[In the following favorable review of The Woman Lit by Fireflies, Houston explores stylistic and thematic aspects of the three novellas.]

A dozen years ago, Jim Harrison published a collection called Legends of the Fall, which may well be the best set of novellas to appear in this country during the last quarter-century. But if [The Woman Lit By Fireflies,] which also consists of three novellas, doesn't move at the breakneck speed of its predecessor, there's no cause for Harrison fans to become alarmed. No writer who tries to extend his range, as good writers must, can allow himself to repeat effects only because they worked well the first time around. The Woman Lit by Fireflies demonstrates, in fact, a powerful talent in search of its limits.

All three novellas explore, to varying extents, a familiar Harrison theme, which is summed up in a line one of his characters remembers from a Robert Duncan poem: "Foremost we admire the outlaw / who has the strength of his own / lawfulness."

In the first story, a rogue tale called "Brown Dog," the narrator is literally an outlaw, if only a petty one—a fellow called B. D., shortened from the nickname Brown Dog, which was given to him by his Chippewa neighbors in Michigan's Upper Peninsula when he was a boy. B. D. is the most vivid of the book's characters, a scoundrel and folk philosopher whose impeccably done voice swings from humor to pathos as easily as a blues song. B. D. may or may not be part Indian himself; he was raised as an orphan and has pretty much had to make himself up as he goes along. Now he's got involved with a graduate student in anthropology who's using their love affair to wangle out of him the location of an ancient Chippewa burial ground; B. D., however, refuses to comply, since he's sworn to the Chippewas that he won't. On the other hand, he's discovered an intact Indian corpse in the cold waters of Lake Superior and is trying to peddle it to a shady artifacts dealer, an endeavor for which the cops have branded him an outlaw.

What's truly lawful, then? For B. D. (and, one suspects, for Jim Harrison, too), lawfulness lies in respecting what's worth respect—in B. D.'s own terms.

The second novella, "Sunset Limited," moves with a hard narrative drive that makes it the closest cousin to the stories in Legends of the Fall. It's a kind of political melodrama that brings four 60's radicals, now middle-aged and "reformed," back together to rescue their onetime leader from a Mexican jail. For a while, they become outlaws again to fight the greater outlaws in the still-intact System. In the process, they must come to terms with old betrayals, loves and ironies.

But while the issues the novella deals with are valid, the story itself is marred by a not terribly credible action-movie ending. One of the characters, for example, redeems a long-ago betrayal by staying behind to cover the others' escape from the C.I.A. In the process, he gets himself blown apart by an AK-47, but manages to die with "a trace of a smile" on his face. Actors, one imagines, are much more likely to die smiling than real people who are torn to shreds by assault rifles. Because it fails to live up to its promise, "Sunset Limited" is the weakest of the three stories.

The title novella, which originally appeared in a slightly different form in The New Yorker, represents the greatest departure from Mr. Harrison's earlier work. Its protagonist, a more subtle outlaw, is a wealthy, fiftyish suburban Detroit housewife who simply walks away from her husband at a freeway rest stop, leaving a note in the bathroom and making her escape over a fence out back. She spends the night in a cornfield, and in the course of that night—complete with flashbacks that allow the reader to understand how things have come to such a startling pass—she is reborn into a new, more authentic self.

At one level, "The Woman Lit by Fireflies" is very much a classic New Yorker story, with all the blessings and limitations that almost-genre has come to imply: an emphasis on subtext and character over immediacy and plot, a narrative that digresses as much as it progresses, an "interior" approach to storytelling. In the hands of lesser writers, the form can produce pretty bloodless fiction. But it is Mr. Harrison's characteristic energy—in the prose, in the individual moments—that ultimately saves the piece. Instead of being overwhelmed by the form, he has transcended it, created a tension with it.

As he did in his most recent novel, Dalva, Mr. Harrison proves again in "The Woman Lit by Fireflies" that he can convincingly handle a woman's point of view, once more giving the lie to the inane argument that a writer must stick only with his or her own sex, race, region and so on. A talented writer who understands the human heart, as Mr. Harrison does, understands essence; the rest of a character is accident, and can be learned.

Overall, then, while it is quite different from the earlier collection, The Woman Lit by Fireflies provides a sampler of just what Jim Harrison is up to these days. And though it's not without its flaws, what he's up to is still exciting and impressive.