Review by New York Times Review
MY ALL-BOYS HIGH school A.P. English class was presided over by a glamorous, overqualified woman known to us as Dr. Lerner. I might have been in love with her. She smelled wonderful, like lemon trees on a hot day. Knowing she was a doctor of literature didn't prevent me from imagining various medical situations in which she saved my life. Once, I stopped Dr. Lerner in the hall and feigned difficulty with a "Heart of Darkness" essay. This was plainly an excuse to stand close to her. She looked me in the eye and said, "What's the difference between a civilized man and an uncivilized one?" I shrugged. "Cotton underwear?" "Restraint," Dr. Lerner said, and swept on. I still wonder: Was she talking about Kurtz? Or me? In the decades since, no literary character I've encountered, not Humbert Humbert or Frankenstein or Ahab or even Kurtz, has made me ponder Dr. Lerner's question more deeply than Jim Harrison's Brown Dog. Brown Dog, if you haven't yet run across him, has been the protagonist of five Harrison novellas since 1990. A thick new collection, "Brown Dog: Novellas," assembles them all, and includes a sixth - unpublished until now. Brown Dog has no other name. He's simply B.D., a scoundrel, a "backwoods nitwit," a "kindly fool," a goof as lovable as Sancho Panza and a libertine as promiscuous (if not as discriminating) as Don Juan. Picture a smuttier, older and alcoholic Huckleberry Finn, who happens to be Native American. B.D. lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, home of Hemingway's Two-Hearted River, where summer is "known locally as three months of bad sledding" and where the headline "Old Finn Walks 25 Miles to See Brother" is considered rousing. Raised by his grandfather, he hates loud noises, prefers the company of ravens and bears, and his idea of advance planning is to stash pints of schnapps in tree stumps near his favorite trout streams. If Brown Dog qualifies as civilized, it's only a part-time vocation. He is an "anti-magnet for money" ; lust flares in his loins every 15 minutes; four days without a drink seems his best record. He plans to fast before going into "battle" (i.e., chucking fireworks at an ex-girlfriend), but a couple of hours later, he gets "distracted by a pail of fresh smelt" and "two cases of beer." Running from the police, B.D. asks to stop for breakfast. He prefers to sleep outdoors because houses are too warm. He averages one piece of mail a year. He believes sobriety is a "tough row to hoe." And yet B. D. is generally endearing and sporadically admirable. He risks everything to defend an ancient Hopewell burial site, he cares for his disabled stepdaughter with supernatural patience, and he never sheds his childlike naïveté. The first time he saw the ocean, Harrison tells us, he kept his "face in his hands ... peeking out between his fingers because the view was far too much to be absorbed wide open." WHAT HARRISON does on every page of "Brown Dog" is have fun. In the first (and best) novella, we watch B. D. haul a frozen corpse out of Lake Superior, stuff it into a stolen ice truck and convince himself it might be the father he never knew. In the second, we watch him dodge angry and lethal cuckolds, convince local newspapers he might be leading a secret "Red Power" brotherhood and team up with an "erstwhile though deeply fraudulent Indian activist" who is required back at U.C.L.A. soon "to head a colloquium: 'Will Whitey Ever See Red?'" In the ensuing novellas, we watch him steal a bearskin from a Hollywood producer, fall for a sex-addicted dentist, ride on a tour bus with a rock band and have "real trouble dealing with" a Montana Costco. The kind of fun Harrison prefers above all is bawdy. B.D. connects with an implausible number of women over these 500 pages, and I don't care to estimate the number of times Harrison employs the word "weenie." His sentences can be careless, the later novellas feel repetitive, and the uneven addition, "He Dog," is not Harrison's best work. That said, readers don't turn to Harrison for razor-sharp prose and linear narratives. Exuberance and messiness are his great strengths. "It was the messiness of nature that gave it such beauty," B.D. reflects at one point, and that's how I feel about "Brown Dog." At his best, Harrison is having fun not simply for the sake of delight but because he believes delight is as close to sublimity as humans can get. Despite all the beer drinking and yearning, sometimes you look up from his pages and catch yourself wrestling with big, important questions about class, race and ecological degradation. You meet B.D.'s Uncle Delmore, for example, who always wears a three-piece suit and who unplugged his TV years before "because Ronald Reagan said a lot of Indians were oil-rich on their 'preservations.'" You identify with B.D.'s frustrations with well-intentioned bureaucracies and their incessant record-keeping. "What chance did a fellow have to improve," he complains, "when they had files to pull the rug out from under him?" Harrison's best jokes betray the sad absurdities of our historical situation. Just before B.D. and "six Wisconsin braves" head off to prevent anthropologists from surveying the aforementioned Hopewell burial site, the narrator writes, "Fred wanted to sing 'We Shall Overcome' but no one could remember the words beyond 'someday' and their voices trailed off to the crackling fire." In so many ways, the character of Brown Dog reminds me of my family's big, fuzzy mixed-breed dog, Lincoln. Both B.D. and Lincoln have hair of legendary unruliness. Both prefer cold weather. Both smell bad. Both take full advantage of proximity to members of the opposite sex. Neither frequents a dentist. Neither possesses any reason to care what day of the week it is. Both find deep pleasure in walking through the woods. Both are "inexperienced at thinking ahead." Both approach a porterhouse steak with almost spiritual ecstasy. And both have a certain wisdom to teach us, if we can stop being busy for long enough to pay attention. Here's B. D. at a low point, after his van has been wrecked and snow has fallen for three straight days and he has hardly a penny to his name: "Come to think of it, the main good thing out here snowbound in this cabin is that nothing is happening. ... I've got this personal feeling things are not supposed to be happening to people all of the time. At least I'm not designed for it. There should be more open spaces between events." This sums up Lincoln's attitude about life precisely. As this book's second novella puts it: "He might be B. D. dragging along the earth but he actually was a lot lighter in the mind than nearly everyone else, save a few sages and master adepts sprung from the Far East." What's the difference between a civilized man and an uncivilized one? Is it cable TV, a decent credit score and gainful employment? Or is it the ability to move through a place knowing the trees and streams and birds, free of the burdens of ambition, recognizing this is the time and place one is meant to be? Ultimately, it is B.D.'s unencumberedness that's so appealing. The great project of life, he reminds us, is to sit still long enough to appreciate it. ANTHONY DOERR'S fifth book, the novel "All the Light We Cannot See," will be published in May.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 15, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This essential collection of six novellas (including the never-before-published "He Dog") offers an omnibus look at Brown Dog, a pure Harrison creation and a glorious character who will make readers howl with delight. From his first scuffling introduction in The Woman Lit by Fireflies, this boozy, backwoods, tree-cutting, snow-shoveling part-Native American from Michigan's Upper Peninsula wins over his audience with a bawdy, sometimes thoughtful tone. In these stories, he shambles from a day-to-day set of misadventures arising from some illegal salvage diving to a loopy picaresque jaunt through Los Angeles ("I just want my bearskin back," he says), to something much more profound and redemptive, standing in as a father figure to several vulnerable Indian and partially Indian children, despite the absence of much paternal influence in his own life. When a girlfriend tells him he's "involved in failure as a habit," Brown Dog says, "I never felt I did all that badly at life." He mentions a youth spent as a bare-knuckle fighter, but his greatest successes are usually horizontal, as he manages a string of unlikely, often alcohol-fueled sexual conquests, from Shelley the anthropologist, who schemes to get him to reveal the location of an ancient Indian burial mound, to a lonely Jewish dentist who wants to "go at it like canines unmindful of the noise they made." Often moving, frequently funny, these 500 pages offer the best way to get acquainted (or reacquainted) with one of literature's great characters. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Since 1990, Harrison (Legends of the Fall) has been publishing novellas about the adventures of Brown Dog, a character of partly Native American descent living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This volume collects Harrison's five previously published Brown Dog stories and adds a new one. Brown Dog exists primarily off the grid of contemporary society and subsists on odd jobs (some legal, some not) and the occasional generosity of his (maybe) Uncle Delmore and the kind but troubled social worker Gretchen, who is the object of Brown Dog's unrequited passion. Motivated primarily by alcohol and sex (his genuine affection for women of all shapes and sizes makes him remarkably successful in this endeavor), Brown Dog can't seem to stay out of trouble. Harrison takes pains not to paint his leading man as a "noble savage," but the character's observations highlight the foibles and hypocrisy of modern life. -VERDICT Readers new to Harrison's sagas will be happy for this full introduction. Those already familiar will find here a satisfying conclusion that leaves open the possibility for further adventures.-Christine DeZelar--Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis (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
Pity poor Brown Dog, the Everyman of the North Woods, whose luck would be nonexistent were it not bad. Still, Brown Dog's countenance is as cheerful as Don Quixote's was woeful. Harrison's comic hero--and in some ways alter ego--is as quixotic as they come, depending on kind winds to blow him a little money, some booze and a bit of righteous loving. In this exercise in well-effected repackaging, Brown Dog's tales are lifted from other Harrison collections (e.g., The Farmer's Daughter, 2009, and The Summer He Didn't Die, 2005) and gathered in a single volume, which is just right. When we first met Brown Dog, he was a barroom horndog generally taken for an Indian (though, at first, he's not so sure of that: "Now I'm no more Indian than a keg of nails") and able to wheedle a drink or two out of passing anthropologists for his trouble. He was also the haunted discoverer of the body of an unmistakably authentic Indian below the waters of Lake Superior, waters so cold that bodies do not bloat and float in them. That body will turn up from time to time as Brown Dog leaves the Upper Peninsula on sometimes-unwanted quests--to Los Angeles, for instance, to hunt down a bearskin that's been stolen from him and to Canada, in the company of some Native rockers. But mostly he hangs around in the pines, always just barely a step ahead of the law and in trouble in every other way; when we leave him in the hitherto unpublished novella He Dog, he is a step away from being pounded by "a strapping woman" named Big Cheryl, who reckons that the experience might just do B.D. some good. Rollicking, expertly observed, beautifully written. Any new book by Harrison is cause for joy, and having all the Brown Dog stories in one place is no exception.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
