[In the following review, Coates examines the plots, characters, and themes of The Woman Lit by Fireflies.]

For almost the last 20 years, Jim Harrison has been developing into one of our finest novelists, even though he declines to live what late 20th Century America considers to be a writer's life, which these days usually revolves around the universities with their MFA programs and teaching jobs.

Harrison remains essentially the same man who spent years "at manual labor as a block layer, a carpenter, a digger of well pits," as he indicated in a Paris Review interview a few years ago, and he believes "that rural, almost white-trash element . . . stood me in good stead as an artist, in the great variety of life it forced me into. . . ." He legitimately has the kind of resumé that writers used to display on the jacket, of their first novels: Mr. So-and-So has worked as a bartender, bricklayer, census-taker and member of a magazine subscription crew.

As a result, Harrison writes the kind of bedrock Americana that Hemingway might have turned out if he had come home from the Great War, moved up in Michigan and stayed there, with occasional side trips to Key West, Idaho and other points west. He is a poet who wrote his first eccentric novel (Wolf) during the enforced ennui of being in traction after a hunting accident. And his combination of poetic attentiveness to detail with the exemplary commonplaceness of the life he has continued to lead gives his work a genuine mythopoeic quality that is rare, if not unique, among contemporary American writers.

Part of that power has to do with Harrison's feeling for the spirit of a land or place and his identification with the kind of people, Native Americans among others, who routinely believe that the natural world is contiguous with an unseen one. "Why are people," he has asked, "incapable of ascribing to the natural world the kind of mystery which they think they are somehow deserving of but have never reached? . . . For our purposes as artists, everything we are taught is false—everything."

Harrison and his characters believe in that continuity between the natural and the unseen solidly enough to mock the phony veneration of it among professional mystifiers and modern-day shamans—like the team of anthropologists who get involved with an Upper Peninsula layabout and fake Indian named Brown Dog, title character of the hilarious first novella among the three in Harrison's new book, The Woman Lit By Fireflies, which is in many ways a companion volume to the three epic tales in his Legends of the Fall (1979).

Brown Dog's amused, wary and edgy affair with the beautiful academic Shelley could be a paradigm for the quint-essential Harrison man's relationship with the whole modern world. He meets her when she and "two fellows who wore beards and hundred-dollar tennis shoes" come into a bar looking for the old Chippewa herbalist with whom Brown Dog is drinking. Brown Dog appreciates her beauty while noting that she "is a fair-size girl by modern standards, but not in the Upper Peninsula. .. . In a cold climate a larger woman is favored by all except transplants from down below. . . ." If Brown Dog and his friends want beauty, they watch the "exercise programs on television as you don't get to see all that many girls in bathing suits in the U. P., what with summer being known locally as three months of bad sledding."

From Shelley and her friends, including an equally beautiful cousin named Tarah, Brown Dog gets sex, free psychoanalysis and "a book of poetry by a fruitcake Arab by the name of Gibran that I couldn't understand, so I gave it to a tourist girl and it made her horny as a toad."

From Brown Dog, Shelley gets sex plus limited and grudging access to a Chippewa burial mound that would make her name in anthropology of the Hillman period if only she could get him to pin down its location.

Brown Dog, who works as a salvage diver, meanwhile pursues his own disastrous project of raising an Indian corpse perfectly embalmed by the cold at the bottom of Lake Superior so he can sell it for $20,000 to a shady Chicago dealer in nautical artifacts.

Amid the farcical crescendo of these intertwining plots, something real and quite moving takes place. All three novellas are about midlife crises that are really unresolved adolescent problems, actions defining selfhood that are delayed for 20 or 30 years.

In "Brown Dog," the 42-year-old title character finally catches up with Rose, the Chippewa girl who wanted nothing to do with him in high school. "Sunset Limited," the second story, is "The Big Chill" played for keeps, as the former members of "a pacifist Wild Bunch" who did time in the late sixties for vandalizing a local draft board regroup in middle age to save the one of their number who has continued his radical activism and is now under sentence of death in a Mexican prison.

Gwen, the divorced rancher with an adopted Cambodian teenage daughter; Billy, who has been "destructively manipulated by his father" into becoming a brilliant and wealthy corporate lawyer; Patty, a vice-president at a Hollywood movie studio; and Sam, the mystical former Green Beret who has become a naturalist "studying coyotes in the mountain fastness of northern New Mexico," have all "enacted the rite of passage from Yippiehood to some compromise with Yuppiehood." But each will have to sacrifice something to save Zip, the half-mad but essentially harmless revolutionary.

In the title story, the woman ultimately lit by fireflies is Clare, who would be 50 in another week but up till now has been "so fair-minded as to be frequently rendered immobile." She ends her immobility and makes her first real bid for independence during a drive across Iowa in an Audi 5000 as "her husband on the seat beside her punched in a tape called Tracking the Blues which contained no black music, but rather the witless drone of a weekly financial lecture sent from New York City."

At a rest stop she leaves a note to the police in a toilet stall saying "My husband has been abusing me. Do not believe anything he says," and escapes among endless rows of corn into freedom and an oncoming migraine. Improvising shelter according to half-learned survival lessons and reviewing her life, she recognizes some important truths and revives some old dreams during a long rainy night lit only by fireflies. The hardest truth of all is simple recognition of how much time it took her to begin living:

The beauty and dread of time was that nothing was forgiven. Not a single minute. The years she had spent in consideration of this act were not only lost, irretrievable, but the recognition of the loss was so naive as to leave her breathless.

Brown Dog's retrieval of his sunken Indian, whom he dazedly comes to identify as his father, proves to be an effective metaphor for the psychic action of all three of these marvelous stories: something painful, unfaceable is brought to the surface of a half-lived life, and recognition of it allows life to resume being lived as it should be.

And the advice Brown Dog gets from "the chief . . . who spoke to me there in the ice-cold dark" of a stolen refrigerator truck, is after all pretty good:

"Beware of women with forked tongues. Buy yourself a hat, because your hair is thinning on top. Don't rely on alcohol so much for good times . . . [D]on't come tromping into the Halls of Death, but live your life with light feet. Before I forget, bury me in the Forest where I belong, not with the fish."