Brown Dog, by Jim Harrison, Grove Press, 2013. 525 pages, $27.
My slight acquaintance with the works of Jim Harrison — I’ve read maybe 10 percent of his many books — leads me to believe that Brown Dog, the character, is the truest expression of his inner self.
John Steinbeck surely knew a man like Mack, the hero of “Cannery Row,” and Nikos Kazantzakis may have known someone like his “Zorba the Greek,” men of boundless animal spirits who confronted the world directly, without the filter of intellectualism.
But you had the sense that Steinbeck and Kazantzakis were hovering admiringly and a little regretfully over their creations, wishing they could share their elemental purity. That does not appear to be the case with Harrison. I don’t think he felt any separation from Brown Dog, a Michigan Indian and backwoods Casanova who lives out the biological imperative of eat, drink, procreate.
Brown Dog feels no more guilt or compunction in his pursuit of satiation than does the bear, an animal with whom he feels a deep kinship. And Harrison is not saying, “Wouldn’t it be fine if we could live like Brown Dog,” but rather, “Isn’t it fine that we have found ourselves in this place, with so much good food, so many intoxicating spirits, so many opportunities for an invigorating roll in the hay?”
This book is a collection of six novellas, five of them previously published, starting with “Brown Dog,” which appeared in 1990, and ending with “He Dog,” the new story. One of Harrison’s best-known books is “Legends of the Fall.” This one, with its blissfully innocent hero, might have been called “Before the Fall.”
You get the feeling that Harrison turned his hand to these novellas for relief, whenever the hard work of producing a novel, or dealing with the constraints of civilization, grew too tedious.
They may also have been a vehicle for getting things off his chest. In picaresque novellas like this, where you are free to send your character off to anywhere you please, into all sorts of company, the sky’s the limit.
Do you want to skewer arrogant academics? Self-absorbed Hollywood starlets? Pretentious journalists? Officious bureaucrats? Half-wit rednecks? All that skewering is here, and much more, delivered in Brown Dog’s rambling, hilarious, offhanded manner.
The first tale is by far the best, and the best part of that story is narrated by Brown Dog himself, in the form of a journal he has been talked into keeping in hopes of straightening out his life. He is such a good storyteller in his own voice that I’m surprised Harrison didn’t return to it.
At any rate, Brown Dog never comes close to straightening out his life. Far from it. He has spent most of his life in crude hunting cabins deep in the woods, hunting, fishing and gamboling, with occasional forays into local watering holes in search of booze and broads. Only rarely does he work, earning just enough money to finance his long periods of unemployment.
He is constantly getting in jams and scrapes, always within a whisker of going to jail at the hands of the law or to eternity at the hands of some jealous husband or boyfriend. There is a scene in which two cuckolds arrive at a bar in hopes of beating Brown Dog to a pulp. The ensuing brawl is so funny and perfect I shake my head now to think of it.
In the first story, he salvages the preserved body of an Indian from the icy waters of Lake Superior, gives up the location of an Indian burial mound to a beautiful young anthropologist he can’t wait to bed, then gets into all sorts of trouble trying to prevent the anthropologist and her colleagues from desecrating the site.
The aftereffects of these capers reverberate throughout the series.
He gets into further trouble trying to save a young girl from being sent to a “special school” because she is impaired by fetal alcohol syndrome. She is the daughter of Brown Dog’s improbable lifetime crush, one of the many “hefty” women he falls for, and all over, in these novellas.
There is an abundance of low-rent romance in these tales, but Harrison manages to make them bizarrely lovely, as here: “‘You got a prize coming and it’s not a tamale,’ Marcelle said after french kissing him at the door, the taste of her snapping Dentyne merging with the liver and onions. Love was grand again.”
Sometimes Brown Dog isn’t even sure what happened the previous night: “After the big argument I ran off to the bar, which violates my probation. I came home just before dawn smelling of perfume. Who wore the perfume I can’t say except she was not local.”
The first novella in particular is stuffed with such brilliant asides, to the point where you — or I at any rate — might be tempted to read half the story aloud to anyone within earshot.
I did have some moments of uneasiness throughout the book. I kept wondering whether it was entirely kosher for a white novelist to have so much fun with a hard-living alcoholic Indian. And was it OK for him to create Berry, the young girl with fetal alcohol syndrome, and then to make her a perfect little forest creature who rarely interacts with human beings but communes effortlessly with animals, particularly with birds?
The answer, I think, is that Harrison exists somewhere beyond the realm of such questions. He is a storyteller pure and simple, and if he has deigned to take notice of what is known as political correctness, it was probably only to file it away for scornful treatment in some later book.
So I won’t go there. I will go there, however, in my next review. After I read “Brown Dog” I turned, without really thinking what I was doing, to “Stay Away, Joe,” the most famous book in Montana literary history written by a white novelist about Indians.
