OPINION:
THE BIG SEVEN: A FAUX MYSTERY
By Jim Harrison
Grove Press. $26, 341 pages
Lascivious old men of the world, unite. You have a new champion. Ever since becoming as well-known to AARP and Social Security as he is to his many readers, 77-year-old Jim Harrison, one of the finest American writers of the last half-century, has been featuring male protagonists who are past maturity, or, to be downright factual, old. And yet their amatory accomplishments are the stuff of young men’s dreams.
In several of his most recent novels, the hero, if that is the right word for Mr. Harrison’s benumbed and benighted version of Rousseau’s natural man, is a male in his 60s embedded, in the non-military sense, with a woman a third his age — or less.
In “The English Major,” 60-something Cliff takes up — and off on a road trip — with Marybelle, his former student. But in this 2008 novel, our hero eventually rues the folly of his May-December sexcapade: “”Forty-five years of sex fantasies come true and I’m thinking that I wish I could go fishing.” In one of the three novellas that make up “The Farmer’s Daughter,” which came out the next year, a 73-year-old is trying his creaky best to get physical with a 14-year-old girl, and ditto for the age differences of the main male characters and their lusty playmates in “The Great Leader” and “Brown Dog,” published in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
Now comes “The Big Seven,” whose title refers to the Seven Deadly Sins. As for the plot, such as it is: Sunderson, whom readers first met in “The Great Leader,” where the about-to-retire detective had to deal with the charismatic but crazed head of a Montana cult, is now back home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This time, informed by Diane, his estranged-if-still-loved-and-loving wife, that their adopted daughter Cynthia has dropped out of the University of Michigan and run off with a charismatic but crazed rock musician, Sunderson is charged with finding the girl and bringing her back to normal life.
But Sunderson and normal life aren’t exactly longtime soul mates. Even he knows he drinks too much, and he’d rather fish and hike in the woods than work any day, which, in Jim Harrison’s world, makes him perfectly sane and rational and normal for an adult American male. But, being both a dutiful cop and a loving if estranged husband, he accepts the charge and charges off to rescue their daughter.
Of Sunderson’s feelings for Cynthia, Mr. Harrison tells us, “He loved this lost girl, his neighbor for most of her life, abandoned by her parents and then adopted by him and Diane simply because they all liked each other and thought they might as well become a family since her own parents were utterly indifferent.” That’s a typical Jim Harrison sentence — flat in tone but ringing with meaning.
Not only does Sunderson succeed in bringing Cynthia back from the ungrateful dead, but in the process ends up with a tax-free cash windfall of $50,000, part of which he uses to buy a fishing cabin in Michigan. Initially, this appears to be a dream realized, but early on Sunderson encounters his neighbors, the gun-toting and criminally inclined Ames family who, to a man, have no saving graces, except for the women and girls, all comely, of course, and wonderfully different in different ways.
But various members of the clan keep getting killed off, which is where the faux mystery part comes in. Thus begins the main action of the book, which one really shouldn’t call a novel.
For Harrison fans, that’s not a negative: We don’t read Jim Harrison for plot or character development. We read Jim Harrison for the marvelous ways he puts words into sentences and for such non-English-major virtues as humor, love of nature and wry observations on the human condition.
They may be misfits, but there’s never anything truly wrong with his heroes. From Brown Dog to Sunderson, you’d like to be in their company, whether it’s having a drink, fishing, taking a hike in the woods, or — and especially — sharing a meal. (One of Mr. Harrison’s 36 books is “The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand”).
Like the Bible — an unlikely comparison — open any Jim Harrison book and a quotable line will fall out. Page 25: “[Sunderson] knew in his heart that he never should have come to New York. The fancy people and fifteen-dollar drinks — everything in this unfamiliar place depressed him . He was a dried pea in a huge machine, rattling around at random.”
We also read him because, not like Hemingway with whom he’s often compared but like, in my view, a Clint Eastwood hero — he continues to hold out hope for man’s better nature. Of a couple central to his story, he writes, “Now they had risen a ways again as people do, rarely but it does happen.”
Mr. Harrison seems to like, and perhaps even identify with retired detective Sunderson, so we’ll probably meet him again, and there will probably be a Lolita or two in the cast. But one thing for sure, the next faux mystery will include bad guys. As Jim Harrison told an interviewer almost 30 years ago, explaining why he’d moved from poetry to novel-writing, “I think it was the influence of Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald. I wanted to tell one of those simple tales that has a great deal of narrative urgency, propelled by characters who, once you’ve met them, you know it’s going to be a godawful mess. These are people that nobody wants in their living room.”
• John Greenya is a Washington writer and critic.
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