Thursday, February 21, 2013
SURGING WITH LIFE
I just finished
by Jim Harrison, the wonderful writer who has followed me all his life. Or is it that I have followed Jim Harrison?
Just when I think that, perhaps, I am reading the last writing of the man, here he is again. Magnificently generous with his soul in the form of two novellas.
Look at him. He looks like the Wreck of the Hesperus. He has led a rough hewn life and has shared it at every step of the way.
There are some near death experiences in this book and I have the idea that Harrison may have been there himself.
The first novella concerns a 60 year old art critic, connoisseur and appraiser who has come to his boyhood home to be a companion to his mother for only a month. Clive. His sister, who has the job full-time, has taken time off to see France.
There is nothing wrong with his mother, actually. So it is not really bad time. He needs to take her for her birdwatching and get out of the way. Which he does. His mom is adept at zingers. They come flying in when least expected. Clive is still vulnerable to them.
He walks around the farm, the neighborhood, and he runs into a teen age crush.
He finds his water colors in his boyhood closet mess. Clive, that is his name, was an aspiring artist and gave up on it along the way veering into talking about art rather than doing it.
We spend the month with him in his "place of origin".
It isn't hard to make the leap between an artist who has taken to talking about art rather than doing it to a writer who has gotten to be a formidable spokesman for his trade. Fortunately, Harrison still does it.
His writing about art and artists in this long story is beautifully clear and filled with wry asides, a Harrison trademark.
The second story, the title story, is about being 17 and male. I remember what that was like. In fact, my 17 year old lives not too far from the surface in my body, mind and spirit. The same must be true for Jim Harrison.
The boy who loves swimming, Thad, finds himself at a crossroads. End of high school, end of a girl-next door relationship. And so on.
To keep his equilibrium, he swims.
He has water visions.
An aquatic farm boy with a penchant for aphorisms that describe his discoveries about himself and and in the world.
Delightful.
The thing about Jim Harrison's writing is that it is pleasure itself. Yes. There is a point of view. A likable, or not, character who is well defined, usually just like me. And then there is the telling of it. The asides, the hilarious observations, the surprising topography of lives in action. Harrison's characters are rarely still unless they are made so by physical impairment or a sudden and drastic life change.
I recommend this book and, if it were a movie, I would give it a 5 out of Netflix5.
