There isn't enough Jim Harrison in this world. One of the few truly original writers of the last 20 years, he belongs to no school, and sits in a category and style uniquely his own. While he is sometimes compared, favourably and unfavourably, to Ernest Hemingway because they both write about Michigan and, sometimes, fishing, the comparison makes as much sense as linking Hemingway with Cervantes because they both write about Spain.
When Harrison died several years ago, I was as much disgruntled as I was sad. Jim Harrison books were capped. Damn it.
In the new year I re-read Brown Dog, a 2013 repackaging of 6 novellas featuring BD (the titular Brown Dog), perhaps the most joyful picaro of our times. BD first showed up in 1990, in Harrison's novella triptych The Woman Lit by Fireflies, along with two unrelated stories. And this patterned continued. Every 5 or so years BD would turn up in a book of novellas, a single story, enough to fall in love with, but never enough to be enough. There is a wonderful difference in reading one novella here and there and the whole sprawling collection. Repackaged as they are, this edition of Brown Dog becomes something a of a modern epic, a loving, lewd and unruly 23-year saga of a man stumbling through morality and chasing misfortune; at peace with it, if not himself and the world around him.
From trying to rescue a cadaver found on a deep diving salvage job, to adopting unwanted children, to escaping Canada, BD always take a very wayward route in trying to do the right thing. There is genuine joy not only in what he does but in the way he does it. His romantic conquests are as abundant as his romantic failures and the same can be said for most areas of his life; working, fishing, camping, friends and family, but above all questing, even if accidentally.
There are a lot of distractions, for the reader and for BD – from trysts to drinking bouts to Harrison’s rich and meandering writing – but at its core Brown Dog is the story of someone always trying hard to do the right thing. And there isn’t enough of that in this world.
— Michael Caleb Tasker was born in Montreal, Canada, and spent his childhood in New Orleans and Buenos Aires. He has worked as a journalist, university lecturer, ranch hand and his fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Adelaide, Australia.
You can find Michael Caleb Tasker’s story "Cracked Bells" in Issue 299 Spring 2024. Order the issue now:
