Born and raised in Michigan, Jim Harrison often sets the lusty appetites and grizzled fatalism of his work among his native state's north woods, rivers and lakes. When a Harrison character gets off track in urban living or academia or an unsustainable marriage, he goes back to drink from Michigan's nourishing well.
The River Swimmer takes another refreshing dive into that well. The title novella is the story of Thad, a Michigan youth raised on a farm on a river island. Surrounded by water at home, Thad is born with the swimming gift. Swim coaches offer generous scholarships when his untrained time trials break Big Ten records, but in typical Harrison fashion, Thad is more interested in the shapely rear ends and breasts of girls than intercollegiate competition. He swims because "it is the most complete feeling of freedom that there is. The current guides your skin. It's the closest we get to a bird."
"The Land of Unlikeness" is the longer and better of the two novellas, giving Harrison more room to dig into the changes that old age brings to men. Clive is a 60-year-old art history professor from New York City who gave up painting after critics trashed his last gallery show. He returns to the center of Michigan's rural mitten to care for his nearly blind mother. Dreading a month of bad food--"at mother's house you ate what was served and in the proportions she had decided were appropriate"--he bounces back when he finds that his first sexual partner, Laurette, is also back from her downstate job to live in her old neighboring farm home. She has taken in a young down-on-her-luck, bisexual poet, and, consistent with Harrison's prodigious appetite for food, sex and the arts, Clive gathers his paints from his childhood room to discover again the pleasure he found in painting and female company. Older now, Clive realizes that "he didn't want to be a painter, he only wanted to paint," Harrison writes. "He knew how to paint so why not paint. Everybody had to do something while awake."
Harrison includes what could be his own epitaph in the words of an old Indian woman who tells Thad about "a northern Michigan writer friendly with the tribe and author of somber works known as One Who Goes into the Dark a Long Ways and We Hope He Comes Back." The River Swimmer is Harrison at his crusty best. --Bruce Jacobs
Shelf Talker: Jim Harrison returns to Michigan in two novellas that explore the transforming values of his favorite indulgences: nature, art, food and sex.