they have known one another since childhood, attended the same college, and belonged to the same sorority. They have all married very successful men who turned out to be unsatisfactory husbands. More recently, each has had an affair with Daryl, a disaffected, self-important, counterculture aesthete and writer. The three friendsMartha, Frances, and Shirleyhave known Daryl since college, when he first managed to seduce each of them even though they had sworn an oath that “none . . . would ever sleep with this monster.” After Daryl, in what seems to be a moment of mean-spirited reprisal, reveals to the friends’ three husbands that he has slept with their wives, Martha poisons him with crushed-up antidepressant drugs in his coffee. Before long Martha has fled to Mexico, where her friends soon join her to help her understand how to get her life back in order.

“Republican Wives” manages to do several things at once. On one hand, it pokes fun at upper-class American life, with its materialism and crass capitalism. The story poses the age-old question: Can money buy happiness? If so, why are these women so eager to enter into an affair, one at a time, with a man they loathe? The novella also pokes fun at the archetype of the smug and condescending literary artiste. At the same time, the central focus of these women’s livesalthough perhaps unrealized by any of the three of themis shown to be the friendships they have with one another.

The third piece in Harrison’s collection, “Tracking,” is only a novella in terms of its length; it does not exactly create a fictional story. The account it provides, in a clipped, precise, third-person narrative, mirrors closely Harrison’s biography as most recently related by the author in his memoir Off to the Side (2003). “Tracking” begins with a young man, Jimmy or Jim, growing up in rural Michigan whose intellectual curiosity is slowly stoked until he has determined to become a writer. He attends the University of Michigan, marries young, earns a master’s degree, teaches briefly at State University of New York, Stony Brook, wins poetry awards, eventually turns to fiction, and finally makes money once Hollywood takes an interest.

The title of the novella-memoir implies that, again and again, Jim tries to make sense of who he is and what he is to become, based on where he is. The narrator notes that, more than any other occupation, travel has taught him the most: “If your own personality was almost carelessly absolved and you were open and interested, the stories floated into the mind in amazing quantity. There seemed to be a place in every culture for the writer as listener and most people wanted to be heard.”

Like “The Summer He Didn’t Die” and “Republican Wives,” “Tracking” is divided into three parts; the segments of “Tracking” divide the writer-narrator’s life: “What the Boy Saw,” “What the Man Saw,” and “What the Older Man Saw.” Part of what the narrator learns over his long career and various misadventures is the importance of family. Spending a night with two elderly fishermen who helped him fix his broken truck during one spell of wanderlust, “it occurred to him that there were no obligations to art or anything else except to support his wife and daughters. Above all else he was still his father’s son.” In other words, “place” is not somewhere to be visited but rather something one constructs from the love of other people, to take along with one.

The reader of The Summer He Didn’t Die is tempted to connect its three works thematically, as Faulkner famously did with the collection of short stories and novellas Go Down Moses (1942). Often, placing such artificial frameworks on collections of shorter works is to do the author a disservice. Nonetheless, there are certain thematic elements that carry through each of these texts. At some level, each of the protagonistsBrown Dog, Martha, Frances, Shirley, and Jimis looking for some fleeting phantom of happiness, a will-o-the-wisp that will bring enlightenment and fulfillment. The unsophisticated and stumbling Brown Dog may be the one most adept at enjoying the wonders that each day brings, but even he is in a constant search for love. The three Republican wives hope to find happiness and meaning in life through sex with a man who represents everything their stolid and secure husbands are not. Jim seeks to find artistic transcendence somewhere just down the road.

What each of these characters does, in response to the simple human elusiveness of their dreams, is to gather family about them. Over the course of “The Summer He Didn’t Die,” Brown Dog goes from being a single, forty-nine-year-old man with no responsibilities to someone willing to flee his native land and become a fugitive from the law to save his adopted daughter. In “Republican Wives,” the one man that Martha can count on is her father, a representative of how men behaved in prior generations, when loyalty and honesty counted. Further, although none of the women have sisters, they each fly to Martha’s side immediately when she is in trouble. In a sense, the care the women show one another reveals that their deepest relationships are not between themselves and their husbands but rather among the three of them. Even their dalliances with Daryl are shared. Although “Tracking” is more of a portrait of the artist as a young man than it is a work focused on family, Jim nevertheless learns in it that his family is what is most important to himabove fame, above riches, and above artistry.