The Ancient Minstrel by Jim Harrison

Published by Grove Press on March 1, 2016

One of the characters in The Ancient Minstrel mentions that editors want big, sprawling stories that smack readers in the face. Jim Harrison doesn’t do a lot of smacking. He writes meandering stories that observe foibles and failures, that pry into the ordinary, that tell stories within stories and make readers pause and grin and perhaps indulge in a knowing chuckle. His characters enjoy sex and food and rivers but they are usually uncertain about the other things in life, if any, that might give them pleasure. The three novellas collected here are emblematic of Harrison’s work.

Typical of Jim Harrison’s recent fiction, “The Ancient Minstrel” is about an aging man who drinks too much, sleeps around (a habit that is impaired by aging and drinking too much), lies habitually, and copes with “imagined monsters” as well as all of life’s “deep injustices” (such as the death of a pet). The story’s protagonist, a 70-year-old writer/poet, is melancholy but his thoughts of suicide have always been interrupted by hunger before he could act upon them. The writer is semi-separated from his surprisingly tolerant wife. Whether that tolerance will extend to harboring the pregnant pig he impulsively purchases for their Montana ranch is one of many situations that showcases Harrison’s wry humor.

The point of “The Ancient Minstrel” (I think) is that there are always reasons to continue living, unexpected moments of pure joy that, even if fleeting, make it all worthwhile. A brief epilog, written in the first person, discusses the craft of writing in very personal terms.

The second entry, “Eggs,” tells the story of Catherine, whose grandparents owned the Montana farm where her mother (a London transplant) desperately wanted to live. The story explores different periods of Catherine’s life: London during the Blitz, Palm Beach after the war, wrong men everywhere, including an incarcerated brother. Through it all, her affinity for chickens never abates. The title refers not just to chickens but to Catherine’s own eggs and the difficulty of finding someone worthwhile to fertilize them. The point of the story might be that chickens are better for your mental health than parents or partners. But the more meaningful theme is that the past is always part of the present. Life is “a constant whirl in which people often behave horribly,” yet “the past lives on in all of us” and we need to find a way to make peace with it.

“The Case of the Howling Buddhas” features Sunderson, a retired cop and current private investigator who is familiar to Harrison fans. The story, in fact, is almost a continuation of the last Sunderson novel, with frequent references to past events. Sunderson’s behavior is rather scandalous (it usually involves females who are barely, or not yet, old enough to vote), which makes him either endearing or disgusting to readers (opinions are sharply divided, judging from Amazon reviews). This story comes the closest of the three to having a plot (Sunderson is hired to track down a wealthy man’s daughter who has run off with a Zen teacher) but its focus is on Sunderson’s lust for a girl who is a half century younger than Sunderson. The ending comes as a shock.

I like Jim Harrison for many reasons. One is that he makes a point of writing about characters who go out of their way to play with dogs. Another is his ability to capture all of the anxieties, regrets, vanities, and emotional frailties of aging men. Another is that his characters are, like all of us, “trying to figure out life,” although the theories they derive are funnier than most of us manage to conjure. Another is his honest depiction of rural life, in counterpoint to the “literary tradition” that buries rural America “in honeysuckle and lilacs, hardworking and noble yokels.” Another is his recognition that big events can have small consequences that compound over a lifetime. Another is the amount of wisdom he manages to impart in throwaway sentences as the story meanders along. Another is the deep love of nature that his characters express. And another is the way he manages to give a folksy quality to literary prose (or a literary quality to folksy prose). All of that is present in these three novellas, which I recommend as must reading to Jim Harrison fans.

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The Big Seven by Jim Harrison

Published by Grove Press on January 27, 2015

Sex and violence are frequent partners in fiction as in life. They are both improbably plentiful in the life of 66-year-old Sunderson, a retired police detective last seen in The Great Leader. Violence in particular is the theme of The Big Seven. Sunderson thinks violence should be the eighth deadly sin and blames its prevalence in the world's history, or more precisely his awareness of it, for making him "an alcoholic and a late-blooming sex maniac."

The book's first instance of violence follows Sunderson's impulsive plan to save his adopted daughter Mona, who has disappeared from Ann Arbor with a rock band that is headed for Paris. Later in the novel, Sunderson spends his time fishing and studying the Ames family, a "human junk pile" except for the female members, including the free-spirited Monica. Sunderson takes on another impulsive rescue mission concerning Monica while most of the Ames clan makes it their mission to kill Sunderson when they aren't killing each other. Elements of a murder mystery appear as Sunderson wonders why the trigger-happy family members are dropping dead from poison, although the "faux mystery" subtitle makes clear that this really isn't a mystery novel.

Sunderson is not a role model but he is a believable guy. He drinks too much. He lusts after young women, including his adopted daughter. He spies on naked women. He vows "to limit the amount of messiness" in his life but still sets a new "all-around record for sloppy behavior." He regularly engages in about half of the deadly sins.

Harrison's books typically wander, emphasizing the randomness of life. The Big Seven is no exception. While that might put off readers who prefer fiction that has a straightforward plot, Harrison's point is that life is rarely straightforward -- and how could it be, given that "the world is a madhouse"? I suspect that many older people, like Sunderson, are "puzzled by how in the sweep of life we end up where we do," tied in "peculiar knots that lack the clarity of our original intentions." We cannot "walk around the corner without tripping on a toad." In his unique way, Harrison reminds us that life's journey is an adventure, sometimes exciting, sometimes cruel, but almost always unexpected, even if you prefer to spend it fishing.

It takes time to adjust to Harrison's writing style but the time is well spent. He doesn't waste words. Even seemingly inconsequential sentences develop the reader's understanding of the story or a character or the human condition. Sunderson muses about life, death, the afterlife (acknowledging that he has "no talent for theology"), sex, the galaxy, and much else, including, of course, the deadly sins. Now and then his musings made me bust out a laugh.

I like Harrison's daring exploration of the American attitude toward relationships between old men and young women. In some cultures, age-gap relationships are common, accepted, and meaningful. Sunderson feels no guilt about the lust and affection he feels for a 19-year-old but he knows he will be judged (particularly by the ex-wife he still adores). Sunderson is old enough to be thinking about death and I can't blame him for wanting to think about pleasant ways to have a heart attack.

The Big Seven is less purposeful than Harrison's best fiction, including The Great Leader, although Harrison still crams more meaningful sentences into an average page than most writers produce in an entire novel. Sunderson complains that an Ames brother who is writing a crime novel created prose that "was absolutely devoid of any charm, one of the main reasons you read." Harrison writes with an abundance of charm and that's reason enough to recommend The Big Seven.

RECOMMENDED

The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison

Published by Grove Press on January 8, 2013 

If you've read Jim Harrison you know what to expect (gentle humor poking fun at the hapless male) and what not to expect (commas) from his writing. The River Swimmer is a short volume consisting of two novellas. The first addresses the familiar theme of Harrison's recent work: the aging man's need to renew his life, his eternal struggle to understand women, and his slightly ridiculous response to sexual desire. The second concerns a young man who endeavors to swim through the bewildering array of obstacles and opportunities that life presents.

In "The Land of Unlikeness," a man must choose between "the world's idea of success" and his love of creating art. Twenty years divorced and three years estranged from his daughter, Clive still hasn't gotten his life together. A former artist who abandoned painting for the financial security of academia, Clive is taking an involuntary leave of absence following an unfortunate encounter with an Art Tart. At his sister's insistence, he is using the time to visit his elderly bird-watching mother at his childhood home in Michigan. Since this is the mother who, years earlier, made a speech at dinner that ended with "You failed us, son," it's easy to understand why Clive doesn't want to go home again. Clive's thoughts are occupied by missed opportunities and mild regrets, some of which pertain to a childhood flame who still lives in town. Still, in his less sullen moments, Clive displays the guarded optimism that is common in Harrison's characters: "He had the happy thought that he had zero percent financing on the rest of his life because no one more than nominally cared except himself. He might be going mad as a hatter but it hadn't been that bad so far." At the age of sixty, well into life's third act, can Clive stop "toting around his heavy knapsack of ironies" and find a way to allow "a little light ... to peek into his beleaguered soul"?

"The River Swimmer" tells an offbeat story. Thad grew up on an island in the middle of a river. When he wasn't working on the family farm, he was swimming. "If there were indeed water spirits they had a firm hold on him like love eventually does on young men, an obsessional disease of sorts." After brawling with Friendly Frank, his girlfriend's father, Thad swims the hundred miles from Muskegon to Chicago. He hooks up with a girl he meets along the way. To Thad's embarrassment, the girl and her wealthy father become involved in his family drama when Friendly Frank's employees put Thad's father in the hospital, an outgrowth of the confrontation between Thad and Frank. Thad doesn't want to hate Friendly Frank, but "surely part of the greatest evil of evil men is that they make you hate them." Soon he finds himself back on the farm, in the company of Frank's daughter, the wealthy man's daughter, and another girl he's bedded. Women and employers and swimming coaches have plans for Thad. With his whole life ahead of him, Thad doesn't want to be pinned down like a butterfly in a collection. As Thad transitions to adulthood, he is desperate to retain his freedom, his sense of adventure, his profound link to water. Yet in the end, he learns that life can't be planned.

Both stories are populated with quirky characters. The earthy characters in "The River Swimmer" are particularly engaging. As always, Harrison's writing is filled with sharp insight as he gently dissects his characters, exposing faults and revealing quintessential goodness. It would be difficult to read these stories without a smile, although "The River Swimmer" turns out to be the more serious of the two.

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The Great Leader by Jim Harrison

Published by Grove Press on October 4, 2011

As a divorced police detective in Marquette, Michigan, Sunderson's life is generally sedate. The kind of crime that requires detective work is far from rampant in the Upper Peninsula. His hobbies include trout fishing and surreptitiously watching a teen neighbor arise naked from her bed each morning. Sunderson is sure he would cut off his own hands before touching the girl "but then he wondered how one would go about cutting off his own hands." Every ten days a married woman visits Sunderson for sex. Sunderson considers "what it would be like to be full of firm moral resolve" but clearly that's an experience he will never have.

Sunderson's final investigation before retirement involves a cult leader (known to the cult's members as the Great Leader but adopting the name Dwight as his most recent alias) who was rumored to have been sexually involved with minors before apparently faking his death. Unsuccessful in his attempt to locate the culprit, Sunderson decides to flee from his home after his retirement party (where he is chagrined to learn that his inappropriate behavior with a dancing girl -- who happens to be a potential witness against Dwight -- was seen by the other attendees). Sunderson travels to Arizona where he takes up a new hobby: investigating "the crime of religion," which amounts to searching for Dwight. There he meets more women: Lucy, who reminds him a bit too much of Diane, his ex-wife; and Melissa, a nurse whose protective brother is a drug lord. His time in the Southwest gives Sunderson ample opportunity to ruminate about his failures and obsessions, an occupation he continues after his return to the U.P.

Jim Harrison writes lovingly of land and nature; the reliability of its "indefatigable creature life" contrasts with the unreliability of human nature. Although Sunderson keeps track of Dwight's activities, what passes for a plot in The Great Leader is just an excuse for Harrison to exercise his wit and make pithy observations about American life. Harrison focuses his dry and occasionally outrageous humor on a variety of human behavior (and misbehavior). His most prominent targets are sex, religion, money, divorce, and retirement (the last of which makes Sunderson feel "not quite like a roadkill but like a man whose peripheries have been squashed, blurred, by the loss of his defining profession.") Harrison skewers the notion that men can reinvent themselves after retirement; Sunderson's efforts leave him feeling like "a dog who, hit by a car, drags himself into a ditch trying to be more out of harm's way." As he did in The English Major, Harrison has fun exploring the sexual interests of a man who, having physically passed beyond middle age, demonstrates the emotional maturity of a rutting teenager.

Warnings: In his descriptions of Sunderson's intimate life and fantasies, Harrison is explicit -- no more so than many modern humorists, but enough to put off readers who disapprove of erotic content, even when it's funny. Sunderson's thoughts provide a running commentary on history, politics, and sex after sixty -- topics that might offend readers who disagree with his pointed opinions. Others might be upset that Sunderson doesn't vigorously condemn every adult who has sex with a teenager (a frequent subject of his wandering thoughts). Whether I agreed with Sunderson's opinions or not -- sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't -- they frequently made me laugh, and I found many of his notions about society's failings to be on target.

When I read a Harrison novel, it takes me awhile to adjust to his unique style. I wouldn't describe his sentences as run-on, but the man is no fan of the comma. The style isn't necessarily bad, just different -- although I'm not sure I ever completed the adjustment. I don't read Harrison novels for stylistic brilliance, and I wouldn't recommend this one for its plot, which doesn't amount to much. I nonetheless enjoyed this book (and recommend it) for its humor and for its perceptive takes on life as seen through the eyes of a Midwestern senior citizen. Harrison provokes serious thought nearly as often as snickers and chuckles. He is the best chronicler of the "aging man blues" I've come across. When I laugh at the foibles displayed by his characters, I'm often laughing at myself. That, for me, made the reading experience worthwhile.

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