[Keith Opdahl is an American critic and author. In the following review of Legends of the Fall, he praises stylistic aspects of Harrison's novellas but challenges his depiction of the plight of the American male.]

It's as though William Butler Yeats had written a scenario for Sam Peckinpah. Or as though James Dickey had done a Western—though Dickey wraps the violence in Deliverance in a context that attempts to explain and redeem it, while Jim Harrison gives the pure, raw, macho daydream. Harrison's three long stories are full of silent men and lovely women who desire to be ravaged. The bad guys are nightmare figures with names like "Slats" who just won't listen to reason. You have to zap them hard.

What is it about these purely evil characters? Do we turn to them because of their simplicity? Some atavistic belief in evil? In Dickey's novel the middle-class men are forced to become violent, and the memory of their classy cars and tiled kitchens makes the brutal state of nature shocking. So this is what happens when you drop out of Rotary! But in Harrison such contrasts melt away. The violence is a norm a daydream, a fantasy of male power that we could call adolescent if it weren't so clearly middle-aged. The 40-year-old with his waning powers must be as anxious as the 16-year-old discovering them. Both somehow require the sexuality of gunplay—a weapon, invincible, squirting bullets at all who would do harm. "He lifted the Purdey twelve-gauge shotgun along his leg up through the parting in the robe and blew the two Irishmen into eternity."

And yet Harrison's style can be pretty decent, as you would expect from a man who has published four volumes of poetry. When three brothers ride off to enlist in World War I, for example, Harrison sets the scene.

By first light the wind blew hard against the yellowed aspens, the leaves skittering across the high pasture and burying themselves in a draw. When they forded their first river the leaves of the cottonwoods stripped by the wind caught in the eddies, pasting themselves against the rocks.

Harrison sees the weather and the countryside clearly. He too often doesn't see the characters, and particularly the women. In the first story, "Revenge," the wife who seduced Cochran is vague, which is unforgivable since it is love for her that drives the protagonist. Or is it? You would think, in any case, that Harrison's preference for event over character would make him careful in his plots, but not so. Cochran knows that the husband of his lover is a Mexican millionaire, for example, with gangster connections and the nickname "Shark"—not exactly the kind of man you would want to cuckold. But when the husband sends him an envelope with a one-way ticket to Madrid, Cochran is mystified. One way? Why one way? And why all this cash? "He examined the ticket several times thinking the return might have been left out by mistake." And when he is beaten up during the weekend tryst, Cochran takes it poorly. The husband has overreacted, he feels, and the wife must certainly agree. She has her lips sliced by a razor and is forced to serve the troops in a Mexican whorehouse for a month. These men!

The best of the stories, "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," suggests that Harrison has better fiction within him. The protagonist is a second-generation Norwegian named Nordstrom who is emotionally reticent. He is also an American who has found our dream empty, and a somewhat clumsy man who is too sincere, too diligent not to act once he has seen through the sham. Since it is his unimaginative diligence that first traps him in the American culture (working for an oil company) and then drives him—literal-minded maniac that he is—to seek something better. Nordstrom is a moving figure. At 40, divorced, he dances alone in his apartment, trying to get in touch with himself. A cliché? Perhaps, though Harrison has caught something both recognizable and fresh. Nordstrom is too innocent, too efficient, not to seek health.

At the very least, he points to a peculiar result of our melting pot, for when the stiff-lipped children of Northern European immigrants see a Latin mama hugging and crying and loving in the movies, they don't shrug it off, regretting their ancestors didn't use more garlic. They feel cold, deprived, emotionally stunted, or so Harrison suggests. And in this story they do something about it, for Harrison finds his point of departure in the emotional sterility that so many other writers take as their shaping revelation. Attempting to return to life. Nordstrom tries the healing hobby—a sailboat, skiing, some tennis—and then quits his job to move from California to Boston to be near his grown daughter. He dances. He eats in a Jewish delicatessen, where he has fun filling in for the short-order cook. He keeps a diary and develops his cooking skills and takes his emotional temperature. He worries about his sex life, and if Harrison isn't totally successful, turning to another gangster who must be tossed out the window, he finds a story that works. For when Nordstrom abandons his Boston life to become a cook in a small Florida restaurant, we do not wonder when he will return North. He has found the kind of strenuous, simple life he needs. We note with satisfaction that he also finds someone with whom to dance—strangers, acquaintances. But someone.

This too is fantasy, of course, but it is honest and revealing. Harrison's style is right, too, for it consists mostly of summary, as though we looked from a distance, with a tone that catches the large perspective and mute struggle of the character himself.

But this style cannot redeem the title story, which Esquire published with much hoopla, for it is the crudest fantasy of the three, and makes one wonder about the state of the American male. We have the Montana ranch with lots of blue weather over distant hills. We have the family group and a sacred place within a canyon. We have such loyal family retainers as the Indian, One Stab, who likes to do savage dances. But most of all, we have the cold fury of a romantically wronged man, Tristan, the wild brother in the tradition of Faulkner's Sutpen and the Public Broadcasting System's Poldark. When he was 12, Tristan demanded that his mother return to the ranch from Boston, where she preferred to spend the winters. When she refused, Tristan cursed God and became, Harrison says, an unbeliever. It is our greatest myth—"It's all Mom's fault."

But it is really the death of his brother in World War I and then of his true love by a stray bullet that Tristan cannot forgive. He throws away his life in angry, brooding, romantic adventure on the sea and as a bootlegger. Never mind that he hurts other people far more than life hurts him. He is our protagonist, and we are to see him as sensitive rather than as a sorehead. When he lays another brother's pathetically insane wife, whom he had abandoned earlier—the point of his name—we are to understand that he is driven to it by his unhappiness.

Has Harrison seen too many gangster movies, too many Westerns, too much TV? He seems to believe all this, though I would guess that he is either doing movie scenarios, attempting to tap into the great American Dream Machine—and after starving through four volumes of poetry he might well have earned the right—or has trained himself as a poet to be too honest, too direct to soften these American fantasies. They are not after all so very different from Grimm's fairy tales. The bad guys must be destroyed. The good guy provides a catharsis of self-pity and resentment.

Every once in a while someone like Calvin Trillin confesses his hunger for Twinkies, as though his body had a real need for all those chemicals. If our culture has a similar need for junk lit—the so-called "romantic" fiction of lonely people engaged in preposterous and violent pranks, usually in picturesque places—why not have our poets write it? Give them a monopoly, if we cannot stamp it out. Enrich our endowment of the arts. In the hands of Jim Harrison, these fantasies are so open we can indeed see what we are or what we dream. At the very least, such clumsy plots and vacant characters, such ill-concealed self-pity and anger, such male posturing and fearful fantasies would find expression in precise language.