[In the following review, Drabelle expresses disappointment in Sundog, asserting that Harrison's new style of story telling lacks the honesty of his earlier style.]

At about midpoint in his new novel [Sundog], Jim Harrison frames a simile of Virgilian beauty that sums up much of his work. In the Caribbean he used to watch the tide go out through a channel. “The sun-blasted shallow water yields up nearly everything it holds in a swimming, tumbling stream. … The rearrival on the incoming tide is much more gradual and ordered, a processional, much like the paradigm of our own early years, which appear so painfully slow when we live them. No one is ready, it seems, for the loss of control, the ineluctable character of acceleration that gathers around the later years.”

Growing old is one of Harrison's preoccupations, and few other Americans write so perceptively about middle-aged men. His protagonists tend to have outsized appetites for food, drink, and sex; waistlines slackening for the last, irretrievable time; and chronic insomnia. Even so, there is a charming courtesy about them. Still earnest, they pursue an accommodation with decline, seek the Tao of Pushing Fifty.

Sundog features two such men, Harrison himself, who serves as narrator, and Robert Corvus Strang, a builder of dams, now holed up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula for recuperation. A sufferer from epilepsy since he was struck by lightning as a boy, Strang met disaster while on location in the Venezuelan highlands. When he ran out of the medicine that controls his seizures, he resorted to a substitute recommended by local Indians. Atop the dam-in-progress, he blacked out and fell 300 feet into the river. Back home he is reduced to crawling around the woods to regain his strength.

Harrison shows up to interview Strang for a projected feature article. But his concentration is fitful, and there are so many interruptions by visiting children and ex-wives that his story unfolds like a reluctant century plant. Somewhere along the line Harrison scraps the notion of an article in favor of a nonfiction novel. Oppressed by the tedium of recovery, Strang summons the strength to cut it short.

In addition to that tidal simile, Sundog contains several apercus worth copying into a commonplace book. One of them offers the cleverest explanation I've heard as to why we're becoming a bicoastal people. Lust for food, Harrison muses, “is, after all, the sublimated reason why many of us leave the Midwest in the first place. … For a young poet from the Midwest, the discovery of garlic can be as poignant as the discovery of Rimbaud and Federico Garcia Lorca. Art without sensuality dwindles into the Episcopalian.” The characters are vivid and amusing—especially Emmeline, Strang's robust first wife—and, as always, Harrison's prose is a precision instrument.

Yet overall Sundog disappoints. One reason is that it sounds idolatrous. Harrison and Strang are so much the same Rabelaisian type that the book lacks tension. Strang's profession bears the seeds of conflict—these days many Americans look upon dams as environmental Edsels—but Harrison throws them away: inasmuch as Strang sticks to poverty-stricken regions of Third World countries, he builds only good dams. The result is that he and Harrison tend to echo each other, and the novel takes on a testimonial air.

The other shortcoming has to do with originality. Legends of the Fall, Harrison's 1979 trio of novellas, was an inverted tour de force. Here was a gifted contemporary writer breaking off chunks of mythic American material (two of the three tales concern revenge wrought in distant Western precincts) and not tarting them up or clowning around with them. Unlike, say, John Barth in The Sot-Weed Factor or Thomas Berger in Little Big Man, Harrison told his brutal, lilting stories with an old-fashioned straight face. And such was the power of his plotting and the purity of his language that he achieved a reviving triumph.

Sundog, in contrast, is a conventionally fragmented product—even, with its new-journalistic trappings, a trendy one. The book's very design smacks of up-to-the-minute self-consciousness. The reader has to contend with several typefaces: one for scene-setting passages, a second for Harrison's taped comments, a third for Strang's transcribed reminiscences. Instead of the bold-faced vigor driving Legends of the Fall, we have three types of ambiguity. I'm not suggesting that Harrison keep reworking the same material—only that he think again about discarding what seemed a fresh and distinctive approach to storytelling.