My generation learned that one way to the self is through travel when we read Catcher in the Rye. Then, we read On the Road, and, later, Travels with Charley. Now part of the "new middle aged" group in their 60's, Jim Harrison provides us with The English Major.Cliff's wife got bored and ran of...
Having struggled through the overly plotted machinations of Gone Girl it was a pleasure to dive into Jim Harrison's shaggy dog story road trip and reflection on late middle age crisis. When you are reading Harrison you cannot help but hope and feel that the fictional characters are proxy!s for th...
After reading Denis Johnson's wonderful novella Train Dreams I was inspired to do some more novella reading so I picked up The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison. They're not dissimilar--Johnson and Harrison--especially the first of the two novellas in Harrison's collection, "The Land of Unlikeness," ...
I will read more by this author, though this book is terribly uneven. One story is mundane, following a sixty year old man through a month as his mother's caregiver. The other is fantastic, telling the story of a nineteen year old's marathon swims (impossible open water swims from the rural home ...
Harrison, Jim. The Great Leader, Grove Press, New York, 2011 (329pp.$24) Though he’d forgive us saying it, and probably emit a chuckle, the great novelist Jim Harrison is a tad bit daffy. Maybe he always was, or maybe Americans ociety and culture, now gone entirely around the bend, is too easy ...
I wondered why Harrison decided to write this novel as a detective story, when that part of it was quite farcical. The better story was that about the just-retired detective coming to terms with a divorce from his lifelong partner, his partiality to alcohol, his flagging libido that is transformi...
A very satisfying read of an extended family in the Michigan Upper Peninsula finding their way through woods of life. Harrison is among a handful of American novelists I most appreciate for a capacity to elucidate the interplay of the individual and collective sources of meaning in existence. Li...
"Dear Son! I am being honest but not honest enough. Once up in Minnesota I saw a three-legged bobcat, a not quite whole bobcat with one leg lost to a trap. There is the saw about cutting the horse's legs off to get him in a box. The year it happened to me the moon was never quite full. Is the sto...
Utterly unlike the movie – but no better. The movie might be better. (The last time I saw it I was high and I was very entertained imagining digressive counter-films about Col. Ludlow’s embittered back story and virginal Samuel’s “poetic” friendships with other Cambridge aesthetes and the homosex...