Tracking a spirit to its source

THE 1979 collection “Legends of the Fall” signaled that Jim Harrison was a writer who had the goods. Whether he was describing a vulture circling a dying man in the desert near Nogales, Ariz., or the adventures of three brothers who ride north from Montana to Canada to enlist in World War I, his is a raw and riveting version of the American West. In nine novels, nine poetry collections, four novella collections and five books of nonfiction (including the 2002 memoir “Off to the Side”), Harrison has proved to be one of our finest storytellers. His new collection, “The Summer He Didn’t Die,” gives us more from the master.

The title novella unwinds with all the pleasures of a day fishing one of the world’s great trout streams -- the Big Hole, let’s say. The novella brings back Brown Dog, the wily and astute mixed-blood roustabout from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who first appeared in Harrison’s 1990 collection “The Woman Lit by Fireflies.” In that story, Brown Dog stole an ice truck to transport the perfectly preserved body of a Native American chief he found at the bottom of frigid Lake Superior. In the 1994 collection “Julip,” Brown Dog worked to protect a Native American burial ground from excavation by anthropologists. Now, in “The Summer He Didn’t Die,” Brown Dog and his uncle Delmore, a pure-blood Chippewa, are trying to save his stepdaughter Berry, who has fetal alcohol syndrome, from being warehoused in a state school in Lansing. Berry doesn’t speak much, but she can shinny up a fir tree and point out the locations of trout when B.D. goes fishing. The idea of her being confined to an institution makes B.D. crazy.

Brown Dog has a big heart, a big thirst for booze and a knack for pleasing women. (Just as his teeth are giving out, Belinda, a new dentist in town, discovers his talents in the sack.) He also has a wry way of putting on outsiders -- in this case a dolt of a writer doing a piece for a national magazine about the “rural poor of the great north.” B.D.’s perspective on their excursion works the traditional city/country antipathy to hilarious effect, beginning when B.D. meets the writer -- “a burly man in khaki who seemed to teeter on a pair of ornate cowboy boots.”

The writer offers B.D. a deal: “I’ll pay you five hundred dollars if you drive me around for two days to see the poor.” B.D.’s reaction: “You should be able to do it in two days. It’s not like you’re overhauling an old Plymouth without the parts.”

“Republican Wives,” the second novella in this collection, is an ironic set of monologues by three women who were sorority sisters at the University of Michigan in 1980, all of whom have had affairs with an obnoxious poet named Daryl. Now married to wealthy men, they gather in Merida to support Martha, who has tried to kill Daryl with an overdose of antidepressants after he has “outed” all three to their husbands. Harrison captures Martha’s perspective in a breathless run-on narrative: “Here I was in the Yucatan in Mexico at age forty-two calling my dad as if I were fourteen, or younger yet. Everything in me rose and converged and wondered if anyone were truly designed for the life I had lived? There were so many layers of artificial privilege that looking out the window I had the vantage point of another universe.”

The most intriguing novella in this set is “Tracking,” a three-part autobiographical account of the writer’s odyssey that is at once a bare-bones telling of a life’s journey and a meditation upon the author’s philosophy and aesthetics. It begins with early memories: Bluegills and frog’s eggs beneath a lake’s surface, a drowned baby muskrat, the smell of the narrator’s aunt’s wet bathing suit, rain dimpling the lake. The young man, raised in the woods, trained in observation, becomes a writer, a husband, a father; he has stints in New York, in academia and hustling up screenwriting work in Hollywood. But Michigan -- a farm near a lake with the family, a remote log cabin in the Upper Peninsula for himself -- is his anchor.

Not much past his mid-30s, the writer begins to “wear out at an accelerated rate,” partly from alcohol, partly from the effort to make a living. “He thought it was his duty to eat the world but had no idea what to spit out. He had carelessly become everything in order to write -- men, women, trees, lakes, the landscape which absorbed him, dogs, deer, cats, the noises he heard, the night sky.... You fling yourself into life and in the process of eating it, it ate you.”

A novel fails, the writer slides into depression, but he plugs on with his calling. A note comes from a renowned actor, inviting him to a film set in Durango. The writer is almost tapped out. The actor, Jack Nicholson, offers to support him while he writes his new book, presumably “Legends of the Fall.” The book is written quickly, and it sells to a movie studio before publication for more than the writer had earned in 18 years of marriage.

A Hollywood ending, with a Hollywood coda: His “temporary” star fades. He works harder.

Throughout “Tracking,” there is a clear tension between the writer’s core being and the outside world. In the last section, titled “What the Older Man Saw,” Harrison explains the writer’s dilemma: “[A]ll of the underpinnings of his life were mythologically oriented rather than drawn to accepted and rather ordinary agreements with what constituted reality.”

“The Summer He Didn’t Die” doesn’t match the lean precision of Harrison’s best work. Nonetheless, these new novellas are urgent and contemporary, displaying his marvelous gifts for compression and idiosyncratic language. And in an author’s note about “Tracking,” there is a clue to his unerring sense of plot: “[N]early all of my life has been spent in the country where I can walk, usually with dogs, before I get ready to write, and walk again later to recover from writing. Often I track wild creatures.... When you find an interesting track, it’s a toss-up to check out where the animal has been or where it’s going. Once in a vast area of dunes bordering Lake Superior it was easy to track a mother bear and two cubs until it suddenly came to me that this was unwise.”

The writer, compelled to follow his instincts, rushes headlong into danger; the wise older man turns back.