The Summer He Didn't Die (First Edition)

Jim Harrison's new book, The Summer He Didn't Die, is a collection of novellas showcasing the flair that has made him a contemporary master of the form, and a celebration of love, the senses, and family, no matter how untraditional.
The Summer He Didn't Die exults with life and all its magic. In the title novella, Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian loved by Harrison's readers, is trying to parent his two step-children and take care of his family's health on meager resources - it helps a bit that his charms are irresistible to the new dentist in town. Republican Wives is a witty satire on the sexual neuroses of the Right, the mystery of why any person desires another, and the irrational power of love that, when thwarted, can turn so easily into an urge to murder. Tracking is a meditation on Harrison's fascination with place, telling his own familiar mythology through the places he has seen and the intellectual loves he has known in a vivid stream of consciousness that transfigures how we look at our own surroundings.

Harrison is arguably America’s master of the novella, and critics praise him for conquering such a challenging literary form. "The Summer He Didn’t Die" evokes Harrison’s previous Brown Dog stories—here narrating Brown Dog’s latest adventures—to please longtime fans, though even sympathetic critics concede that this latest collection is perhaps not his best. Some critics were surprised at the inclusion of the autobiographical "Tracking" so closely on the heels of Harrison’s 2002 memoir, Off to the Side.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Three very different and challenging approaches to the novella form Harrison's latest. The title story laconically narrates the struggles of a multiracial, Indian-identified Northern Michigan wood pulp cutter named Brown Dog, a single father with an imprisoned, alcoholic wife. When the state dictates mandatory schooling for his disabled 7-year-old daughter, who suffers from the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome, "B.D." must decide whether to flee with her to Canada. "Republican Wives" presents after-the-affair disquisitions from three women who were the lovers of local university-based poet Daryl, whom one of the women, Martha, has tried to kill with an overdose of Elavil. The final novella, a meandering, partially autobiographical character study called "Tracking," thoroughly inspects the career's worth of baggage that has resulted from life as a white male writer operating in nonmetropolitan middle America. Harrison's command of the novella form is as impressive as the range of his voices, with his prose moving from the interiorized Faulknerian third-person of the title story to the run-on, staccato first-person of the first, and best, of the "Republican Wives." Following on the novel True North, this set of short fictions shifts pitch-perfect perspectives effortlessly, with a lightness that belies its depth. (Aug.)
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In the first novella in this collection of three, "The Summer He Didn't Die" Harrison resurrects northern Michigan denizen Brown Dog, last seen--a fish out of water in the wilds of L.A.--in "Westward Ho" (in the collection The Beast God Forgot to Invent, 2000). Perennially broke and hopelessly in love with Gretchen, a lesbian social worker, the hapless but good-hearted BD is determined not to have his simpleminded stepdaughter, born a victim of fetal-alcohol syndrome, "transferred down to a public boarding school in Lansing that specialized in her kind of infirmity." In the second novella, "Republican Wives," rendered in three distinct voices, dear old friends from posh Bloomfield Hills, the eponymous wives--Martha, Frances, and Shirly--trade off chapters to narrate the plight of Martha, who flees south of the border to Merida in the Yucatan after lacing her lover Daryl's coffee with Elavil in a hotel room in Houston. Frances and Shirly, no stranger to Daryl's amorous attentions themselves, rally around their comrade in a display of sympathy and support as they each recall their own dalliances with the rake. Finally, in "Tracking," Harrison returns to the ground he recently mined in his memoir, Off to the Side (2002), this time with a third-person account of a no-name, itinerant midwesterner who pursues his calling as a writer and poet while coming to terms with what it means to be an artist. Harrison's earthy prose, uniquely evocative of place, is economical, precise, and hearty, and is sometimes startling in its ability to touch on core truths. Benjamin Segedin
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