Harrison embraces lives on the margin in 3 novellas

"The Farmer's Daughter"

by Jim Harrison

Grove Press, 320 pp., $24

Novelist Jim Harrison covers an epic range of themes in these three lively novellas. All are cast with his usual mix of endearing if idiosyncratic characters who, in these tales, confront some blunt hardships. Each of them finds solace in wild and empty places along the way (these are Harrison stories, after all). And somehow, each manages to turn the odds and emerge with at least the hope of love.

Sarah, the feisty 15-year-old heroine of the title story, is burdened with a disillusioned and thoroughly distracted father and a religious nut for a mom. Stranded on an isolated Montana ranch, Sarah has only her music (her grandmother taught her classical piano), her horse and the windy Montana wilds for company.

She finds a friend briefly in Tim, an old, ill rancher who sold her family the ranch. Tim introduces Sarah to the country, teaches her to shoot, entrusts her with his cranky dog. Eventually he bequeaths her his cabin, a valued retreat. But after Sarah's mother leaves, no one is there for her when she is assaulted at a county fair. Her obsession with getting even with her attacker leads to an epic misadventure. It also sends her off to seek the larger world beyond Montana where her love of music open doors to a new life.

Brown Dog, the antihero of the second novella, is a Chippewa Indian and perennial favorite among Harrison's readers. Well into middle age now, "B.D." no longer invites calamity on a regular basis. But old habits are hard to shuck. He has fled from Michigan to Canada with his young stepdaughter, Berry, a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. Authorities in the States want to place her in a home for the mentally disabled, but B.D. seeks the healing power of nature (Berry has a remarkable affinity for wild creatures). Now they are stuck in Toronto, money is running thin and B.D. is having second thoughts.

Deliverance appears in the form of a matronly social worker who also manages a Lakota rock band called the Thunderskins. Brown Dog and Berry's passage back to the U.S. aboard the band's tour bus is delightfully picaresque and vintage Harrison.

The last novella reads like a Mexican folk tale. In his youth, the narrator is "bitten" by a hummingbird in Mexico, then nipped by a wolf pup he attempts to rescue. Later in life he is diagnosed with an acute blood virus, but something else is clearly afoot. During full moons he becomes possessed by "seizures" and wracked with irrepressible appetites. Only by retreating to the wilds and running himself into exhaustion does he maintain the illusion of a quasi-normal life.

By stalking society's hinterlands in his fiction, Harrison reminds us of the universality of human experience. As marginal as his characters appear, he awakes in readers a genuine compassion for them. In Harrison's generous, insightful and slightly offbeat world, even werewolves get a shot at redemption.