Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406050134
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by NEIL HARVEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
When Jim Harrison published his second novel in 1973, the Washington Post called it, "a bad novel but a work of art." That kind of praise isn't likely to find its way into a dust- jacket blurb, but, in the best way, it would be hard to find a more accurate comment concerning a lot of Harrison's work.
Although he has published nine works of fiction, Jim Harrison is more of a poet than a by-the-numbers novelist. He is capable of wringing tremendous beauty out of sentences and paragraphs, and he has a knack for fleshing out realistic, admirably strong characters. Nonetheless, his pacing can sometimes be a little meandering and frustrating. His novels often seem like a gathering of wise, wistful anecdotes constantly interrupted by a plot that keeps elbowing in, refusing to leave.
"Legends of the Fall," published in 1978 and arguably Harrison's masterpiece, is a set of unrelated but thematically linked short novels. Each novella clocks in at under a hundred pages, and the smaller work-space seemed to focus Harrison's storytelling without noticeably changing the style of his prose. "Julip" is a return to the same format: three different, smaller stories with similar themes. Counting 1990's "The Woman Lit By Fireflies", this is the third time he's come back to this structure, and each time he does so the books have less strength.
In the title novella, Julip, a troubled young woman attempts to spring her deranged brother from prison to the relative safety of a mental hospital. In the course of her efforts she encounters a series of middle-aged male lawyers, doctors, judges and artists, most of whom are openly dealing with crises which, placed next to stoic Julip's sad past, seem comparatively minor.
This section is a good piece of writing that might've been a better one if Harrison were able to make the reader as awestruck over Julip as he, and all the characters, seem to be. Her childhood traumas are continually dredged up and recounted with almost sadistic relish, and even though the intention seems to be to draw her as some angelic martyr, Julip still comes across as more of a pragmatic tease.
Another set of problems with the story are the characters of three millionaire playboys who, in their relentless pursuit of Julip, all seem to have wandered into the book on their way home from a Larry McMurtry novel and aren't sure if they're supposed to provide pathos or comic relief.
The second novella, "The Seven-Ounce Man," continues, from "The Woman Lit By Fireflies," the adventures of Brown Dog, a simple but affable unemployed salvage diver whose main goal in life is wine, women and song, with maybe a good thick steak substituting for the song part. Brown Dog woos waitresses and female nurses, dodges barfights, becomes a local celebrity and eventually gets tangled up with a band of revolutionary Native Americans. While this story may have the least of the three to say, it's also the most entertaining.
Closing the book is "The Beige Dolorosa," in which 50- year-old college professor Phillip Caulkins, who has had the rug pulled out from under him after losing his teaching job, retreats to the desert of Arizona to find himself. Harrison has covered territory like this before, but with a lot more style and insight, as in "The Man Who Gave Up His Name."
In this case, he seems to be aping himself rather than re-exploring old characters, ideas and situations; being cramped, for 90 pages, inside the first-person narrative of Phillip Caulkins, a man who wholly deserves his inferiority complex, is not a pleasant or enlightening experience.
At the center of each of these stories are characters who, isolated both physically and emotionally, thinks and behaves as if they're never going to get any older than they already are. Resigned to failure and boredom, they train their attention on impossible tasks and conquests and, in doing so, either discover the answers to their problems, or discover that there are no solutions.
There's a lot to like in "Julip" but not nearly as much as one would expect from a writer of Jim Harrison's stature. This is not his worst work, but it's also not his best; these are not necessarily bad novels, but neither are they works of art.
Neil Harvey lives in Blacksubrg.
by CNB