[In the following review, Kakutani offers a thematic analysis of the three novellas comprising The Woman Lit by Fireflies.]

Although they have almost nothing else in common, the three protagonists in Jim Harrison's new collection of novellas [The Woman Lit by Fireflies] are all at turning points in their lives. Having somehow managed to reach middle age without too many bouts of introspection, they suddenly find themselves forced—by circumstance or self-doubt—to reassess their lives, and the reader is invited to listen in on their efforts to come to terms with the past. Each of the stories is told, with varying degrees of effectiveness, in a series of dreamlike flashbacks and flash-forwards that cut back and forth in time. Each is meant to convey the shape and texture of a life caught in medias res.

The title character of the first tale, "Brown Dog," will be instantly familiar to readers of the author's earlier books. Brown Dog, or B. D., as he is called by some of his pals, is another one of those macho men of the wilderness who are fond of solitude, alcohol and women (in more or less that order). . . .

As he has done so many times before, Mr. Harrison conjures up life in the Michigan wilderness in strong, authoritative prose, and he proves equally adept at satirizing the ecological-minded yuppies who arrive there intent on writing dissertations about Indian burial mounds and local storytelling customs. It is B. D.'s luck to become involved with just such a yuppie—a sexy young woman named Shelley, who becomes his lover and later his legal guardian.

Shelley seduces B. D. to get him to show her some secret Indian burial grounds—or so he later suspects. Their affair, along with a series of other developments, will cause B. D. to start re-evaluating his attitudes toward family and tradition. Some of those developments (including the vindictive torching of a campsite, and the discovery of a frozen corpse in a lake) sound ridiculously melodramatic when described in isolation, but as depicted by Mr. Harrison they are smoothly knit into the narrative, lending it both suspense and a heightened sense of legend.

Similar elements conclude the second story, "Sunset Limited," but unfortunately they turn a well-observed account of a "Big Chill"-like reunion into a moralistic fable about guilt and redemption, revolutionary zeal and liberal piety. This time, the dynamic between rich city slickers and nature-loving country folks is illustrated by two pairs of former 60's radicals.

On one hand, there are Patty, an uptight movie executive known for mixing risky pictures, and Billy, an enormously wealthy lawyer, who takes corporate planes back and forth to his favorite baseball games. Opposing them are Gwen, a plucky woman who ekes out a living on a small ranch in the Arizona desert after her divorce, and Sam, an eccentric naturalist who prefers the company of coyotes to that of human beings. Although the four have had little contact with one another since their draft-board-protest days, they are unexpectedly reunited when a fifth friend—an ardent revolutionary named Zip, who has stubbornly clung to his radical politics—is jailed in Mexico for outside agitation.

What happens when Patty, Billy, Gwen and Sam try to rescue Zip is not only tricked up in the worst movie-of-the-week-fashion, it is also delineated in such baldly manipulative terms that the reader is never able to forget that Mr. Harrison is there behind the scenes, pushing and pulling his characters hither and thither to illustrate his own theses.

The last novella in this volume, "The Woman Lit by Fireflies," also suffers from an air of contrivance. Like the author's last novel, Dalva, it attempts to give a portrait of a middle-aged woman as she searches her past for clues to her identity. This time, the woman in question is a wealthy and genteel Midwesterner married to a horribly supercilious businessman.

As they're driving home after a visit with their daughter, Clare suddenly bolts: at a rest stop on the highway, she leaves a note in the ladies' room saying she is running away from an abusive husband, and she sets off alone through the cornfields. She spends the night in a farmer's field; she catches rainwater in an empty can, builds a fire with some twigs and roasts an ear of corn for dinner. In the process, she reviews her life and marriage.

Though there are some genuinely moving moments in Clare's reminiscences, much of her story feels hokey and sentimental. Her husband is described in such thoroughly obnoxious terms that the reader finds it difficult to understand why Clare has stayed with him all these years. Worse, Clare's own maudlin memories—which mainly have to do with her beloved dog, Sammy, who dies of cancer within weeks of her best friend, who also dies of cancer—sound more like someone's impersonation of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown than the thing itself.

In the end, Clare, like Mr. Harrison's other two protagonists, finds fulfillment and a measure of redemption in moving on to the next chapter of her life. The reader is ultimately less satisfied, finishing [The Woman Lit by Fireflies] with decidedly mixed feelings.