I took a sleeping bag out of the closet, turned out the lights, and settled down in the yard. Close attention to the stars, moon, sun, and earth is genuinely helpful when you want to stop talking to yourself. We all hope for a superior brand of madness but our wounds are considerably less interesting than our cures.Julip is made up of three novellas, seemingly unrelated, and although the characters and settings don't overlap, they are thematically linked. There's something Hemingwayesque in author Jim Harrison's approach -- with manly men fishing for tarpon off the Florida coast, cutting pulp up in Michigan, or rounding up cattle on an Arizona ranch -- but what elevates this book above pastiche is the self-awareness that the characters have; the sense of playing at the work of the real men.
In "Julip", the title character -- named after both the drink and the flower -- is a 21-year-old woman, more vital than beautiful, who uses her attractiveness to seduce and manipulate three rich middle-aged men who find her irresistible. Out of duty to the unbalanced brother who attacked these men on her behalf, Julip goes on a quest to Florida to have his jail sentence commuted to a psychiatric facility, but her only true passion is for the hunting dogs that she raises and trains back home in Wisconsin. She refers to the three men dismissively as "the Boys", and as her really horrifying childhood is slowly revealed, Julip's relationship with them seems both more and less tragic: she was never an innocent, but she also never had a chance at any other kind of life. The small details in this story -- like the relationships that Julip and Bobby have with their cousin Marcia -- nag at my brain and develop Julip's character in a way that I never saw Hemingway accomplish with women characters.
In "The Seven-Ounce Man", Brown Dog (a character Harrison had written about before), is a middle-aged drifter, and having been orphaned and raised by a grandfather who had many Native American friends, Brown Dog is often mistaken for Native himself. Content to live in a deep woods cabin without electricity or running water, BD likes the hard work of cutting pulp for low pay so long as he can be in town on the weekends for hard drinking and womanizing. Although he wasn't actively looking for more meaning in his life, Brown Dog becomes energized when a Native activist enlists his help. This story had the most humour in it but I found the structure curious -- moving through three sections from third person to first and back to third again.
By this time, I thought I had a handle on Harrison's milieu -- writing about the working poor; people whose struggle for basic survival leads to a spiritual impoverishment (because who has the energy to feed the mind and soul while the belly is empty?). But the final story, "The Beige Dolorosa", is about a 50-year-old English professor -- someone who muses about Keats' deeper meanings and thinks that Mozart is "clearly better than anything else man has made, including penicillin" -- who, divorced and forced to take a reduced-pay sabbatical in the wake of a manufactured sexual scandal, is convinced to take a rest at his daughter's in-laws' working ranch. Mending fences and riding a slow-moving mare, Phillip Caulkins really notices nature for the first time, and after having a life-changing dream, commences to rename American birds with more imaginative and colourful monikers.
All three of these main characters are homeless in a way (or at least only have homes at the discretion of others), and while they all seek to find meaning (or have meaning thrust upon them, as in Brown Dog's case), only Julip seems to truly transcend her circumstances (and likely only because she has meaningful work she loves). Work is an important consideration for all of the characters: "The Boys" -- a painter, a writer, and a photographer -- dabble in the real work of men on their annual fishing trip, but that is questionably achieved with high tech equipment, champagne and caviar lunches, and their catch-and-release policy; Brown Dog can do the hard labour of a working man but really covets the ritual and medicine of the Natives; and while Caulkins enjoys playing at cowboy, his quixotic quest to rename the birds becomes his true vocation. To paraphrase the quote I opened with, the characters all have mundane wounds but it's their cures that make the stories. I don't know if I can say I loved this collection, but so many small details are resurfacing as I consider the novellas, that Julip deserves to be rounded up to four stars.
