Review by New York Times Review
Jim Harrison's rugged hero is on the trail of an elusive cult leader. IT is now 55 years since my last book report, which is a long time to live with a guilty conscience. So here it is: In the spring of 1956 I wrote a highly favorable review of the Bible without reading a word of it, and it was the last A I ever got in English. Why it has taken so long to come clean I'm not sure, except I have always been extremely sensitive about my academic reputation. Meanwhile the years have passed, and although I still haven't read the Bible, I think I know enough about literature now to foresee that Jim Harrison's new novel, "The Great Leader," will be easier than the Bible was to option to the movies. For one thing, there will be fewer producers claiming they developed the material, and for another the protagonist has a more accessible arc. Possibly you are thinking that I haven't learned my lesson, but trust me: I don't have to be at that meeting to know what everybody is going to say. Anyway, Harrison's protagonist. His name is Sunderson. Recently divorced, just retired from the Michigan State Police, often drunk, sad and hung over, but still holding dear to the things that have always held him, even as the world he has loved is disappearing. His dog Walter, for instance, is dead two or three years and still actively mourned. Likewise his marriage, except his wife is remarried, not hit chasing a car. (The truth is, I'm not sure specifically what did Walter in.) He - Sunderson, not Walter - leaves killed whiskey bottles behind everywhere he goes, maybe like bread crumbs to find the way home to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where he has lived in the cold, bitter grasp of Lake Superior all his life. And reads history compulsively, fishes trout streams and beaver ponds compulsively, drinks awful whiskey - did I mention he drinks? - and if he has ever met a female bottom that does not set him howling at the moon, then he was obviously taught that if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. He is a keen observer of both ladies' bottoms and everything he eats, particularly wild game. He takes long naps and engages in considerable sex for his age (65) and for the amount of time he spends black and blue and gimped up, not to mention the time he still devotes to figuring sex out. Which is to say there is an age when the reproductive system begins to rebel against unsatisfied supermarket erections. I refer you here to the boy who cried wolf. But then, how do you get so banged up at 65 anyway? Well, he does drink. Then too, he is in hot pursuit of a hedonistic cult leader - the Great Leader of Harrison's title - and is nearly killed in a horrifying ambush by an unknown number of the man's prepubescent girlfriends. They throw stones, but believe me when I say this is not a signal to go to the New Testament for hidden meaning; the meaning is Sunderson's discovery of how much unnoticed anger you carry around after you leave the hospital, which is so true it makes me blink tears. Put together, these things serve (to borrow a phrase from "The Great Leader") to percolate Sunderson's brain. That is, to entertain it, which is one of the two possible reasons to write, or for that matter read. To enlighten and to entertain: what else is there? And while good books - even so-so books - serve both functions, if you ever have to choose one over the other, keep in mind that a book that entertains without enlightening can still be a guilty pleasure, but a book that enlightens without entertaining is algebra. Meaning that on some level your brain has to have a good time or it's pointless, and I am happy to report that "The Great Leader" carbonates page after page after page. You might go so far as to compare it to Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Or you might not. Actually, Harrison is more like Ted Williams, much the better hitter - does anybody know by the way if they finally put his head into frozen storage? - except Williams was one of those brooders who thought too much about his art. That may work in baseball, but when it comes to reading and writing, it gets in the way. So where does that leave Jim Harrison and American literature? WILLIE Mays. Mays was a magic act, but the kind that left you with the feeling that the miraculous stuff surprised him too. And that's where Harrison fits in, 30-odd books down the road - his own shelf in the library - and you can still feel the excitement every time he pulls something new out of his ear. Which pretty much happens on every page he writes. No? Pick a number, any number, from 1 to 329. All right, then: Page 94 finds Sunderson in Arizona, on the scent of the Great Leader, whose crimes are never defined precisely beyond the suspicion that he has sex with children. It is dawn in Arizona and Sunderson makes one of his regular calls home to Mona, his 16-year-old next-door neighbor back in Michigan, who is researching cults for him on her computer. Sunderson does not trust computers, but then he does not trust electricity. He is a very old-fashioned guy. Mona from next door has a lovely behind, although possibly not as lovely as Carla's from the drunken woodpile incident at Sunderson's retirement party, and a shade lovelier than Lucy's, whose behind is like his ex-wife's but without the sentimental attachment. He keeps track of Mona's bottom through a gap created by pulling Slotkin's treatise on violence in America from his bookshelf. Mona reports that two friends have stayed the night, a pajama party, drunk all the beer in Sunderson's icebox and are still running around naked and shrieking. It's too bad, she says, that Sunderson isn't there to peek. Mona is an endearing kid who takes a little getting used to. He listens a moment to the shrieking. Then this: "In his own danceless life he couldn't imagine anyone laughing on a November dawn but here it was. He tried to dismiss the image of three nude girls in the same bed but it was like trying not to think of a white horse." Both barrels, right between the eyes. "Danceless life" could be the national anthem of the early retired, and a second later, three naked adolescents are scampering through his head like mice in the drywall, where shooing them off is impossible, like trying not to think of a white horse. This of course is a tap on the shoulder, a reminder that the Great Leader's crimes, however indistinct, are some incarnation of Sunderson's own, which raises the question of what Sunderson is really chasing, but without beating you over the head with it. That may be as good a place as any to draw the line between entertainment and enlightenment. It is not entertaining to be beaten over the head. But enough of Page 94. Pick up the book for yourself, drop it on the floor and wherever it falls open there will be something just as good. The critic glances at the clock and realizes that pretty soon he has to say something bad about Jim Harrison. Yes, he's established that he's read the book; now something to prove he isn't being paid off. Under duress, then, he ventures that there may be one buttock too many in Harrison's story - although it could just as easily be argued that there is a sunset every evening in Key West, and nobody complains about that. Also, the critic doesn't trust references to popular culture even if he can't say why (Sunderson is said to resemble the actor Robert Duvall), and as a rule when he - the critic, not Sunderson - reads a novel he skips the parts about dreams. Taken one by one, these complaints may seem trivial, but together they add up to exactly nothing, maybe a little less. Jim Harrison can break all the rules he wants and come out smelling like a rose, and if you will excuse my mixing aromas - fish and flowers - I would mention that for me, Harrison set the hook deep and early, in a novella called "Revenge." There is a scene in that story of almost incomprehensible savagery - Harrison by the way is as good at writing violence as anybody, and particularly gets the weirdness of the incubation period - and he accomplished this particular violence by interrupting himself and manually moving readers to the fireplace mantel, where they could watch without getting hurt. It was one of Harrison's moments of instinctive genius, I think, perhaps the only way to bring off the scene without changing the mesmeric sound coming off the pages to something more ordinary, and I mean it as no disrespect to speculate that these moments are in some way out of Harrison's hands, and very close to magic. Pete Dexter's most recent books are the novel "Spooner" and the journalism collection "Paper Trails."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 2, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The world needs more hard-boiled mysteries written by soft-boiled poets. It's been 30 years since the late Richard Hugo wrote the delicious Death and the Good Life, and now we have this very similar tale from poet and novelist Harrison. Like Mush Heart Barnes in Hugo's book, Harrison's hero, sixtysomething Sunderson, is given to weeping. And why not? He's reeling from a soul-crushing divorce, he's just retired from his job as county sheriff in the wilds of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and he's been spotted peeping at the high-school girl next door as she does her nude yoga. What Sunderson needs is a new case. Sure, he's retired, but there's still the unresolved matter of cult leader Dwight, aka the Great Leader, who, Sunderson knows, is doing more than peeping at the cult's teenage followers. So it's off on a quixotic adventure to the Arizona desert for the hard-drinking, hopelessly sensitive, dangerously good-hearted, unflaggingly randy ex-sheriff. Hoping to corral Dwight and finally understand the evil connection between religion, money, and sex, Sunderson mostly muses and mopes about the impossibility of his quest, about the unfairness of getting old, about whether he should stop drinking (To even think of quitting made him feel that life was on the verge of cheating him), and about lost love in all its agonizing forms. It's hardly a mystery at all, really, but after about five pages, most readers will be willing to follow Sunderson anywhere. After all, our hero reminds us, the purpose of life, simply enough, was life.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Harrison (The English Teacher) offers a chunk of comic backwoods noir marked by more plodding than stalking. Detective Sunderson wallows in "the deep puzzlement of retirement" even as he pursues, on his own dime, a pedophilic cult leader. Known simply as "Dwight," the quarry promises to unknot for Sunderson the bedeviling connections between sex, religion, and money. But Dwight barely appears on the page, leaving the detective often ruminating on his own distrust of money and spirituality, and obsessing about sex-which he actually gets a fair amount of for an overweight, drunk, sardonic, 64-year-old bachelor, despite his belief that the "biological imperative was a distracting nuisance." Characters and themes like these pervade the prolific Harrison's work; no one makes horny geezers so lovable, but some will wish he'd distilled this into the novella form he's so good at. The story's motifs of lust and power, sex and death resonate, yet the narrative's slow progression keeps an otherwise entertaining literary investigation rooted in the oft-frozen ground of the Upper Peninsula. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Perhaps best known for his film-adapted collection of novellas, Legends of the Fall, Harrison is one of the most prolific writers of recent times, with an expansive body of work ranging from poetry (Letters to Yesenin) to children's literature (The Boy Who Ran to the Woods). Set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Harrison's favorite location, this book does not offer the continuing story line of familial heartbreak and reconciliation explored in True North and Returning to Earth, but common themes of alcoholism and loneliness in the Upper Peninsula. Divorced, alcoholic, and recently retired detective Sunderson journeys from Michigan to Nebraska as he tracks a cult and its charismatic leader, whose commitment to evading capture is as strong as Sunderson's commitment to finding him. This cat-and-mouse game between the two main characters is used effectively to explore the intrinsic tensions between the universal truths of justice, religion, and mortality. VERDICT A classic Harrison novel, complete with humorous and introspective characters. [See Prepub Alert, 4/4/11.]-Joshua Finnell, -Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH (c) Copyright 2011. 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
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.