Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

Have you ever wanted to do something you knew was dangerous? Dangerous enough maybe to kill you?

That’s where Scarlett Thomas put Ariel Mato, lusting after a book which “was known” to have killed those who read it. Not only lusting, but by page ten, buying the book. Reader, it’s in her hands.

The title of this literary temptation is The End of Mr. Y, and as you’ve already noticed it’s also the title of Thomas’s novel.

One way to categorize this novel is as a mystery: what happens when Ariel reads Thomas E. Lumas’s novel? Because, of course, you know she’s going to do it, wouldn’t you?

It’s also an intellectual novel, exploring at length in dialogue and narration, philosophy and the philosophy of quantum physics.

I think about Heidegger again, and realize there’s so much I don’t know. From what I can remember, Heidegger’s special word for consciousness (or, at least, the kind of consciousness that most humans seem to have) is Dasein literally a kind of being that is able to ask questions about its own being. For Heidegger, being cannot be considered without the idea of time. You can only be present in the present, and therefore only exist in the sense you exist in time. Dasein can recognize and theorize about its own being. It can wonder, Why am I here? Why do I exist? And what is existence, anyway?” And Dasein is therefore constructed out of language: logos, that which signifies….

"Imagine that some mutation happens in our computer simulation. The little characters become conscious. Now what would their thoughts be made of?"

I visualize my laptop sitting on a desk, with this game playing out on it. I imagine what it would be like o be one of these digital, binary characters. How many dimensions would you be aware of? How would you interact with other characters? I think about what this world is made of—basically zeros and ones—and then I realize that in this little world everything would be zeros and ones. The little characters may not be able to see them, but everything, including their thought, would be made from the same thing.

“Their thoughts would be made from the same code their world is made from,” I say to Lura. “Zeros and ones.”

Yes, very good. Yes—if it was a contemporary silican machine, which would obviously be coded in binary.

So it would be up quarks and down quarks, if it was a quantum computer.”

Now she smiles. “You do know something about science,” she says. “Except you’re not quite right. Up and down quarks are still a binary system. The whole point of quantum computing is that the quarks can be in a combination of different states, and can therefore carry out more than one calculation at once.”

But I’m already feeling sick, because I think I know where this is going.

“Now tell me,” she says. “The grass and trees in our binary world. What are they made from?”

“Zeros and ones,” I say.

“And the houses, and the water and the air?”

“Zeros and ones.”

"And what happens to thoughts in this world once it has happened? Does it
disappear?"

"It gets stores on the hard drive." I pause, thinking about temporary caches and the difference between RAM and ROM. "Does it?"

Don’t despair; it’s also an action novel with plenty of chase scenes in both dimensions.

It’s also a novel of speculative fiction because Thomas creates a detailed new dimension she’s abstracted from those philosophies and places her protagonist, Ariel, (and others) in it.

Not to forget a romance: love at first sight, the approved male, an ex-priest, who at one point even appears deus-ex-machina-like. And a porno-ish novel with some graphic “dirty sex,” of an S & M persuasion, about which Ariel, who also has been addicted to cutting herself, feels both guilt and shame but can’t leave alone because she enjoys it, which makes her feel more guilty still.

But do not expect Ariel to be a piece of street scum. She’s a university-educated young woman whose earned her doctorate and is working on her doctoral thesis, driven by a must-scratch curiosity about the fictional novel; its author and her thesis supervisor, Saul Burlem, who first put her on Lumas’s trail, both disappeared.

So now here I am, unsupervised, like an experiment with no observer—Fleming’s plate of mold, perhaps, or an uncollapsed wave function—and what am I doing? I’m reading Lumas. I’m reading The End of Mr. Y, for God’s sake. Fuck you, Burlem.

Thomas reminds me of Richard Powers. She’s not as lyrical or plum-pudding filled with literary quotations and allusions, but like Powers’ Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark, The End of Mr. Y seems to have been created for the purpose of making real (in fiction) her intellectual constructs and imaginary world. Much more than from its romance or sex, Scarlett Thomas is turned on by words.

No fan of philosophy, I had a grim time hanging in there through long discourses on Heidegger and gang, but the adventure’s delight and her constructed world was worth it, like those camping trips in which it rained, but what but what lures you back was the adventure, the thrill of doing.

Try it. At the very least you’ll find it amazing and memorable.

Hillary Mantel, Beyond Black

A ghost story, unlike, I’d wager, any ghost story you’ve encountered before, Beyond Black is a study of two clashing personality types. Alison, Al, is a “sensitive” who had acquired, reluctantly, a spirit guide, an ugly dwarf ghost, at a very young age and has been stuck with him ever since. Both abetted by and in addition to Morris’s manipulations, numbers of those “who had passed” presented themselves to Al, informing her, complaining to her of the past and sometimes of the present. Finally Al concluded, since she wasn’t suited (what with distraction and mischievous practical jokes by Morris) for any conventional employment to become a professional revealer of the beyond to paying audiences. She was a natural, quickly skilled in working audiences, assuaging both coarse and disbelieving humor and grumbling dissatisfaction at what she told them.

Unsurprisingly she, Colette, her spirit guide, and a few “sensitive” friends elect to go to Princess Di’s funeral, half expecting that the dead princess will join them:

“S’funny,” Colette said. “It’s only a fortnight ago, those pictures of her in the boat with Dodi, in her bikini. And we were all saying, what a slapper.”

Al opened the glove box and ferreted out a chocolate biscuit.

“That is the emergency Kit-Kat,” Colette protested.

“This is an emergency. I couldn’t eat my breakfast.” She ate the chocolate morosely, finger by finger. “If Gavin had been Prince of Wales,” she said, “do you think you’d have tried harder in your marriage?”

“Definitely."

Colette’s eyes were on the road; in the passenger seat Alison twisted over her shoulder to look at Morris in the back, kicking his short legs and singing a medley of patriotic songs. As they passed beneath a bridge policemen’s faces peered down at them, pink sweating ovals above the sick glow of high-visibility jackets. Stubble-headed boys—the type who, in normal times, heave a concrete block through your windscreen—now jabbed the mild air with bunches of carnations. A ragged bedsheet, grey-white drifted down into their view. It was scrawled in crimson capitals, as if in virgin’s blood: DIANA, QUEEN OF OUR HEARTS.

Good at ghosting, she was no business woman. Her accounts were in disarray, her taxes unpaid, her income barely matched her outflow, with no care directed toward retirement and hard times. Into this breech comes Colette, fast with numbers, organized to the “T,” practical but willing to take Allison’s word for the “people” she could see though Colette couldn’t. Colette’s marriage to the grumpy, indifferent Gavin was tottering toward separation, so the two women joined forces in business and living arrangements, Colette becoming Allison’s organizer, gofer, and occasional foot massager so effectively that Allison quickly moved from insolvency to nicely fixed.

But of course their personality differences quickly had them stepping on each other’s toes. Al’s fatness (she was amazingly obese) became more and more repugnant to Colette, who was skinny and stringy in body and hair.

A bitter humor arises from the their platonic relationship’s resemblance to many marriages in its disintegrating spin. And a certain anthropological interest emerges from the novel’s many, many glimpses into the professional experiences of British psychics. Hilary Mantel also shows her readers the underbelly of English lower-class life, which is as sordid and painful as the underbelly of its royals but lacking in their accoutrements.

Mantell’s skills in dialogue and dialect are part of the novel’s rewards. Beyond Black is almost a must reading for writers in its demonstration of the necessity of good structure. Its deficiency of a well designed plot line gives Mantell’s events the feel of standing waves, going up and down but not getting anywhere. Her surprises are too foreseeable to surprise; her resolution lacks satisfaction.

Still its unusual subject matter is likely to hold your interest, but bail out when the impulse strikes because, while it doesn’t get less interesting, it never gets more interesting.

Joyce Carol Oates, Black Girl/White Girl

I purchased Black Girl/White Girl warily, fearing it might be a politically correct dramatization of liberal angst.

It wasn’t. Oh, both girls had been shaped by American attitudes about race (who growing up in his country hasn’t been). And Genna Meade was indeed the daughter of a fighting liberal, one who put his own freedom on the line in opposing the Vietnam war, and still used his position and skill as a trial lawyer to defend other liberals in trouble with the law. By parental training and ancestry—her ancestral Quaker forebears were anti-slavery crusaders—Genna was proBlack, thrilled to find herself roommate at a small liberal Schuyler College with black Minette Swift. But Minette, the daughter of a minister, who organized her life as a lover and follower of Christ, wasn’t interested in political activism and had no desire to be integrated with whites.

In “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates” from the P.S. section of the Harper Perennial edition of the novel, JCO rejects the notion Black Girl/White Girl is focused on politics or the Viet Nam war, characterizing it as “primarily a story of a powerful, life-altering if unrequited feeling on the part of one girl for another.”

A powerful psychological novel “shown” not “told” with no authorial explanations is my take. While Ginna, the narrator, is given more page space with her thoughts and feelings, Minette is revealed only through her behavior and dialogue. And both are intriguing, well characterized, and thoroughly believable.

Scenarios about Minette’s motivation makes an on-going personal sidebar for readers. The plot is highly original; the reader won’t guess the conclusion of either storyline until a deliberate hint of one ending shortly before the novel comes to its close.

Just then, two girls from Haven House with whom I was friendly (oh, I was friendly with anyone an everyone who encouraged me with a smile!) came to sit at our table. These were white girls who, like me, were somewhat in awe of Minette Swift, whose efforts to befriend her had been met with a coolness that was sometimes polite and sometimes not so polite. This morning Minette barely acknowledged them and took no part in our conversation about Hurricane Audrey. I told them about the cracked window, where a broken tree limb had been blown. Minette hadn’t appeared to be listening but a moment later she shut her book, pushed back her chair and carried away her tray without a word. Her face was shut like a fist, she seemed furious. Left behind the three of us looked after her with bewilderment.

Three white girls. Looking after a black girl, bewildered.

“Is something wrong with Minette this morning?”

“’This morning’! Any morning.”

Quickly I said, “The storm kept her awake. She’s afraid of hurricanes. Her family is from South Carolina…”

Girls in Haven Hall sometimes asked me about my roommate: what was she like when you got to know her? I was evasive in answering. I did not want to confess that I had not yet gotten to know my roommate and felt at times that, as the weeks passed, I was coming to know her less and less.

In the freshman class at Schuyler, Minette Swift was emerging as something of an enigma.: a black girl who didn’t act “black.” A girl with a strong personality who was generally admired and respected but not, so far, much liked.

A page turner, definitely, but definitely not a feel-good novel. My guess is that JCO neither intended this novel to “feel good” nor wants to write such fiction; she seems to view contemporary American life as anything but fun and wants her fiction to reflect what she sees. Black Girl/White Girl will leave its readers thinking about families, about American culture, and speculating about where their shaping influence leaves off and the individual’s biological makeup begins.

From the plot the reader is free to conclude, as I did, that Manette’s insecurity and antisocial behavior came by no means entirely from U.S. victimization of blacks, but in part from her own quick-to-take affront nature. As though to tip readers toward this conclusion Oates has enrolled at the school a number of young women who were both outgoing and successful.

Shelly Lowenkopf regards the compliment s/he writes well as an insult, feeling, I believe, that voice, characterization, storyline are much more worthy of discussion, whereas writing well as compliment is in the nature of a s/he-looks-good-in-hats description. Well, Joyce Carol Oates has a fine commanding voice, a major talent for characterization and storyline, but she does write well. Indeed her prose is this novel’s one feels-good element, making me squirm with pleasure as I read.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Tattooed Girl

The protagonist, Joshua Seigl, is a take-off on Philip Roth, and to ensure the readers’ apprehension of this, she dedicates the book to him. Clever—in the first couple of pages I was chuckling—cruel, mean spirited—soon reading was as uncomfortable as watching a bare-knuckled fist fight.

The novel focuses on the time in Seigl’s life when he was struck down (literally) with a mysterious, devastating illness. Readers of Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson will feel twinges of recognition.

The title character, Alma, affords no relief. In the novel’s early pages she is a victim, has been a victim--of among other cruelties S & M exploitation--seems assured a future of victimhood. Her victimization has been inscribed on her once-pretty face, arms, and hands with tattoos. Don’t imagine the tattoos you’ve seen on fresh faced youths or even the black ink tattoos so frequent in prison life. Alma’s tattoos are not even doodles but gray scribbles meant to deface. Who put them there and why? She doesn’t know, but they have changed her life, marking her as something to be used, not someone to cherish. What becomes of her is full of surprises and well demonstrates the complexity and flexibility of the human personality.

Two important third-level characters, Dimitri Meatte and Jet—Seigl’s sister—are both vicious in different ways.

Sondra Bloomenthal, Seigl’s long-time friend and occasional lover is the novel’s most comfortable character, but can you

be comfortable in the presence of such an ever-hopeful glutton for rejection as this refined and well educated lady?

Oates has a clear eye and deft ways of describing the labyrinth-like complexity of the human brain, which notoriously at times is dominated by its intellectual circuitry only to be overwhelmed by the older reptilian synapses. Reading about these characters in action is much like reading about spiders—fascinating but horrid.

Eithne Farry quotes Oates as acknowledging, “Well, you know, The Tattooed Girl has a background of a Greek tragedy—there are lots of allusions to Greek literature.” Her characters do seem to me as extreme in the behavior and personality as those populating Greek tragedy. Farry also says that “For Oates, Alma—the girl of the title—is ‘an American type.’” Perhaps one among thousands of American types, but I would dispute her being in any way typical of Americans.

According to Farry Oates reports this novel is “about anti-Semitism and identity.” Certainly Alma and Dimitri are anti-Semitic:

Hate hate hate him: the Jew.

She could not have said it was Mr. Seigl’s Jew-ness she hated, or hating him, and knowing he was a Jew, that was why. Which came first. Maybe she’d never have guessed he was a Jew except Dimitri made so much of it. (She’d never have guessed his sister “Jet” was any Jew for sure.) Or maybe it was instinct? Something you could smell almost.

But I didn’t gain any new insight into anti-Semitism from reading The Tattooed Girl, more a recreation of attitudes and emotions I’d already encountered in too many acquaintances.

And identity? Well, Seigle certainly struggles with himself, as a man, as a writer, as an invalid, the most telling assault to his preferred persona being his abrupt, unexpected fall in a cemetery which let him for a time alone and helpless, and which seemed to hover, threatening and impeding his days:

And the symptoms from which he did suffer had so far been sporadic, unpredictable. He protested, “I can go for days without….”

Stumbling, falling. Mis-stepping

On good days he walked, hiked, jogged (cautiously). A good day had come to be a kind of (secret) holiday.

(For Seigl, desperate not to be found out, just yet, by the community, still more by his relatives, had become inordinately secretive. He’d never shared secrets readily, kept his private life private, but now he was becoming parenthetical: he felt like an eclipsed moon. He was still there, but you couldn’t see him.)

Every man ought to make his life acceptable to others, but his death to himself alone. Seigl leafed though volume four of the Epistles. His hands shook, but he could disguise it by resting the heavy book against a shelf.

He was breathing quickly. His face felt smudged, after his encounter with the woman. (But why so irritable with her, why so arrogant. She meant only well. She likes you, why react as if she wanted to sink her talons into your flesh like a harpy? There are no harpies in Carmel Heights.)

Fifteen days since that humiliating incident in the cemetery. Since that time Seigl’s entire sense of himself had changed. He felt every molecule had changed. There was matter and anti-matter in the universe, and he’d taken for granted that, being an American born in 1964 of well-to-do parents, he was matter, and he mattered. Now, he understood that he was becoming anti-matter. Death rising up his legs like the cold that rose in Socrates’ legs. In Mount Carmel Cemetery, Siegl had tasted that cold.

Not phrased, perhaps, so fancifully, aren’t these feeling similar to those of every seriously ill person? In illness, one’s identify does change to victim. But these are feelings and attitudes which, given recovery, disappear like collapsing fog. To dramatize it scarcely investigates or characterizes it.

The ending is, as befits a Greek tragedy look-alike, dramatic and surprising.

I wouldn’t recommend reading this novel for pleasure, but for insight into one of Oates’ personalities and into a real, though, distasteful behavioral mode of Homo sapiens, it is vividly illustrative.

Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

This wonderfully strange novel is Petterson’s sixth, but only the third to have been translated from their original Norwegian into English. And it’s English English with all its differences in spelling, punctuation, and usage from American English; beyond that I have quarrels with translator Ann Born’s command of tense, which falters on occasion, taking the reader out of the story to reconstruct usage.

Small annoyances to the delight in this story, set in a forest at Norway’s northern border only scant miles from Sweden. The storyline splits into two, one the narrator’s vivid, detailed memories of his fifteenth year life with his father in that forest; the other of the sixty-five-year-old narrator, divorced and retired, who has returned to the forest to live out his remaining years.

I sense that my back is not too good and roll over onto my stomach and push myself over the edge of the bed with my knees down on the floor firs and then raise myself tentatively into a standing position. That goes well, but I am really stiff and sore after yesterday’s efforts. I go barefoot into the kitchen, past the dog and into the hall.

The boy’s father and companion, seen through the narrator’s memories, becomes an important secondary character, with his own exciting world war II resistance experiences and romance. Petterson is a grand shuffler of time so that we learn these twin story lines in bits that are often not chronological.

My father stroked his beard, squinted at the sun for a moment before he glanced sideways down at me where we stood on the steps.

‘What say you, Trond T.?’ he asked. Tobias is my middle name, but I would never use it, and the T. only turned up when my father wanted to sound a tad serious and it was a signal to me that now there was time to fool around a bit.

‘Ye-e-es,’ I said. ‘There might just be a possibility there.’

‘We do have some work of our own to see to as well,’ he said.

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘We have a few things to get out of the way, it’s not that, but maybe we could squeeze in a day or two we might jus about manage.’

We might, but it won’t be easy,’ said my father.

‘Yeah, it will be hard,’ I said. ‘One would have to say a barter in kind would probably come in handy.

‘You’re right there,’ said my father, looking at me with curiosity. ‘Bartering surely couldn’t be a bad thing.’

‘A horse with harness,’ I said. ‘For a few days of next week or the one after.’

‘Just so,’ my father said with a broad smile. ‘Right to a tee. What do you say to that, Barkald?’

Barkald had been standing there in the yard with a bewildered expression on his face as he listened to our contorted dialogue, and now he stepped right into the trap.

The storylines themselves are worth the read. But for me the greater pleasures were in Petterson’s descriptions of forest and lake, so like Jim Harrison in the pleasure they radiate, and his descriptions of quotidian experience. I’ve encountered no other writer who dared write in such exacting detail the movements involved in domestic and work life. His personal response to the activities and the skill and effort required to accomplish them make the descriptions absorbing in themselves.

The stove was crackling well. I open the bread box and cut a couple of slices, put water on to boil for coffee and then I hear Lyra give her shot sharp bark on the steps. It is her way of ringing the bell and is easy to distinguish from the other sounds she makes. I let her back in. She goes to lie down by the stove where the warmth is gradually spreading. I Ly a breakfast table for myself and prepare Lyra’s in her bowl, but she must wait her turn. I am the boss. I eat first.

My other great enjoyment in this novel is the characterizations of father and son. Rich and dimensional from the get-go, they become stranger, more perplexing at denouement and ending, so that I closed the final page of Out Stealing Horses still puzzling, still mentally creating scenarios to make sense of these men. The two of them will continue to tease my understanding through the years.

Jim Harrison, Dalva

Washington Square Books/Pocket Books 1988 by Anna Productions

My hunch is Dalva began with Jim Harrison’s desire to tell the Sioux nation’s story. His mode of commercial communication is fiction. So he spun this glorious novel to hold the story, which he told, in snatches, largely through the journals of John Wesley Northridge. Northridge and his journals are fictitious; the Sioux and Harrison’s accounts of their history are not.

Two thirds of the novel are narrated by the title character, Dalva, a woman’s whose stance and emotional bearings are congruent with the latest incarnation of the Women’s Movement just aborning as this novel was published; bluntly honest she reports:

One of the main sadnesses of my life at that time , and on occasion since, is that I matured early and was thought by others to be overly attractive. It isn’t the usual thing to be complained about but it unfairly, I thought, set me aside and brought notice when none was desired. It made me shy, and I tended to withdraw at the first mention of what I looked like. It wasn’t so bad in country school where Naomi was the sole teacher and there were only four of us in the seventh grade, but for eighth grade I had to take the school bus to the nearest town of any size which, certain reasons, will be unnamed. There was the constant attention from the older town boys and I was at a loss what to do. I was thirteen and refused all dates, saying my mother wouldn’t let me go out. I also refused an invitation to become a cheerleader because I wanted to take the school bus home to be with my horses. I trusted one senior boy because he was the son of our doctor and seemed quite pleasant. He gave me a ride home in his convertible one late April day, full of himself because he had been accepted by far-off Dartmouth. He tried very hard to rape me, but I was quite strong from taking care of horses and actually broke one of his fingers, though not before he forced my face close to his penis which erupted all over me. I was so shocked I laughed.

Dalva’s story could stand on is own without the solid ballast and tragic dignity of the Sioux’s story. She is a woman whom most of her readers would enjoy as a friend. I certainly would, though in places I would make different choices than she, certainly about the quantities of alcohol she ingested. But who wants their friends to be mirror images? And the view of Dalva is awesome.

She’s a scion of a remarkable family. John Wesley Northridge was her great grandfather whose marriage to a Sioux gave Dalva her smidgen of Sioux genes. And it is from John Wesley that Dalva comes by her money, which she handles with the nonchalance and generosity that Harrison so admires. For he is the victim of a familiar conflict. He likes nice things—art, fine architecture, fine wines, fine food--but he despises money grubbing and money grubbers. The only comfortable solution is inherited money. Ah, but the rub is he despises the way so many heirs of wealth live their lives; see his novella Republican Wives for details. So inherited money treated with modesty and generosity; you can find it in Cynthia’s children in Returning to Earth, and nineteen years earlier, already fully formed in Dalva.

Dalva’s story certainly provides another demonstration that money cannot protect one from tragedy, but character responds to tragedy with new growth. I shan’t explain because Harrison tells her story far better than I could.

The other third of this novel is narrated by Michael, the historian who lusts and pleads, actually flat out begs, for access to John Wesley Northridge’s journal, legally possessed by Dalva. Lust is the operant word for Michael: he lusts for the journals, he lusts for women--most any who bear the necessary sexual characteristics--he lusts for wine, he lusts for food, and will do what’s needed to get what he lusts for, even when they’re illegally underage girls:

If she wasn’t a beauty I would have sent her packing. As a long-term teacher I have developed a subtle bedside manner. I answered all the questions with just a sliver of British accent, affecting a Noel Coward weariness but an actor’s intensity. I acted worldly, troubled, morose, so sophisticated that my answers tended to streak off into airy tangents. My bedside manner slowly rose to the surface as I began turning the tables by asking her questions about her hopes and fears. She adjusted her skirt, flattered and nonplussed that I cared. With a millisecond glimpse of thigh my worm turned. I got up and poured us each an ample glass of cold white wine, not so much as a trick but to break the ice. I said the wine must be confidential since I wasn’t sure she was of drinking age. She blushed again and said they had a dilly of a graduation party the week before, and a lot of kids drank so much they “blew lunch,” a puzzling new euphemism, it seems, for puking. Now that I had tilted her off balance a little, I had to finish the job. I stared at her long and hard without speaking—actually I was thinking about lunch. When she was sufficiently nervous I began to speak to her in the tone used on horses.

Harrison has Dalva find extenuating charm in Michael, perhaps because he spouts intelligent conversation, perhaps because she is a lusty woman.

Delightful, idiosyncratic characters and a couple of endearing animals sweeten Dalva and Michael’s narratives, both balancing the pain of Sioux history. This history I had vowed never to punish myself with reading again, but this rousing novel seduced me, and, I don’t regret and won’t forget the reading.

Jim Harrison, Two Collections

Jim Harrison’s The Summer He Didn’t Die (pub. 2005) and The Beast God Forgot to Invent (pub 2000)

Each of these collections of (three) novellas contains a novella spotlighting Brown Dog; for that and another reason it’s worth while to consider (and read) them together.

I’m taking off with “Tracks,” the autobiographical novella and last placed in The Summer He Didn’t Die, because it is chock full of clues to the Harrison oeuvre, and most especially to these collections.

As a woman and wife I have “issues” with the life, written in the third person, that Harrison describes in “Tracks.” More than once, he emphasizes that as his father’s son he feels a deep, sharp obligation to support his wife and children, but, at least as described, they seem tangential to his life and feelings. He reminds me of the traditional Iroquois who maintained separate villages for men, largely engaged in hunting and warfare, and women, involved as they were with child care and horticulture; the two groups came together for ceremonial occasions and, presumably, mating.

In real life Harrison may actually have clocked more time with his wife and daughter than elsewhere, but his third person narrator’s account focuses on career, money struggles, travel, eating and drinking accounts, and, for solace, not his wife, not his daughters but hiking, fishing, and camping alone in the woods. In “Tracks” he names his dog before he names his daughter; previously she is mentioned only in birth announcement and by role designation, “daughter,” and briefly at that. Toward its end the novella displays a slight increase of focus on his wife, from which I learned she had built her life around the children, raising horses, and growing a garden. From scant mention, his daughters appear to have matured to acquire lives of their own; but Harrison gives no account of any child training or comforting or affection.

The question I continue to ponder: Is this a reflection of the real life Harrison’s actual interests? Or is this myth building with a career-oriented PR subtext?

The conflict of human biological hunting and gathering instincts with the urban civilization that dominates our lives underlies in all of Harrison’s fiction—part of the reason I find it emotionally satisfying.

The novella itself is a glorious romp through woods-craft lore, food and drink, and literature, including philosophy with a whisper of science, all well peppered by jabs at the academic world, bureaucracy, and city life. Anyone with an interest in any of these topics should do themselves the kindness of reading “Tracks.”

The title novella of the collection, “The Summer He Didn’t Die,” resolved my uncertainty of the difference between plot and story line. Its plot is the same as Harrison’s magnificent novel Returning to Earth but its story line doesn’t in the slightest resemble any of the novel’s storylines.

Brown Dog, the novella’s protagonist first harbors then champions a child warped by fetal alcohol syndrome, (thereby quickening my allegiance and the hope that Brown Dog is a doppelganger of a part, at least, of Harrison’s own personality).

Brown Dog continually wars with bureaucracy, and often wins, while entwined himself with food, drink, women, and dearth of money, often winning there too.

A thoroughly delightful man; rebels will love him.

“Republican Wives” allowed Harrison to exercise, but not exorcise, his class prejudice.

It’s my prejudice, too, but he portrays his three Republican wives with such scathing rancor and contempt, I became uncomfortable and found myself defending them.

The novella has the same structure—three first-person narratives telling the story and progressively moving the central storyline forward--as Returning to Earth, published in ’07. Its aesthetic success may have prompted his treatment of the novel.

In “Tracks” Harrison mentions his restlessness, which can be seen in his switching narrative styles from third person to first, and his experiments with structure—one of his many delights as a writer.

The Beast God Forgot to Invent places the third-person Brown Dog novella, “Westward Ho,” in its middle, well sandwiched between two first person narratives

It opens with Brown Dog musing about a cloud he recognized, wondering how the cloud came to be so far from its Michigan Upper Peninsula home. But BD, himself, doesn’t know where he is or why. Eventually his head clears to the point of realizing he has been sleeping under a bush in UCLA’s botanical garden, adjacent to Westwood Village. When two garden workers walk over to tell him he can’t sleep there, with impeccable logic he replies, “But I already have.”

Brown Dog himself is so far from home because he’s on the run from the consequences of a series of peccadilloes, Harrison nicely describes. But now he’s on a hunt for the stolen, near-sacred bearskin his grandfather left him.

BD is picked up by a “Hollywood” type we all know from excursions in print and film.

After reading “Tracks" from The Summer He Didn’t Die it’s easy to conclude Harrison wrote this novella after a fling at screen writing in California’s film industry and has dumped his resultant ire into these pages. Of course Harrison was there for the Big Bucks, and his dramatized contempt is a little like a prostitute bad-mouthing her johns.

But Brown Bear wasn’t after Big Bucks; he wanted that bear skin. And his adventures and misadventures in the hunt and in surviving while on the hunt make up this yarn, another version of country cousin goes to the big city.

I found the title novella from The Beast God Forgot to Invent less tantalizing than its title.

But once I abandoned my expectations, the story emerged as a good, solid, low-key read. The narrator, Norman Arnz is a sixty-seven-year-old semi-retired rare book dealer, who supposedly is writing a statement in reply to a request from the coroner in Munzing, Michigan, of the events surrounding and leading to Joseph Lacort’s death.

The joke is Arnz’s wild discursiveness (the “statement” is 98 pages long). But its rambling discourse on the habits and habitat of those involved is worth the time you’ll spend reading it.

As the title sugests, “I Forgot to Go to Spain” is something of a shaggy dog novella. Its narrator has three dozen 100-page “bioprobes, including dispositions on Marilyn Monroe, Linus Pauling, and Fidel Castro, to his credit, which support him, his sister—his acerbic researcher and conscience—and his younger brother—the accountant-thief.

After the discursive meandering through his family of origin and a nine-day first marriage, the narrator takes the reader into the novella’s food-, alcohol-and women-filled now. Unquestionably Harrison is a bottom man; myself—I’m turned on my backs and noses but have been studying bottoms recently with Harrison’s enthusiasm in mind and find them neither as enticing as Harrison suggests or as off-putting as some cartons and jokes would have it. We need to establish a Harrison’s bottom blog to quantify the various reactions to his favorite portion of human anatomy.

The novella is enriched by Harrison’s, via his narrator, musing. My favorite: “Is there a chain of fibs that encircles and binds us?”

The narrator’s wanderings, as discursive as his gloss, take his readers hither and yon, back to and away from his family and love/sexual life. The result had me wondering whether sophisticate can truly be distinct from cynic.

Nevertheless Harrison’s wilderness of words always is worth exploring.

Jim Harrison, The Road Home

This novel, exploring many of the same characters as those in his nine-years-earlier novel Delva, reflects changes in its author’s perspective from that decade of living. His interest in death is stronger and his sense of death’s inevitability. At the same time the horror of death has weakened, leaving in its place more the sense that it is a natural part of life and curiosity of what not being will be like.

Perspective interests Harrison. Frequently in both his novels and his novellas he tells his story in more than one character’s first person voice, both retelling material already presented by a predecessor but with that different point of view or pushing along the narrative in a different voice and different set of emotions, modes of thought, and reaction patterns.

In Dalva, largely told by its title character he also let Michael narrate a portion of the story. In The Road Home five characters share in telling the story. My favorite is Dalva’s grandfather, John Wesley Northridge II, to whom Harrison gives 150 pages of his 446 page novel. What I especially enjoyed about this character was the feeling of his mellow emotional balance and affectionate regard for many of those in his life. Imagine my surprise on reading how many other characters who had known him as a young man remember him as a sort of monster rogue, over riding any who opposed him, appropriating both land and lives when it suited him, and using his great physical strength to rule and punish as his volatile temper flared. The difference between the young and old John Wesley Northridge II came from his devastation at the loss of his favorite son in the Korean War.

I’m still wondering whether such a sudden complete reversal is possible since I’ve always been struck by how slowly and slightly the personality changes with time and event, even when considerable effort pushes for change. I would give a pretty to read the narration of some of the story by the young John Wesley Northridge II, a compliment to Harrison’s skill in character development.

The second part of the novel, 131 pages, belong to Nelse, Dalva’s illegitimate son, a young man after his author’s heart, who hates cities, human greed, confinement in career or place, and relishes what’s left of the wilderness, preferring to sleep under stars to ceilings, and to eat food he has caught himself—especially trout—to anything in a restaurant. He’s one of these what-you-see-is-what-you-get people, and his journal is a delight:

I was pretty sure I felt the earth moving beneath my back. The sensation happened several times within an hour or so. The stars were wiggling a bit and intermittently blurred, my vision addled by fever: Virgo with Spica, Leo and Regulus, Bootes less defined except by overwhelming Arcturus.

Maybe I did and maybe it was an illusion. I can’t say much for the difference which is a fine point we primates are always trying to transcend. It isn’t a case study and neither am I….

Not surprisingly, considering his youth, Nelse falls in love with a determined bang despite his differing and conflicting differences in personality and life style preferences from those of his nubile and winsome J.M. Much of his section is devoted to careful and penetrating consideration of this conflict, not taking sides but presenting each of the young people’s case fairly.

J.M. wanted to drive my truck so I simply sat there, a rare thing in my solo career. I developed a lump in my throat just looking at her legs and the way her hem hiked further up when she worked the clutch. There was no indication that this ache was mutual but my mind was certainly foggy as we drove along. I agreed readily to anything she said in her chatting such as that we had to live together for a full year before we mentioned the word “marriage,” and then she repeated she was finishing her BA which would take up the coming year in Lincoln. My pecker was swollen enough that no iron curtain dropped at the word “Lincoln.” I don’t mind any city if it’s a quick in and out which wasn’t what she implied in her next suggestion. Why didn’t I finish my degree since I was so close? The lump in my throat began to take on a different nature and I tried mightily to observe the landscape. Finally I said that all I had to do was totally rewrite my senior paper but I was unwilling to do that. I added that my dead Ponca informant would rise from the dead and strangle me if I left him out by changing the paper to jerk-off academic specifications. They could shove the mortar boards up their asses sideways before I’d do that.

She reddened, stiffened and slammed on the brakes. “It must be nice,” she said, “to throw away something that the rest of us work hard for.”

Harrison gives Naomi only thirty-five pages to tell her perspective on the novel’s character and events, to my regret because I enjoy Naomi and her hard wrought reasoning voice:

Which brings me back to Nelse, who seems cut from the same cloth [as Dalva, her father, and grandfather] as we used to often say before people stopped making their own clothes. When he appeared that early summer morning in a peculiar green pick-up with lightning bolts on the door panels I had, of course, no idea who it would be other than a seasonal employee of the Department of the Interior and that seemed odd as we had done a bird survey only a few years ago. He had barely taken a step out of the pick-up before I recognized him to be the son of Dalva and her misbegotten lover. What else could a mother think when her fifteen-year-old daughter becomes pregnant? His immediate mannerisms were almost too male. There is such a thing, God Knows. When he came toward me from the truck I actually prayed I’d like him as the opposite was possible. Shyness and arrogance can both be close to narcissism and he seemed to possess both, though I very soon recognized that like a few of my students over the years Nelse rather than being arrogant, had simply made up his mind about too many things when he was too young.

Without spelling it out, Harrison uses Naomi to make the case for parents who often agonize over their children’s dilemmas without being able to do much to alleviate their pain. In this case Naomi and her father-in-law had made a pivotal decision for Dalva and like Dalva are faced with its consequences. I agree with Naomi’s assessment that either one of the two choices Dalva was faced with would have brought pain, probably a lifetime of it. But she and her father-in-law seem to be tossing the blame of it back and forth like a hot potato.

Paul, Dalva’s uncle, Naomi’s surviving son, given forty-one pages, seems quite different from the man Dalva and Naomi spoke of in Dalva. But this might be because he is narrating, and largely concerned with his desires for and hopes of a committed relationship with Naomi, and also possibly the difference is indicative of the passage of time, bringing with it Dalva’s adulthood and life as an adult. Harrison is sensitive to and skilled in revealing time and event’s effect on personality, one of the reasons undertaking to read both these novels repays the reader’s effort.

The novel’s final seventy-eight pages belong to Dalva who relates the process of getting acquainted with the son she had known only for minutes just after his birth. The mix of emotions, the tentative probing, the musing—all are there.

At age forty-six I can stand at the kitchen sink and look out at the barnyard where the event occurred and feel overwhelmingly blessed that I found my son. Both his parents were problematical and I suppose his mother still is. I conceived him out by the creek in a wet baptism dress at age fifteen. The father, Duane Stone Horse, was sixteen and has drifted far backward in time but is not the less vivid for being so long dead. I wonder if anyone can stand back from earth and get a clear look for more than a few minutes at a time. Though we are one body in some respects I am not fool enough to think I am his mother in the truest sense, the woman who raises and presumably nurtures you day by day. We are what is left of his father and my father except for Ruth who was too young to remember. I think Niles and I are becoming the closest of friends and perhaps something else for which there is no category. When I see him out the window at dawn or twilight when the light is a bit blurred. I think he could be either my father or Duane. After he drove me home on the day I had lost my job and when by evening I became quite miserable with delayed rage we sat by the fire and he took my hand and held it. That has to be enough.

Where Delva relates the Sioux story, The Road Home is entirely about its people and their relationships, the kind of book I relish most. Reading both is a favor to yourself.

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This is where I post news of things that I am currently reading.