Review by New York Times Review
MY father, who was a scrupulous and seasoned engineer, said on one of our last road trips that there was a part of a person that was always 17. He'd been telling me another story about his youth on the farm, and he was grinning at the time. I could feel Jim Harrison grinning the same way in his glorious novella "The River Swimmer," which celebrates the manifold lessons of that heady year by following the outsize adventures of 17-year-old Thad, a strong, dreamy farm boy who is inexorably drawn to water. Indeed, both of the novellas that make up Harrison's new book (also called "The River Swimmer") dive into a watershed age with Harrison's signature gusto. Thad, the river swimmer, is 17 in every way; Clive, the art professor returning to the farm in "The Land of Unlikeness," is 60. These two trenchant and visionary long stories are about the real human discomfort - and triumph - of being awake. Thad plunges into the river at every chance, even in winter, always has. In this rushing, episodic rite of passage, the passages are mainly rivers. Water is Thad's first love, and it is in the river that he encounters the "water babies," aquatic infants who may be the souls of lost children. They are the primal mystery in a world of mysteries that Thad confronts in his travels. He's young and strong and handsome, a blank tablet on which the wonders and treacheries of the world can be written. The picaresque is a kind of moral education for this wide-eyed guy as he encounters violence and cruelty and food and sex and money and religion and his dear books and the weird customs of men, and beneath all of it his overwhelming desire to swim. Harrison salts this charming book with Thad's lessons. Considering trouble, he thinks that "the greatest evil of evil men is that they make you hate them." He meets a wonderful librarian and wonders what is "the evolutionary purpose of homeliness in this otherwise delightful person?" Thad cavorts with bears and beavers and sees that "creatures want companionship, but on their own terms." How could greed be the primary virtue of a culture? Nothing seems to be denied rich girls. How could wealth be any preparation for a life "except to make it easy?" Many are ignorant that hard manual labor can make you feel good. If you're truly hungry from hard work, a liver sausage on rye with onions and hot mustard can take you through to dinner. Thad travels to France and thinks: "You go on vacation and end up sitting looking out the window." The water babies inspire him to consider that "people desire miracles but when they get them it adds an extremely confusing element to life." And Thad is confused. Will he end up selling his life for a job, this creature, this searcher, this 17-year-old whom the tribal people call the Human Fish? He wants to swim, yes, but he wants to be at home in the world. He's caught between the arrogance of 17 and a withering state of mind. He feels "victimized by the miraculous." The world is coming at him and vice versa, and he will be knocked about but not out. In Lyon, Thad vows to run up a steep hill for no reason. He reads about the Nile and knows there's a chance a hippo would bite him in half. He's 17! He dreams of swimming the Gulf Stream. He has learned so much; he has learned not to say anything is impossible in a universe with 90 billion galaxies. Jim Harrison has written about 17 as if he wants to retire the number. Harrison is a writer of the body, which he celebrates as the ordinary, essential and wondrous instrument by which we measure the world. Without it, there is no philosophy. And with it, of course, philosophy can be a rocky test. Naturally there is food in both of these novellas, wine and cheese and homemade applesauce and pickled bologna and the veal chop rescued from the last time Clive, the painter, saw his daughter. Harrison, as it happens, has some things to show us about the lessons of 60 as well. Ostensibly a landmark late in the second act if not the third, 60 years is where the art historian, appraiser, professor and former painter Clive has ended up when he returns to his rural homeplace to care for his mother so his sister can make her first trip to Europe. He's a sophisticated, educated connoisseur of art, food and fashion. He is far from his highly evolved life, and his homecoming would be the stuff of arch disdain in another book. He hasn't washed a car himself for 40 years. He's been to Europe 30 times, for Pete's sake, and his academic career has granted him a backpack full of ironies. Clive, however, has other resources. He is a sensitive and kind man, considerate. He's defeated by the fact that he hasn't painted in 20 years, an art he abandoned when he feared being decorative. Being home in his boyhood room with his art books and early paintings and the view from his window oddly feeds Clive, and he finds himself coming to life. There is also the arresting curiosity of his high school crush, Laurette, who provoked him sorely years ago and now has moved back at the end of the lane. The heady mix of his half-blind mother diligently bird-watching with true joy, Laurette and her frank beauty, the vital dream of memory and the view from his window push Clive to order art supplies, and he commences the paintings he's had in his head for 40 years, of a whale skeleton surrounding him in his room so he can look up through the ribs, and the unfinished business of a nude study of Laurette. He has assiduously avoided discomfort in his adult life, and at the farm he remembers frigid days cutting wood with his father, his mother's rustic cooking (pot roast, boiled cabbage, the works) and lying abed waiting to get warm. He awakes one morning having lost his self-importance; can there be a more significant, salubrious epiphany? They mostly run the other way. Unnerved by this and a midnight attack of indigestion, Clive finds himself sitting on his old farm bed looking at Caravaggio, paintings he has seen in museums, but now he's crying. The painter in him wants out; the professor is in decline. One thing can save him, he realizes, the artist's single most important attribute: purity of intent. He wonders at his motives: did he want a meteoric career or did he want to be an artist? Clive abhors the great conflation of art with market. Harrison keeps all of this from becoming overvaulting with the dear comedy of Laurette's portrait, Clive's physical self on the farm and finally a road trip with his estranged daughter. Along the way, we keep company of this increasingly tender soul and his ruminations about art and culture, and the everyday lessons he is learning from his homeplace. In this reborn painter, Harrison opens the heart of a man who knows he's in his third act, but as he arranges his watercolors we can feel the hope. He is astonished to have rediscovered painting, his first love. Everyone has to do something while awake, he thinks with a new pragmatism, so why not paint? Clive's awakening is a blessed and earned thing. We're not going to crown Harrison the new captain of the happy ending, but in the last moment of the story, Clive sees a shade of green behind his reclaimed daughter that he has never seen before, and at the moment that feels like enough. Ron Carlson's most recent novel is "The Signal."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 20, 2013]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The two novellas that constitute Harrison's fine new collection are, as usual, quite different in scope and content. "The Land of Unlikeness" features Clive, 60 and divorced for two decades ("the starkest rupture in his life"), taking advantage of a forced three-month leave from his professorship at an Ivy League college in New York to care for his octogenarian mother, now watching birds on the family farm in northern Michigan. His younger sister, Margaret, who is embarking on a month-long European vacation, informs Clive that his old high school flame Laurette is back in town. Clive reflects on his rift with his alienated daughter, Sabrina, while he rekindles his artist's ambitions despite his thwarted early career as a painter. As Clive relates his rustic origins through frequent, wistful reminisces, he has a "crotch painting experience" with Laurette, who remains the "overwhelming love of his life." Margaret's return home from Europe coincides with Sabrina's visit for a friendly family reunion. The short title novella, a tall tale set in northern Michigan, finds 17-year-old Thad Love, a swimming prodigy, after getting injured in a fight with his girlfriend's father, improbably swimming over 100 miles to Chicago, where he meets a new girl who takes him to France, where Thad is more seriously injured swimming the Loire river. Harrison's (Legends of the Fall) novellas are each striking in their own ways, rich and satisfying. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In each of these two novellas, a man endeavors to find his way in life when the path seems unclear. "The Land of Unlikeness" tells the story of a 60-year-old failed artist who still can't seem to find himself a position as a college art history instructor. Only when he returns home to visit and care for his elderly mother does he begin to rekindle the joy he used to feel when painting. In "Water Baby," a farm boy is inexplicably drawn to the water. Following an abusive act directed at him, he swims across Lake Michigan to Chicago; returning home after another tragic accident, he is once again drawn into the river to follow the magical creatures he sees there. Traber Burns narrates these tales in a pleasant, unobtrusive manner that suits Harrison's lyrical and compelling writing. VERDICT Harrison's fans will find this a captivating listening experience, and those unfamiliar with his writings but who enjoy well-written novellas will also be pleased with this audiobook.-Gloria Maxwell, Metropolitan Community Coll., Kansas City, MO (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Though these two novellas feel slight in comparison with the best of the prolific author's novels, the ways in which they complement and contrast with each other attest to his range. Both The Land of Unlikeness and the title novella return Harrison (The Great Leader, 2011, etc.) to familiar territory, his native Michigan, with protagonists at very different stages of their lives. The autumnal opening novella finds a once-successful painter turned academic returning home to care for his mother, allowing his sister to experience some of the cosmopolitan life beyond Michigan that he has. Neither the author nor his protagonist takes himself overly seriously, though a sense of mortality pervades the story along with the possibility of renewal. "You're not going to live forever, Mister Bigshot," warns the mother, urging her son to reconcile with his daughter, who took sides after his divorce. He reunites with a boyhood love, rediscovers his passion for painting and reaffirms his engagement with a life that he has been watching from the sidelines: "It occurred to him that only purity of intent would save his own sorry soul. If he were to continue to paint he had to do so without the trace of the slumming intellectual toting around his heavy knapsack of ironies. He was well into his third act and further delay would be infamous." By contrast, the title story shows the first act of its protagonist's life reaching climax, as a 17-year-old boy who lives to swim (in rivers) experiences his sexual initiation, and the complications that follow, as he swims his way through a magical, rite-of-passage quest. "[H]umans are ill-prepared for the miraculous," he discovers. "It's too much of a jolt and the human soul is not spacious enough to deal with it." Ultimately, he realizes that "there was a world out there to swim through." Everyday epiphanies from a major author.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
