Newspaper Article

JIM HARRISON'S MISFITS A FATHERLESS WOMAN, AN UPPER PENINSULA ROGUE AND A VICTIMIZED ACADEMIC

Reviewed by Alan Cheuse, an author whose books include the novel "The Light Possessed" and the story collection "The Tennessee Waltz."

1994

Overview

Looking back at Harrison's fiction, one sees some books still burning brightly while others have sputtered out. Along with the novels \"Sundog\" and \"Dalva,\" the novellas in \"Legends of the Fall,\" particularly the title work, show off a writer at the height of his powers. \"Legends of the Fall\" is at once an epical gesture toward our great romance with the West and an acutely modern critique of those same myths-again, Harrison wants it both ways. This intense and engaging story breaks a lot of the rules of narrative (so much exposition, so little time) even as it makes new space in the imagination for the realms of manhood and sorrow. It's a tribute to Harrison's subtle narrative skills that as we follow Julip across Florida while she proceeds with her plan to get Bobby out of jail, we also move back and forth in time-discovering, in a third as many pages as it takes to build the usual novel, her dangerous past and how it comes to impinge on her present. Above all else the novella is a tribute to a young woman wise and talented beyond her years. Her father's dead-long ago run over while lying drunk in a sleeping bag in the middle of a campground parking lot-and her mother has floated away into some high society stratosphere. More than anything else from her childhood, Julip misses a bear that had been a bad if intriguing neighbor at the family's forest retreat in Wisconsin. To keep up her spirits, Julip reads Emily Dickinson and goes on the road on her brother's behalf.

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC