[In the following laudatory review, Grinnell provides a thematic analysis of Legends of the Fall.]

Jim Harrison writes with that clear precision of an experienced hunter who, with a razor sharp knife, can not only field dress a deer but also can skin the hide and membrane from the carcass and leave only venison and bones from what was, a few short hours before, an alive and graceful animal.

I begin with this image intentionally for it typifies both the style and substance of Harrison's prose in the three lengthy stories that constitute Legends of the Fall. These three stories are not for the faint of heart, for there is much death and violence here. Harrison's prose is what Sam Peckinpah's films are to cinema, only better. His writing is rather like that dressed-out deer, raw meat and bones—not fat and tallow. His fiction is almost pure narrative with virtually no dialogue.

The first story in the collection, "Revenge," speaks of a retired air-force officer, Cochran, who has been beaten and left for dead in a Mexican desert after having had an affair with the wife of a ruthless and wealthy Mexican friend. Though affluent, the characters are drawn (and sometimes nearly quartered) against a milieu of Darwinian starkness—only the crafty and tough survive.

For example, when Cochran and his lover are followed and discovered in a hunting cabin, the enraged husband, Tibey (a Spanish nickname for Shark) "takes a razor from his pocket and deftly cuts an incision across . . . [his wife's] lips, the pimp's ancient revenge for a wayward girl." Yet after all the vengeance, retribution, contretemps, and violence, all are remorseful. Cochran, the lover, and Tibey, the husband, are both bereft. Tibey "both in nightmares and in waking moments . . . [feels] the tick in his hand when the razor went through her lips and struck against her teeth." Cochran ends up by digging a grave for his former lover whom he discovered dying in a convent for the insane. While there is honor, survival, passion, sentimentalism (the end of the story is rather like "Evangeline"), in the end, only death wins out.

Indeed death is the dominant theme of all three stories. Death comes quickly to the antagonists and is quickly forgotten, but when a loved one dies, death leaves an irrevocable sense of loss in the hearts of the survivors. And while Harrison gives brief consideration to eschatological matters, they are just as briefly dismissed. The weak, inept and/or gentle die; the strong are left to grieve until their own natural but inevitable death comes.

The middle story, "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," also embraces these themes, albeit a little less so than the other two. The protagonist, Nordstrom, undergoes a crisis of change (though Harrison does not stoop to use the term "mid-life crisis"). A successful businessman in his early forties, Nordstrom chucks his wealth and position after his daughter grows up and his wife has left him. The metamorphosis is nearly unbearable but is something that has to be accepted. "A strange feeling came over [Nordstrom] that gradually forced a radical change in his life. It was an ache just above his heart between his breastbone and throat." But neither Harrison nor his characters waste time on unanswerable questions—a few lines later, Nordstrom dismisses thinking about such matters by saying, "oh, fuck it."

And so it goes. There is more violence and action. Nordstrom hurls a potential assassin seven stories to his death and thinks little of it; yet he grieves deeply over the loss of his wife and daughter and the death of his father. To fill partially these voids, he takes up gourmet cooking and dancing by himself. These are, however, merely things he chooses as existential alternatives to ending his own life. In the wild kingdom, the survivors do not kill themselves.

The title story is superb. "Legends of the Fall" is the longest piece of fiction that Esquire magazine has ever published, and the January 2-16, 1979, issue is worth seeking out for the beautiful illustrations that accompany the story. It begins as a tale of three brothers who leave their father and Montana ranch in 1914 to ride to Calgary, Alberta, to join the fight against Germany. Once in Europe, the yougest and most sensitive of the three, Samuel, is killed. The oldest, Alfred, is wounded and sent home. The middle son, Tristan, already a recalcitrant loner, goes nearly mad and not only kills but also scalps a large number of Germans before cutting out Samuel's heart, sealing it in paraffin and sending it home to his father in Montana for burial.

The story quickly becomes Tristan's alone. He is given a medical discharge because of his "craziness" and after escaping a mental ward, seeks out his seafaring grandfather in England, returns to the U. S., and marries the woman intended for his brother. After a brief, passionate attempt to impregnate her in order to replace Samuel, he goes to sea, first with his grandfather and later as captain of his own schooner. There follows a spate of sea adventures before Tristan returns to Montana to marry a sixteen-yearold half-blooded Indian girl named after his mother, Isabel. Tristan calls her Two.

Having given up Tristan as lost at sea, Susannah, his first wife, had married Alfred. Meanwhile, Tristan lives seven years of relative happiness ranching and smuggling whisky from Canada before Two is accidentally killed. There is then another period of adventure, violence, and mayhem. Years later, the story ends as it began—with violent, poignantly sad deaths.

The three stories are thematically linked by death, burials, survival and by three stoic figures, a Mexican and two American Indians who respectively serve as role models for the three protagonists. All three pieces of fiction are gripping, powerful action tales with literary echoes of Hemingway, Conrad, and others.

At least one feminist critic has called Legends of the Fall and its author "macho." I am sure Harrison doesn't mind. Esquire quotes him as being guilty of the "victimless crime" of writing literary fiction. Literary his fiction is, but it is a lot more. Legends of the Fall should be read by everyone who cares about contemporary fiction and by all those who, at least occasionally, are bored with their own lives.