Perspective: Novella collection hits the mark

Jim Harrison's later novels, notably the interrelated Dalva and The Road Home, are complex works that sprawl across several generations of richly detailed characters. His novella collections, each made up of three short novels -- the best known is Legends of the Fall -- are tightly focused gems. So are the three novellas, found in his latest collection, The Beast God Forgot to Invent.

The title story takes the form of a statement to a coroner about the death of one Joe Lacort, found drowned 30 miles from shore in Lake Superior. The speaker is Norman Arnz, Joe's friend and one of his caretakers. Joe was a successful businessman in his mid-30s when he drank a lot of beer one night, hopped on his Ducati and ran head-first into a beech tree. The resulting "closed head injury" wipes out much of his memory and socialization, and after long and expensive and ultimately useless attempts at rehab, he has "set off to re-map the world, or the only world his senses could tolerate": walking the woods of the Upper Peninsula, cataloging its flora and fauna in his chaotic but poetic journals, and making love to a diverse array of devoted girlfriends who, as Norman does, like him much better after his accident than they did before.

Far from finding Joe a burden, Norman is fascinated by "a man who quite literally saw everything for the first time every single day." Norman himself hasn't seen anything for the first time in ages. At 67, he's semi-retired from commercial real estate and rare book dealing (a strange enough combination). He's Joe's opposite in many ways: compulsively analytical, emotionally cramped and acutely conscious of the past. Joe walks with bears; Norman collects antique books of botanical plates. Norman is also, though he'd hardly admit it, a lonely man, and Joe's ability to connect effortlessly with everyone from grad students to ravens will change his life as well.

Harrison's second novella, Westward Ho, is a welcome reappearance by his character Brown Dog. Harrison's earlier stories about B.D. are set in his Chippewa tribe's home territory in Michigan, but this time he's been led further astray than usual by his con man pal Lone Marten, "an erstwhile though deeply fraudulent Indian activist," and finds himself in the alien world of Los Angeles.

B.D. is Harrison's version of the wise fool, the outsider who sees things much more clearly than the insiders do. There are few places more crammed with insiders (and wanna-bes) than Hollywood, which gives B.D. plenty of material for his ongoing anthropological studies.

I Forgot to Go to Spain is the collection's closer. Its narrator is an exceptionally successful writer, the author of three dozen slickly packaged 100-page "bioprobes" (doesn't the very word make you flinch?) that fly off the shelves in airport newsstands.

At 55, he's a very well paid "alpha canine" who can afford to live in New York, Chicago and Paris and support his siblings -- a fiercely brilliant sister who serves as his researcher and conscience, plus a slacker brother -- as well as an expensive Parisian mistress, all the while indulging his own gourmand tastes. But all is not well.

He can't quite figure out what became of his younger self, the passionate scholar whose goal was "to walk the banks of the Guadalquivir from Seville to Cordoba." He's much too ironic to take his pretentious younger self seriously, but he's not that crazy about his middle-aged self, either. The surest sign of his middle age is that, although his memories of past sexual experiences are lovingly vivid, his present passion is directed to fine Burgundies, Cajun raie au buerre noir and "a simple but perfect puttanesca" -- not the literal whore but the pasta dish named after her.

His probe into his own biography leads him to some revelations, about his siblings, about some of his lovers and mostly about himself, as well as a redemption of sorts. As he tells us around midnight in Paris, "I didn't expect, after all, to become one of those men who could enter a bar, throw his hat, and hit the hat rack every time. As a matter of fact there are no more hats and hat racks."

I'm not so sure. Jim Harrison hits the hat rack three for three with The Beast God Forgot to Invent.

- Colette Bancroft is an editor at the Times.

THE BEAST GOD FORGOT TO INVENT

By Jim Harrison

Atlantic Monthly Press, $24

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