Brown Dog<\/i><\/b>, by Jim Harrison, Grove Press, 2013. 525 pages, $27.<\/b><\/p>\n
My slight acquaintance with the works of Jim Harrison \u2014 I\u2019ve read maybe 10 percent of his many books \u2014 leads me to believe that Brown Dog, the character, is the truest expression of his inner self.<\/p>\n
John Steinbeck surely knew a man like Mack, the hero of \u201cCannery Row,\u201d and Nikos Kazantzakis may have known someone like his \u201cZorba the Greek,\u201d men of boundless animal spirits who confronted the world directly, without the filter of intellectualism.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>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\u2019t think he felt any separation from Brown Dog, a Michigan Indian and backwoods Casanova who lives out the biological imperative of eat, drink, procreate.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be fine if we could live like Brown Dog,\u201d but rather, \u201cIsn\u2019t 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
This book is a collection of six novellas, five of them previously published, starting with \u201cBrown Dog,\u201d which appeared in 1990, and ending with \u201cHe Dog,\u201d the new story. One of Harrison\u2019s best-known books is \u201cLegends of the Fall.\u201d This one, with its blissfully innocent hero, might have been called \u201cBefore the Fall.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s the limit.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s rambling, hilarious, offhanded manner.<\/p>\n
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\u2019m surprised Harrison didn\u2019t return to it.
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