[In the following review, Agee describes the three novellas contained in Julip and the prevalent themes that the stories share.]

More than any other writer today, Jim Harrison has been saddled by the critics with Hemingway's ghost. While it is true that Mr. Harrison's best work depicts, as did Hemingway's, individuals facing the uncertainty of the future with sheer will in a natural setting, his new collection of novellas, Julip, recasts such myths of male initiation and redemption. Finally, Mr. Harrison has exorcised the ghost and, in the process, established himself as a genuinely comic writer.

All three novellas are set in American landscapes traditionally used as testing grounds for men: the fishing waters of the South, the hunting woods of the North and the cattle ranches of the West. But, as Mr. Harrison comically demonstrates, the mythology of maleness often fails; appropriately enough, it is a woman, Julip, in the novella that bears her name, who comes most decisively to wisdom.

The hero of the second novella, “The Seven-Ounce Man,” isn't fooled by any myth of nature, either, and, while he doesn't mind hard physical labor, he has to have his weekly forays to the local bar, cavorting with the waitresses because “women still beat the hell out of men to be around.” He heads to the wilds of Los Angeles as soon as he gets a chance. In the final story, “The Beige Dolorosa,” a professor is able to discard his intellectual baggage when he stops mythologizing, escaping delivery into yet another form of macho doom simply by walking away.

In the perennial war between the sexes that underlies each of the novellas in this book, it is the women who have successfully negotiated the dark waters of strife; they wait on the shore while the men remain at sea, distracted by, or lost or entrenched in, a kind of suspended animation, the result of their failure to achieve any formal or significant end to their rituals of male initiation. These women range from crones to young seductresses, and they're mostly struggling against laughter at the absurdity of living with men.

In the novella “Julip,” the main character's brother, Bobby, is the only man who tires of the game; in a heroic gesture, he tries to right an assault on his sister's womanhood in one fell swoop, by taking a gun to three of those who have tarnished her. It's a gesture worthy of Faulkner's Quentin Compson, but time has eroded its tragic potential; here the action is reduced to a ritual leg-wounding of a group of over-the-hill alcoholics, referred to as “the Boys,” who are sitting ducks when Bobby ambushes them on a fishing trip.

Unlike the characters in Hemingway's world, no one in the novella dies from such nonsense—because, Mr. Harrison suggests, nothing much is really at stake. “These men develop an unbalanced affection for … outdoorsmen,” he explains, because they “appear to be less abstract and venal (untrue)” and “are leading a more manly life than can be led in a law office or brokerage house.” The “Boys” have already forfeited their manhood, their identities. They are permanently doomed to an annual repetition of their initiation out in the wilderness, laboriously shoring up their innocence and manhood with pretty young women like Julip for housekeepers.

However, in the novella's casual reference to those who have killed themselves after serving as “house frauleins, or lust slaves,” we glimpse the dark wreckage that lurks behind the facade of these seemingly happy-go-lucky good ol' boys. Despite their professional achievements, they know they are failures in the greater scheme of things, that they will constantly fall on the lesser side of male endeavor. Women end up the witnesses to and casualties of such slavery to male myths, while at the same time they are seen as reservoirs of power, redemption and damnation.

It is Julip who understands her own experience well enough to use it as the launching point for gaining wisdom, for taking care of the business of freeing her brother and establishing a life for herself that preserves what she loves best: her hunting dogs and the time she spends in the wilderness training them. In her quest to understand the truth about the death of her father, about the shootings that her brother is jailed for, about her own fall into the world of love and loss, Julip takes on comic and often truly heroic stature. By freeing herself from male mythology, she can use it to manipulate and control the “Boys” around her, who remain its slave. “Julip dressed in a sleeveless blouse, white shorts tight across her bottom, and sandals, putting a dab of lavender scent on her neck. The outfit and scent tended to send all of them into a hormonal trance.”

The second novella, “The Seven-Ounce Man,” revisits a picaresque hero called Brown Dog, about whom Mr. Harrison has written before. Although he's as much the romantic and sentimentalist as the other men in this book, Brown Dog possesses enough wit to laugh at himself, to remain open and curious about the convolutions of human endeavor. By refusing to be locked into a single pattern, ritual or myth—including that offered by the American Indian family friend who gives him a cabin and work—Brown Dog remains true to himself. “There didn't seem to be a philosophical or theological palliative,” he notes early on, considering his lack of money and love. But after he finally sleeps with his childhood sweetheart, he realizes that “it can be a blessed event when a dream dies.”

A collector of wisdom (“even gravy couldn't help fruitcake”), Brown Dog is light and mobile, seen by others as “a goof … a long-lost retarded brother” not about to be circumscribed by traditions, cultures, systems of belief. “He liked a genuinely empty future.” Instead, in appropriately canine fashion, he wanders from one place to another, sampling the scents, lapping at the tastes, taking rewards and woundings in equal stride and with equal grace. Not surprisingly, he's an eminently likable character.

There is a development of ideas from one novella to another in this book, and it comes full circle in the third novella, “The Beige Dolorosa.” Phillip Caulkins, a middle-aged professor, has been driven out of academia, ostensibly by political correctness, but actually by his failure to relinquish old forms, by his attraction to the mythic female and by his near-fatal marriage to reason. In retirement from love, he has adopted a sort of neurasthenic posture, forced by his passivity to live off the kindness of strangers on an isolated Arizona ranch.

Unable even to cook, he lives for a while like some enervated drunk until women and circumstance force him out of his shell-shocked remorse and self-pity, back into the world of work and self-awareness. He begins his recovery by undertaking to rename all the birds of North America, a grandiose intellectual gesture, but soon gives up and submits to the simple pleasures of repairing barbed-wire fencing, rediscovering his lost sexuality—and recovering his life itself. Finally he recognizes what's at stake: “What I want to know is if I don't find freedom in this life, when will I find it?”

What makes these novellas work best is the authority of Mr. Harrison's voice, expressed via a curiously old-fashioned, ironic yet earnest narrator who acts as a kind of moral and ethical guide through the shorthand of the sharp cinematic moments of the plots. “She was born mean, captious, sullen,” this narrator observes at one point, “with occasional small dirty windows of charm.”

In the novellas of Julip Jim Harrison suggests that what is suspect in our lives are the grand gestures we invent, the sentimental versions of reality we refuse to discard. The puniness of our lives, which Hemingway could only accept by creating yet another myth, is really, in Mr. Harrison's view, an opportunity for making do, for creating out of nothing something that is authentic and individual. As his characters discover, there's no reason to see life as tragic. Julip's father wasn't a suicide, as she was led to believe; he passed out drunk in a public park and was run over. It was just a stupid accident, not a fatal, romantic gesture.