What does someone do after writing 16 novels and novellas and 10 books of poetry, as well as two essay collections, a book for children and a memoir (in addition to countless pieces of uncollected literary journalism and screenplays)? Keep writing, of course.
Every author enjoys life’s little gold stars – critical attention, commensurate monetary compensation, more and better readers – but, particularly as the titles and the years begin to add up, creation for the sake of creation becomes its own greatest reward. It’s probably even simpler than that: One keeps writing because that’s what one does. Writers are like sharks: Once they stop moving, they’re dead, psychically if not physically.
The Farmer's Daughter, by Jim Harrison Anansi, 308 pages, $ 29.95
Seventy-two-year-old Jim Harrison is still very much alive. The Farmer’s Daughter, a collection of three novellas, is full of all of the things that his deservedly devoted readership has come to expect of his work over four-plus decades: stylistic distinctiveness, a nose for what’s most important and a genuine poet’s touch. If there’s a slightly uncomfortable sense of déjà vu attached to these most recent novellas, it’s perhaps the inevitable byproduct of publishing steadily for 45 years and counting. It’s difficult to think of another U.S. writer who’s been writing so well for so long.
The coming-of-age novella from which the collection takes its name is the weakest of the three. It’s not just that Harrison’s readers have met various versions of the teenage heroine Sarah before; it’s more that she borders on being a clichéd conglomeration of every beautiful, brilliant and almost unbearably sensitive young female character Harrison has ever created.
Long-time Harrison readers will be pleased to note the return of Brown Dog
It’s not enough, for instance, that Sarah be strikingly attractive – every boy and man she meets must possess her, or at least see her in some state of nakedness (including, most creepily, Old Tim, the elderly man who sold Sarah’s father the plot of land they moved to in Montana and who, on his last conscious day while dying of cancer, “reached out with his left hand, the only one that worked, and touched her breast,” adding, “I don’t want to be impolite, but that’s the finest breast I’ve ever seen,” to which Sarah answers, “Thank you”).
Not even the female gynecologist that Sarah visits is indifferent to her staggering attractiveness, feeling it necessary to observe, “You have a gorgeous body, young woman.” Add to this the 15-year-old Sarah’s recreational reading list – Tristram Shandy, Men of Mathematics, the poems of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane (made even more implausible by the fact she’d been home-schooled for years by her simple and sanctimonious fundamentalist Christian mother) – combined with her musical precocity (she plays Grieg, Liszt and Chopin at 4-H Club meetings), and The Farmer’s Daughter collapses under the weight of Sarah’s exasperating extraordinariness.
Long-time Harrison readers will be pleased to note the return of Brown Dog, a recurring character in the Harrison oeuvre. This time Brown Dog – a mixed-race native – and his mute daughter escape from Toronto (where he’s gone underground to avoid, as usual, the law) back to his beloved Northern Michigan by way of hiding out on the tour bus of a native rock band called Thunderskins.
Brown Dog Redux is a nice sampler of all that Harrison does so well. There’s Harrison’s quintessentially epicurean humour (when told by his contact in the native underground that it’s too dangerous to remain in Toronto, “Brown Dog’s first thought was, Why leave an area with such fine pork sausage?”). There’s mordant intelligence (“On Grandpa’s sofa back home there was an embroidered pillow that said `Love Conquers All.’ He thought, I’m not so sure”).
