[In the following review, Harrison analyzes the prevalent themes of sex, wildlife, nature, and escapism in Julip.]

The novella is an unfashionable and indeterminate form: is it a short novel or a long short story? What can a writer do with it, that cannot be achieved more concisely or completely in its shorter or longer cousin? The answer, in Jim Harrison's Julip, is a tremendous amount. The book consists of three sections, “Julip”, “The Seven Ounce Man” and “The Beige Dolorosa”, which are linked by the shared concerns of the main characters—sex, animals and escape—and by the inversions which Harrison subtly brings about. The eponymous heroine of the first story has three lovers all in their fifties. Bobby, Julip's brother, one year younger than her at twenty-one, has inflicted minor injuries on them with a gun. He is imprisoned in Raiford, obviously mad, and Julip must secure the consent of her lovers to move him to a psychiatric hospital, rather than prison, until he is better.

“The Beige Dolorosa”, the third story, finds fifty-year-old Philip Caulkins, a disgraced English professor, working as a cowpoke in Arizona. He gets mixed up with Magdalena, a tempestuously sexy young woman, and ends up alone in Mexico, the back of his truck full of statues of the Virgin Mary, all of them chock-full of rich-smelling Mexican weed.

If, as is apparent, Julip and Caulkins have their share of problems, Brown Dog, the hero of “The Seven Ounce Man”, suffers and overcomes on a higher plane. He has never had a social security number and is being sought by the police for his hapless involvement in a plan to save a Hopewell burial site from excavation. He has no Indian blood despite his name, and his involvement with native American activists seems foisted on him by the media. He would rather get drunk and screw around. “The Seven Ounce Man” is dark, hilarious and poignant, and when Brown Dog ends up heading west with a Canadian Mohawk on the run from the government, there is a sense of wonder and possibility.

It would be wrong to say that these characters are alienated. It is true that they draw solace from the country as well as alcohol and drugs, but it is largely through their relationship with animals that their humanity is manifested. Julip and Brown Dog are both dignified and rendered inadequate by this relationship: Julip religiously writes a diary about the dogs she meets and trains, and discusses her animal dreams with psychiatrists; Brown Dog seeks the bear medicine which his aged friend and malefactor, Delmore Short Bear, brings to life for him.

Dealings with animals and birds, in his case, are initially more arcane. However, his mission comes to him in a Technicolor dream, and it is “to rename the birds of North America [to] publish a new guidebook”. The quest becomes meaningless when Mona, his horse, leads him up a narrow gully. There, birds of all colours and sounds stupefy him. At the story's start, fresh from his disgrace at the university, he can hear nothing but the pulsing of his own blood. By the end, he hears the birds and believes that the “future was acceptable rather than promising”. However, he concludes, “it was certainly my choice.”

Perhaps the strength of the novella form is that, freed from the expectations and complexities of the long novel, it demands a proper resolution. Jim Harrison is a writer of exceptional humanity, and he has written a book with a broad range of settings, about a broad range of characters who live and will go on living.

Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis are fond of suggesting that the world is coming to an end—in Los Angeles, a place of grotesque and inhuman difficulty, where blankness and confusion are the only measures of character. Harrison has no time for moribund old frontiers. He prefers to write of wild states—Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin—new frontiers, where action and change are not only possible, but within reach.