After reading Denis Johnson's wonderful novella Train Dreams I was inspired to do some more novella reading so I picked up The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison. They're not dissimilar--Johnson and Harrison--especially the first of the two novellas in Harrison's collection, "The Land of Unlikeness," about an aging artist returning home and coming to terms with the decisions he's made in his life and rediscovering the loves that propelled him away from home in the first place. Among the similarities between the two writers (and their novellas) is the playfulness of language. Both have a great sense of humor and skill in toggling back and forth in tone between highbrow and low, the sacred and banal, etc--using contrasts and juxtapositions to create absurdity, but still managing to be big-hearted. And, to be honest, I I love writing that pays special attention to the great outdoors (which Harrison always does). I've come to terms with the fact that I will read any book that has the word river in the title. This book consists of 2 novellas. I give the first, The land of Unlikeliness" 5 stars. In it he writes, "He was suddenly quite tired of the mythology he had constructed for his life." What a marvelous sentence. And like that sentence, this novella reminds me why I love reading Jim Harrison's older work, before he became full of himself. Here he's not trying to be too clever by half and too dismissive of his readers. This is a wonderful novella, as good as anything as Harrison has written before. But in the second novella, The River Swimmer, he's back to his newer self. Listen to this: "Out of the blue he said dramatically that he hoped to die alone in a small cabin on a river." I mean, really, "he said dramatically?" It goes on: "She broke into tears. It is a terrible thing when one's love far exceeds the other's. There was no way to comfort her. She was inconsolable. he had done violence to her fantasy life which clearly included him. He sat down at the window hearing her sniffling behind him. He viewed early marriage as banal as swimming the English Channel. He felt an absurd agitation. You go on vacation and end up sitting looking out the window. Her pillow actually became wet with tears. He finally couldn't resist her rump in its summer skirt and making love slowed but didn't abolish the tears." And the whole novella is like that! What narcissistic bullshit. One star. So the book as a whole gets 3 stars.
What do You think about Nageur De Rivière (2014)?
Like his writing very much. Other novels I'm reading took precedent. No reflection on Harrison.
—youcantgetme
