial ground. Somewhat like Harrison, Brown Dog prefers the quiet rhythm of nature to the roaring pace of humanity. He cannot seem to avoid trouble, haphazardly bumbling through incidents, revealing the ridiculous folly that ultimately entangles him with American Indian rights groups.

Harrison selects a fifty-year-old professor accused of having a tryst with a young student as the focus in The Beige Dolorosa. Satiated with accusations of impropriety and campus politics, Phillip, the professor, retreats from campus life to the relaxed cadence of the Latino Southwest, where he discovers serenity. Like Julip and Brown Dog, Phillip surrenders to nature as both a form of survival and a restoration of the soul.

The Road Home

The Road Home, a deep, complex, and spiritually oriented work, demonstrates Harrison’s maturity. The novel offers five compelling stories told through the multigenerational characters of Dalva’s Northridge family. Harrison’s strong narrative weaves fantasy with reality and Native American perspectives with midwestern mentality. The novel opens in the 1950’s, with the half-Sioux patriarch John remorsefully recounting his youth, his attempts at art, and his final acceptance of a way of life as a horse rancher in Nebraska. Ruthless at times in business, John amasses land, status, and a legacy, but he bemoans not achieving artistic fulfillment. Nelse, Northridge’s grandson and Dalva’s son, given up at birth for adoption to a wealthy family, portrays himself as a loose wanderer whose passion for birding chips away at his opportunity for a “normal” existence. Nelse targets an abused wife whom he learns to love—and who loves him. Dalva’s mother, Naomi, who motivates Nelse into rejoining the family, and Paul, son of Naomi and John, offer rich viewpoints on the intriguing tale from their perspective. Finally, Dalva, the strong, willful one, faces a life-threatening illness and the turmoil of understanding the man who was the baby she gave away at birth.

Harrison uses death as a metaphor for the concept of home, but home also is the Nebraska lands surrounding the Niobara Valley and River, which courses through all the characters in the novel. The author’s attention to detail, melding of familiar characters, and masterful storytelling make The Road Home a strong sequel to Dalva.

True North

True North is set mainly in the city of Marquette of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It is a first-person narrative told by David Burkett in three parts: the 1960’s, the 1970’s, and the 1980’s. The plot is driven predominantly by David’s personal journey to escape the horrible deeds of his ancestors, mainly the lumber barons of his father’s family in the middle to late nineteenth century who stole thousands of acres from the Native Americans, raped Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and fostered logging practices that left thousands of men maimed or dead.

David’s internal conflict is that he is extremely afraid that he will turn out like his father, and early on there are some similarities between himself and his father. For example, his first two loves, Laurie and Vera, are possibly too young for him and are lusted after by his father as well. Also, there is the hint that David sees the relationship between his sister Cynthia and Donald, the son of the family’s gardener, as being in bad taste. On the other hand, his father’s inherent problems make David seem very admirable. David’s father is a World War II hero turned alcoholic and pedophile who spends his days and nights at the country club when he is not driving to Duluth, Minnesota, to see one of his fifteen-year-old girlfriends or flying to Key West to “fish.” One can assume that money is no object on these trips to Key West, as the Burketts have inheritance from both paternal and maternal sides; David’s mother comes from a family that became wealthy in the shipping of iron ore from the Upper Peninsula to Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland. As scholar Patrick A. Smith has observed, David’s internal conflict is that he is transfixed and possibly doomed by the weight of history.

Typical of a Harrison novel, the protagonist is not a passive victim of circumstance. Consequently, David’s external conflict is that he has to create a reality for himself in order to break away from his father’s influence and, more important, the type of existence that can only be described as purposeless, living in the doldrums of his ancestors’ greed. This manifests itself in many ways. First, the reader learns that David has converted from his parents’ Episcopalian faith to the Baptist faith, and he now attends a Baptist church by himself. (He believes that his parents use religion to justify their privileged existence.) He eschews the family tradition of attending Yale by choosing Michigan State University, and he follows that with a stint at seminary school in Chicago. He refuses to socialize with the children of his parents’ upper-class friends, preferring to spend his time with Glenn, a handyman’s son. He also accepts the black sheep of the family, his uncle Fred (his mother’s brother) as a father figure, if not also the family’s live-in accountant, Jesse, and gardener, Clarence. David learns about alternatives to his parents’ corrupt version of a Protestant upbringing through Jesse, who is from Mexico; through Clarence, who tends toward the beliefs of his Chippewa ancestors; and through Fred, a religious man who does not believe in organized religion. Most important, instead of killing his father and himself in order to end his bloodline, of which he fantasizes, David decides to write a book about the history of logging in the Upper Peninsula.

Much as Harrison has done in his body of fiction, David aims to put faces, names, and pictures to the people who built the United States and then were left out of the American narrative. The result is that he works on his book for twenty years without much hope for its publication, and, by all accounts, he is unable to balance the quantitative facts with qualitative descriptions. However, his pursuit of this goal and the nontraditional life he leads in the process, mainly in a cabin on the coast of Lake Superior, give him enough knowledge of the past that he is able to throw it away if he pleases. By learning the truth, he is eventually enlightened enough to transcend the past as well as his own futile convictions. Also typical of Harrison’s work, David seems to find this truth in nature, where the reality of life, and his place in it, is more apparent.

Returning to Earth

In Returning to Earth, a sequel to True North, Harrison explores several themes and ideas that are common in his previous novels: nature as the harbinger of truth, the nontraditional family as a positive alternative to a traditional family that breaks itself upon unrealistic expectations, taboo love relationships, and alternate perspectives on reality and the American Dream, along with trying to make sense of the past and one’s place in America. In addition, Returning to Earth meditates on the multiple ways of coping with death.

The story is told in four parts by four first-person narrators: Donald, Kenneth (much like a young Henry David Thoreau or Jack Kerouac), David Burkett, and David’s sister, Cynthia. We learn from Donald in the beginning that he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and has only a short time to live. His purpose for writing is to pass along some of his past to his children, Herald and Clare. The fact that he has dyslexia, which probably went completely untreated because he was educated in the 1960’s, makes this task a courageous one—it also serves Harrison’s artistic need to give a voice to the working class and the working poor. Donald is not a poor man, however; he has been steadily employed as a mason for twenty-five years, and his wife, Cynthia, worked as a teacher on the Bay Mills Indian Reservation right up until he was diagnosed. In fact, Donald and Cynthia could have been wealthy, but she has refused to use her parents’ inheritance because her father’s money was gained through the actions of his corrupt ancestors.

Donald, like his father, Clarence, in True North, is half Finn and half Chippewa. Harrison always uses the parenthetical “(Anishinabe)” after the word “Chippewa.” Anishinabe is what the “Chippewa” called themselves; it means the original people. Donald tries his best to give his audience an idea of his family’s history, and, in effect, his story conveys some of the humanity that David could not convey in his manuscript on the history of logging in True North. Donald’s American Dream, at this point, is to die as he pleases. His life, in comparison to that of the Burketts of True North, has been ironically profound, but it is the way that he chooses to die and be buried that causes the novel’s major conflict.

It is clear that, through True North and Returning to Earth, Harrison means to compare the lives of the more irresponsible “old money” Americans to those of the working class. The moral is that the honest life of a man and woman who nurture their family, even if their love was once taboo and even if they have to break from traditional expectations, can have a more positive effect on America than a family that allows the deeds of the past to ruin its descendants.