[In the following mixed review of the three novellas comprising Julip, Cheuse praises the engaging qualities of "Julip" and "The Seven-Ounce Man" but deems "The Beige Dolorosa" disappointing.]

It's a rare thing when it works, but Jim Harrison wants to have it both ways—to write successfully as a novelist and a poet—and he does. Six novels and three collections of novellas, counting this new book, eight volumes of poetry and a collection of nonfiction in the last few decades add up to one of the most interesting and entertaining bodies of work by any writer of his generation.

Looking back at Harrison's fiction, one sees some books still burning brightly while others have sputtered out. Along with the novels Sundog and Dalva, the novellas in Legends of the Fall, particularly the title work, show off a writer at the height of his powers. Legends of the Fall is at once an epical gesture toward our great romance with the West and an acutely modern critique of those same myths—again, Harrison wants it both ways. This intense and engaging story breaks a lot of the rules of narrative (so much exposition, so little time) even as it makes new space in the imagination for the realms of manhood and sorrow.

Julip, this new collection of three novellas, offers some, if not all, of that old power. Indeed, two of the three pieces match the Harrison standard.

Julip, the incredibly resourceful young woman in Harrison's lead novella, who "got her name, a mixture of a flower and a drink, by her parents' design in the first flower of a somewhat alcoholic marriage," has a mission in mind when we first meet her. She's the kind of girl who, fatherless in a world of rogues, goes for the older guys—and they go all out for her.

Julip is smart, cunning and "in addition to being vivid, all the years of working bird dogs with her father and on her own had given Julip an improbably shapely body. While tuning up dogs in the last month before the grouse season opens, it was nothing for her to walk a dozen miles a day over rough landscape." She tunes up men as well as dogs; when we meet her, she's working on a scheme to free her brother Bobby from jail after he was put away for shooting at three of Julip's middle-aged suitors down among the palms of Key West.

It's a tribute to Harrison's subtle narrative skills that as we follow Julip across Florida while she proceeds with her plan to get Bobby out of jail, we also move back and forth in time—discovering, in a third as many pages as it takes to build the usual novel, her dangerous past and how it comes to impinge on her present. Above all else the novella is a tribute to a young woman wise and talented beyond her years. Her father's dead—long ago run over while lying drunk in a sleeping bag in the middle of a campground parking lot—and her mother has floated away into some high society stratosphere. More than anything else from her childhood, Julip misses a bear that had been a bad if intriguing neighbor at the family's forest retreat in Wisconsin. To keep up her spirits, Julip reads Emily Dickinson and goes on the road on her brother's behalf.

"I'm in the thick of things," she notes in the journal she keeps as she rolls along. In the next line she admits: "Homesick for Wisconsin already." And homesick is how one probably will feel about Julip after reading about her charming and somewhat exotic escapades.

The second novella ["The Seven-Ounce Man"], brings back an old friend, Brown Dog, the Upper Michigan faux Native American rogue who in an earlier volume of Harrison novellas romanced a naive anthropologist even as he disrupted her dig. Banned from certain territory in the Upper Peninsula by the state police, Brown Dog goes about his daily round of loving and drinking and shoveling snow for quick cash and keeping his memoirs when things seem to him worth recording.

"Gaagaagfhirmh!" he writes. "I found this on my notepad . . . it is the word the Chips use for raven.... Sounds like one if you say it right, not too loud from the throat's back end. The days they come and go as always. . . ."

This tale brings Brown Dog out of his winter torpor and sends him back to that same dig—an Indian burial ground he has made it his mission to keep undisturbed—over which that same anthropologist still presides.

I suspect that you'll love what happens next and will miss Brown Dog as he heads west in the aftermath of his latest escapade. One looks forward to a third novella featuring this appealing misfit. He's the very figure of an American existential hero.

West is the direction taken by the hero of the third novella, "The Beige Dolorosa," after his academic career is destroyed by a firestorm of political correctness. Philip Caulkins, an expert on the mad English poet John Clare, leaves a lunatic Midwestern university for a ranch in the Southwest, where he finds an attractive world of birds and horses. Although details here are just as carefully observed as in the other novellas, Caulkins doesn't have the appeal of Julip or Brown Dog. But the standard set earlier in this collection is high, and Harison at least succeeds two out of three times.