[In the following review, Locklin praises Harrison's collection of novellas Julip, giving special praise to the novella entitled “The Beige Dolorosa.”]

I loved the movie version of Jim Harrison's novella, “Legends of the Fall”, and I knew many Eastern critics would not. The novella is a good length for adaptation, and Harrison is as comfortable with the form—this is his third volume of three—as anyone writing today, but one of the last tacitly condoned biases is that of the East against the West, and it flourishes ironically among those who would be most at pain to dissociate themselves from the more conventional prejudices. Harrison still investigates frontier (and erstwhile transcendentalist) categories such as self-reliance, honor, courage, masculinity, and womanhood, whereas the very word manhood evokes derision in many circles today. The less ideological common moviegoer, however, responded deeply to the film's archetypes.

But there are many sides to the stories Harrison spins. “Julip,” for instance, depicts the absurd lengths to which traditional male values may be taken and that it often falls to a capable woman to unravel the complications created by men. Julip's addled brother has landed himself behind bars after a botched attempt to avenge her “defilement” by three middle-aged lovers. An experienced but uncoarsened 21, she is a pillar of savvy in a world of weak and loony males, but she likes men and deals kindly and effectively with them. Like the title protagonist of Harrison's novel Dalva, Julip has inherited from male ancestors traits that are often either absent or present only in parody in the men of her generation. Harrison's women are almost too good in too many ways to ring entirely true, but they are certainly not stereotypes.

“The Seven-Ounce Man” continues the adventures of Brown Dog—formerly of the novella [“Brown Dog” contained in] The Woman Lit by Fireflies—once again drawn into conflicts with various women, anthropologists, and law enforcement agencies. B.D. is a survivor but no stock picaro. He is capable of sacrificing himself on behalf of native burial remains, while parrying an attack on hunting with, “Tell it to someone who gives a shit.” He leads a man's life, but prefers the company of women: “You weren't always cutting and bruising yourself on their edges.” We will no doubt be learning more of this anti-hero of the Upper Peninsula.

Since I love the Tucson area almost as much as I loathe our current political rectitude, I found “The Beige Dolorosa” one of my most pleasurable reading experiences of recent years. It is more than the cautionary tale of an impotent historian set up for a sexual harassment charge. It is a parable of rebirth through intimacy with the natural world; its living things; its cycles, songs and silences; its timelessness; its repose. Drugs—and their profitability, born of their prohibition—have made their way into this landscape also, but Harrison suggests there are ways of co-existing with the insanities of contemporary life (which include an academic world that “resembles the cell structure of political life in Cuba”), of laughing at them while reintegrating ourselves with “the ordinary life of incomprehension.” Robinson Jeffers would concur.

Surely teachers will recognize a system in which they are obsolete at 50, only the rarest of students expresses a love of Mozart, and scholarship is reduced to “Sexism in Yeats.” Harrison, like Sartre, reminds us that a realm of possibilities confronts us and that the choice, ultimately, is our own.

Harrison has spoken ill of Hemingway in interviews, but this may be a case of influence-anxiety. His characters bathe as often as Brett Ashley, and they find their solace in the woods. He is, along with Cormac McCarthy, Tom McGuane, Thom Jones, Chris Offutt, and Gerald Haslam a sustainer of the tradition that asks “How should a person live?” and finds the answer in the natural, the perennial, the ancient, the quest itself. Hemingway never excluded women from his world, and their inclusion is even more explicit in Harrison. At times, Harrison could use a refresher course in the clarity of Hemingway's prose, and financial exigencies are sometimes too easily resolved. He has, however, like Hemingway, known both hardship and well-earned rewards, and has had similar entrée to wide experience and expertise. He even, like Hemingway, has only one good eye. Harrison has been a better literary son than he realizes, and we are the richer for it.