JULIP.

by Jim Harrison

In three tantalizing novellas, Jim Harrison takes us on a quintessentially American journey - from the fishing waters of the South, to the hunting woods of the North, to the cattle ranches of the West - as he leads us through the wonderous landscape of the human heart. “Julip” follows a bright and resourceful young woman as she tries to spring her brother from a Florida jail - he shot three of her former lovers “below the belt.” “The Seven-Ounce Man” continues the picaresque adventures of Brown Dog, a Michigan scoundrel who loves to eat, drink, and chase women to excess, all while sailing along in the bottom ten percent. “The Beige Dolorisa” is the haunting tale of an academic recovering from the repercussions of a sexual harassment scandal, who turns to the natural world for solace. In each of these stories, the irresistible pull of nature becomes a magnificent backdrop for exploring the toughest questions about life and love.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Literature, Novella, American

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Jim Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, to Winfield Sprague Harrison, a county agricultural agent, and Norma Olivia (Wahlgren) Harrison, both avid readers. He married Linda King in 1959 with whom he has two daughters.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

His awards include National Academy of Arts grants (1967, 68, 69), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969-70), the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007).

Much of Harrison's writing depicts sparsely populated regions of North America with many stories set in places such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Montana's mountains, and along the Arizona-Mexico border.

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sat on a boulder next to a stream until just before dark, letting the dulcet and purling sounds soothe me. Bob had told me that in India the peasants will tie a madman to a tree next to a river and the water would draw off his madness. He had neglected to tell me how long the process took.

I have been kidnapped by the music of Jim Harrison's words. Whether they will draw the madness out of me remains to be seen. What I know now though is that I want to be reading Jim Harrison all the time.

There's a recurring character in his novellas, Brown Dog. I won't give you the long version of Brown Dog's life, not here. Instead, see what Harrison has to say about Rose, who is often the love of Brown Dog's life:

She was born mean, captious, sullen, with occasional small dirty windows of charm. The pail of pig slop she had dumped on Brown Dog's head when he was the neighbor boy might have been a harbinger for a sensible man, but as a sentimentalist he was always trying to get at the heart of something that frequently didn't have a heart.

If you see me at the river, don't untie me. Not just yet.

[KG · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Julip" is a collection of 3 uniquely written novellas about 3 different but equally spectacular characters. Jim Harrison's writing is easy, flowing and deliberate but at the same time complex and coordinated. I'm constantly jotting down sentences, words and notions from his books that move me enough that I don't want to forget them. Each character somehow shadows my own life - periodically reminding me of myself, those I love and even, sometimes, those I hate. Oddly enough, Jim Harrison's writing is like the thing he writes about so often, a steady river with a constant flow.

I have heard and read a fair amount of negative reactions to his storytelling. Simplistic. Sexist. Perverted. When writing about a man who is thinking about/dreaming about/looking at a woman, Harrison doesn't shy away from overt sexuality and even, it's true, objectification. My argument is this - men are perverts and to offer the inner monologue of a middle aged man confronted with a young woman in a short skirt without a little salaciousness would be dishonest. If anything, Harrison's honesty about men's imperfect and impure appreciation of women (demonstrated most expertly by Brown Dog in the second story, "The Seven Ounce Man") shows just whose side he's on. His telling of the young and exceptional Julip, worthy female star of the first novella "Julip", gives her all of the strength and worth and paints her male counterparts, "the Boys", as 3 middle aged men trying sloppily to rescue their own long-dead youths by possessing this powerful and certainly un-possessable 21-year old feminine force.

The last story, "The Beige Dolorosa", is a calm portrait of a middle aged man in an uncomfortable but, ultimately, necessary transition and discovery of himself. This story is an examination of nature and literature woven into the foreground of a weak-kneed but wonderful Midwestern professor forced through exigent circumstances to spend his 50's on a cattle ranch in the wilds of Arizona.

Harrison's books offer extraordinary humor, nature, desperation, discomfort and personal discovery in equal measure and this collection is one of his best.

[Robert Cox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok we got a trio of short stories here

Julip
Ok, I'm realizing that much of Jim Harrison fiction is pseudo male fantasy told from a naive womans perspective. On second thought, that's not entirely fair, it appears that roughly a third of his work seems that way. Dog trainer from the midwest has hooks up with guys, including a trio of old creepy dudes that seem to be loosely based on Harrison & Co.

Seven Ounce man
Better, not great. Humorous when its not unintentionally sad. Or maybe intentionally sad, but that doesn't really help anything.

Beige Dolorasa
This one was good! Still would be very exciting to a high school English professor for its deep dive into the Freudian male psyche. But more enjoyable, due to the growth of the character and his increased self esteem after taking on manly pursuits

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Eric Sutton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Jim Harrison is a comfort. Sure, his books can be formulaic, but if it works, it works. I enjoy books set in Michigan (even when he sets his stories elsewhere, his writing of place is sublime) and his general style - a loose plot acting as springboard for existential musings - never fails to entertain. Here are my reviews for the three novellas of Julip:

1. Julip - The titular story was my least favorite of the three. Harrison is a master of the novella form, but I found Julip to be a little too disjointed and sprawling. I've always enjoyed Harrison's heroines - Dalva, especially - and Julip is no exception. She's headstrong and free-spirited, and even though she uses her sexuality to get what she wants, she does so for altruistic purposes, in this case to move her brother from prison to a psychiatric ward. Julip navigates numerous relationships, bureaucratic and personal, to bend the system in her favor.

2. The Seven-Ounce Man - This novella is the second of the Brown Dog stories, which I had read previously in the Brown Dog collection. He is one of Harrison's best characters, quixotic and ribald. On this journey, Brown Dog tries to lay low after his infamy of tipping off U of M students to an ancient burial ground and being arrested for his scuba diving exploits. Through his relationships with Upper Peninsular women (and their lovers) and his relatives, he is drawn back into the fray. Brown Dog's stories are comic and irreverent but also self-reflective enough to keep them grounded.

3. The Beige Dolorosa - This was my favorite of the three. Published in 1994, "The Beige Dolorosa" is ahead of its time in predicting cancel culture in academia and the fallout afterward. Phillip, the narrator, is excised from his professorship at a small liberal arts college in Michigan for pandering to the false claims of the student body, one femme fatale in particular. He winds up on a friend's ranch in southern Arizona to pick up the pieces. This novella is the most introspective of the three; riding Phillip's waves of emotions, from doubt and indignity to elation and rebirth, is reading Harrison at his best. A subplot carries the narrative along so that it's not all cerebral.

I return to Harrison at least once a year, slowly making my way through his oeuvre. Julip comes on the heels of The Woman Lit by Fireflies, which was his return to the novella form after the success of Legends of the Fall and his subsequent foray into novel writing in the 1980s. His in a rich vein of form in this collection.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe I am required by state residency laws to read Jim Harrison, which is where the extra star is handy. But I really hated the first novella (Julip), and the other two grudgingly pulled the score up. The language is good and clear, but I don’t see any evidence that he views women as anything other than sex objects.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three rather long short stories comprise this quite enjoyable book. Individually they were very different with the commonality of nature throughout. I went back several times to savor lines that were beautifully written.

[Gaylord Dold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second Look Books: Julip by Jim Harrison (Houghton Mifflin, $21.95)
Originally published on July 10, 1994. Jim Harrison died last year. His passing is a great loss for American letters.

Jim Harrison is one of our very best American writers. He is the author of six novels, including “Wolf”, “Farmer,” “Warlock” and “Dalva,” the latest named being something of a doubly rare achievement, both a novel of spiritual power and a work of imagination about female life penned by a man. Harrison is also a poet of some note, a gourmand of extraordinarily epic tastes, a great curmudgeon and, if we are to believe his image, a bit of a cad, this last to be taken in its best sense.

An ostensible member of the Michigan-Montana-Key West gang that includes Richard Ford and Tom McGuane, Harrison is a muscular writer in the sense that he prefers the straightforward approach, as when, in a story in the present volume titled “The Seven-Ounce Man,” a character called Brown Dog discovers, or better, reflects, upon a slice of his most recent past: “In the cabin it occurred to him that he had done so much worrying he had been neglecting his drinking.”

As much as anything, Harrison is a writer of the truth about American life as it is today, life full of pusillanimous harms, that pukesome social cud (mixing many metaphors) constantly chewed and never swallowed. He hates, in short, political correctness, campus life, suits and ties. He loves nature, food, life and experience. Relationships don’t much concern him as the subjects of art and his motto may as well be: Take care of yourself and the rest will take care of itself. He is neither a selfish man nor a mannish self. He simply knows how to go from A to B without the aid of psychodrama.

“Julip” is as collection of three longish novellas. Each in its own way is a charming, deliciously complicated and complex work of fiction, standing whole and nearly perfect. Harrison is almost alone among American writers in his love for, and devotion to, this form, a form that requires the ethereal hand of the poet and the earnest devotion of the novelist.
‘Julip’

Julip herself, heroine of the first story, is a dog trainer and self-appointed savior of her brother who is jailed in Key West on a charge of attempted murder, the victims being three of Julip’s worthless lovers. Julip-Harrison (for she is nothing if not a descendent of her author-father) is a direct kind of gal, who goes to bed with a half-baked southern Georgia lawyer in lieu of a fee, and who describes old boyfriend Jim Crabb (another dog trainer) in these poignant terms—“She had known him since childhood, and if anything the sense of general dreariness he filled her with had increased. He was, simply enough, the lamest head she had ever met.”

Traveling from Wisconsin, where her father, a deeply devout alcoholic, has killed himself, Julip undertakes an odyssey of redemption on behalf of the crazy son in her family. Her task is to convince the three victims to forgive the criminal charges so that brother Bobby can spend a few months in the nuthouse rather than a few years in jail. The lovers are symbols. Charles is a photographer, Arthur a painter and Ted a writer. If a book reviewer were tempted to be serious, he would argue that the Julip-lover connection is an encapsulation of the struggle to free art from its commercial, and thus, neurotic, source.

Of Charles, Arthur and Ted, Harrison writers: “In previous times more slack would have been cut for this threesome, but this is an age when not much slack is cut for anyone.” Harrison is never more imaginative than when he is writing (as a man)about a woman (his creation) thinking about what a man (his character) thought about women. “And it was the rock-bottom puzzlement of his life and time: there is an ideal woman who will return to you the kind of sexual life you could have had at 19 but didn’t.” This is a statement so nakedly true it hurts me to think about. “Julip” is a funny and moving ode to redemption and the return to innocence, fully sexy non-violence and non-violent sexiness, dense with revealed truths.
‘The Seven-Ounce Man’

In the “Seven-Ounce Man,” Harrison returns to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is home turf to a continuing character named Brown Dog, B.D. for short. Forgive me for saying this, but stories set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, including as they do the “Big Two-Hearted River”, mosquito clouds, and cold starry nights, cause a certain literary lump in my throat. In this case, B.D. who has fallen under the watchful eye of the FBI and the Michigan State Police for interfering with a university anthropological dog (short for excavating an Indian burial mound), is intent on looking up an old love, Rose, an Ojibway trailer-woman. Unfortunately for B.D., Rose is singularly interested in whisky and bad wine, amatory only late at night when the TV flickers whitely and the trailer trembles in the wind. But B.D. has always had a simply philosophy, one given him by his grandfather. “As Grandpa used to say, it is not in the nature of people to understand each other, “Just get to work on time, that was the main thing.” It was also Grandpa who warned B.D. against fighting the battles of others. But, in this case, that is what B.D. is letting himself in for when he considers once again trying to stop the excavation.

Brown Dog must live very deep in the soul of his creator, for how else could B.D. express such heartfelt Harrison emotions about women—“women still beat the hell out of men to be around. You weren’t always cutting and bruising yourself on their edges.” Speaking as a man, I announce this as an eternal truth. Suffice it to say that “The Seven-Ounce Man” is an adventure story full of verifiable lunatics. It is fiction with the odor of a pine-paneled tavern and is laugh-out-loud hilarious.
‘The Beige Dolorosa’

The last of Harrison’s novellas, “The Beige Dolorosa” is, if you will forgive the allusion, a horse of a different color. Its central character, Phillip Caulkins, is an English professor very late in midlife, who has lost his job due to an unforgivable lapse into political un-correctness having to do with some misstatements in class, and the perception of sexual harassment he must have exuded somewhere on campus.

None of it is true of course, and none of it ought to destroy a good man’s career, but destroy it does, nevertheless, which is a comment upon the current state of campus life and our own incredible dependency on syntax to the exclusion of common sense. Caulkins, without career, retires to southern Arizona to get his bearings and, worried-over by his married daughter, comes into contact with nature for the first time. And it is the natural world—the thriving green grasslands just north of Mexico, the rolling hills and long-vistaed mountains, and the abundant bird life above all—that revive Caulkins and return to him a humanity he has lost.
The first thing that nature does to Caulkins is envelop him in childhood memory. “On seeing the winsome girl I had a ghastly shudder pass over my body, remembering in an instant the girl I saw at the far end of my paper route, whose name was Miriam, and whom I loved with the desperation one is capable of only once in a lifetime.” Caulkins is recovering the physical body, his first possession.

In his retirement Caulkins conceives of a project to write a new guidebook to birds, a guidebook which would rename each species. For instance, the “brown thrasher” would become the beige dolorosa, a name worth of the beauty of its holder. All at once Caulkins realizes the deeply spiritual consequences of the natural world. This realization, or regeneration, strips Caulkins to the bone, which is one way of saying that it releases his inner being. “I must add that nature has erased my occasional urge toward suicide…For the time being I am too much a neophyte to take part in defending it against the inroads of human greed. There is also the idea that I’m a newborn babe with a soft spot on the top of my head. My natural enemies would still crush me.”

In historic terms, the death of nature is near. In a world of screens and fiber optic cable, of information networks and superhighways, in an economic system driven by consumption, mass replication, and instant reproduction, there is precious little room for contemplation, for quietude and simple wonder. In his own way, and with great art and dignity, Harrison asks each of us to convert himself, to re-spiritualize himself, to constitute a chorus of one. It is, as always, a lonely plea that few will hear and fewer will heed. But we owe Jim Harrison a debit of gratitude for making it.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/ju...

...She was not as lovable, though, as the teacher in the South who was always trembling on the lip of nervous collapse and told Julip in a Wal-Mart parking lot that to ninety-nine out of one hundred men she would always be simply a piece of ass. The challenge for a girl was to find number one hundred…

My wife met number 100 in myself back in 1972 but chose instead to shop around until we married in 1983. By that time we had both been divorced once and each had two children by another partner. Our life together has never been easy, but we’ve made the best of it. Julip seems to have made a few bad decisions herself and revisiting this novella after first reading it back around 1994 proved for the most part to be an unsatisfactory experience. Not Jim’s greatest works of art, but being a Harrison book it had plenty of clever wisecracks and sexual innuendos. The second novella in the trio I had previously read a few months ago in the stand-alone Brown Dog collection.

...At our parting a decade ago, after eighteen years of marriage, Marilyn said to my very face that she loved me but that I was of insufficient interest to last a lifetime…

The difference between Marilyn and my wife is that her interest in me has never waned, nor mine for her. Call us lucky or perhaps genius in our games for making life interesting. There has been plenty of fantasy and sexual interest given each other, and we continue to play around with salacious ideas as much as we can. Dangerous ideas lead to desires built to breaking points. The last novella, The Beige Dolorisa, promises to be of the same rich vein that Harrison mined his entire writing career.

...sitting in a darkened theater having one’s nerves peeled is not my idea of pleasure…

I used the quotation above in a prior review in reference to making a point about how painful and discomfiting it is to read a novel that scares the hell out of you even if it is well-written. Harrison felt the same way about horror films. Julip, as a whole, has proven again on this subsequent reading to be a lesser work of art than almost all of Harrison’s other collections. Still, it is better than most and enjoyable enough to have read again.

...Why is it, unless they are furious, must you ask women what is wrong?...

The main character and narrator in The Beige Dolorisa is Phillip Caulkins, a similar but far less overtly sexual man as previous Harrison incarnations. One liners exist as comfortably here as in any Harrison offering. Tempting as it is for all men in a Harrison fiction, Caulkins seems to keep his own waffling head fixed upon his shoulders except for one purely innocent indiscretion when the confused and troubled harlot Magdalena forcefully pulls it down between her legs. This incident remains as a memory that haunts his mind repeatedly, but Caulkins somehow comes to grips with his own nature through nature itself, Mona his trusty old mare, and his new life working on a Southwest ranch as a novice cowboy in lieu of academics.

...I sent a few prayers starward, not mentioning Magdalena but offering thanks for the universe that was making me well, and the request that I not forget the earth during my inevitable mischief...

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved all three stories - but the 2nd was my favorite. I'm stoked to learn that the main character in story 2, Brown Dog, is a recurring character. And a character he is.

[Autumn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is there anything more enjoyable than a Brown Dog novella? Loved the other stories as well.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read every Jim Harrison book that comes my way. A kind of support the hometeam kind of thinking; also though, because he's generally a terrific writer. I have run into a couple of duds, but on the whole, I enjoy his work. Julip was really more about finding the right book at the right time. Three novellas, that I would have had much less appreciation for earlier in my life. The first, Julip, is funny where its supposed to be funny - Harrison's humor can leave me cold, but this was truly funny in places. The second tale, follows the coninuing adventures of his recurring character BD. BD often hits me as a drunken sad sack loser. Somehow, (?!?) not in this story. I liked BD, I sympathized with BD's problems. I was impressed by his alcohol intake. Harrison's characters can go drink for drink with Hemingway's characters. I'm in awe of all of them. The final story, about a lifelong college lit professor who loses his job for non-venal reasons spoke the most directly to me. The professor is in his mid 50's and completely at a loss. He cannot function with out his work. He needs to figure out how to live what remains of his life. What does he want to do with the time he has left? What's important? What's not? His letting go of his former structured life. I also am in my mid-50's, and for reasons completely different that the Professors - I have also quit my lifes work, and have choosen to try and find a better/different way to live. I am also doing my best to let go of things that aren't of value to me. The professors thoughts about time, clocks, calendars, and his varying approaches to it upon leaving work made complete sense to me. First the over documentation (calendars! Lists! Clocks with reminders and timers!), then the complete letting go. Throw out the watch and clock. I've not yet tossed the calendar . . .but maybe I should? This was definitely the right story at the right time for me.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are some weird stories but I just love reading Jim. The last one about grappling with your sanity and potential depression at age 50 will stick with me. Julip seems a bit unrealistic in how the females are portrayed and that she would amiably get with all three of the older gentleman. I love, love, love BD and the idea of long walks and simple pleasures are centerpieces of both the second and third stories (and many other Jim pieces.). BD is a lovable galoot.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been a while since I have read any fiction by Jim Harrison, but I am glad i found this book. All of\ Harrison's strengths as a writer are on display across these three novellas Harrison's characters drink drug and screw with the voraciousness of pagan gods on meth. The writer revels in the appetites of flawed but deeply human characters. He is a writer to be enjoyed and praised

[LUIGI DEMUNNIK · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 cute short stories

3 cute short stories. I liked the second one best, then the first, lastly the third.

Don't expect a clear cut solid end at each story. I guess you could say there's an arch, if you look for it, but to me it seems more of a brief glimpse in the life and times of ....

[Matt Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

julip 3/5
the seven-ounce man 5/5
the beige dolorosa 3.5/5

[Alix · Rating 5 out of 5]

Né sous le signe du coyote, Jim Harrison ne s'apprivoise pas. Par ces temps de sieste prolongée, il nous remet debout et nous offre bien plus qu'une tranche d'exotisme : une cure de sauvagerie.

[John Fetzer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I usually like a Jim Harrisln book, but this one was less focused. It muddles along without strong storyline developing.

[Babs M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the last of the three stories.

[Sean Kinch]

Three novellas, including one of Harrison’s best, “The Beige Dolorosa,” about a middle-aged English prof trying to piece his life together in the mountains of southern Arizona.

[Rich Watson]

Three novellas

[Herbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Julip is composed of three novellas, "Julip", "The Seven Ounce Man", and "The Beige Dolorosa". Each of them is best described as a character study, and Harrison shows himself to be a master of the endeavor. Each piece is unique and unconnected to the others, and deserve to be reviewed separately.

"Julip" follows the progress of the eponymous young woman as she attempts to secure her brother's release from prison into the less onerous custody of a mental health facility. For help she enlists her three middle-aged lovers, all of whom are recognizable characters from Jim Harrison's circle, including Harrison himself. It turns out, after much convoluted and strangely plausible personal history, to be mainly about men growing old. It is the most puzzling of the three stories, and seems to ramble to a stop rather than come to a conclusion, but it is also lovely and meditative, and remains parked in some part of my brain for later consideration and reference. (Four stars.)

"The Seven Ounce Man" I didn't particularly care for. The story of Brown Dog, a drifter in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and how he manages to muddle through left me cold. Partly it was the character himself, with whom I had difficulty identifying, and partly it was due to the structure of the story, which switched between third and first person and seemed to have some continuity problems. A second read might make things more clear, but I'm not at this point convinced it would be worth the effort. (Two stars.)

My favorite story was the last, "The Beige Dolorosa". Someone said that there are not only ten stories, there is only one story, the story of a man finding himself. (Come to think of it, it might have been Jim Harrison, but I'm not sure.) "Dolorosa" tracks a literature professor who has lost his position under squalid circumstances and winds up camped out on a ranch in southern Arizona. Gradually he abandons the petty limitations of his previous existence and for the first time begins to understand the poetry he's studied all his life. It sounds cliche'd, and in a way it is, but it is so delicately and specifically rendered, and the professor so perfectly flawed, that I was immediately swept away by it. (Five stars.)

Julip is not for everyone. It is decidedly literary, and like a three-star tasting menu, it is virtually guaranteed that you won't like something in it. All three stories are about men (even "Julip"), and though Harrison is the most manly of writers, he is manly in the older, less strident way of Hemingway and is not afraid of the faults and peccadillos that define manhood at least as much as swagger and machismo. I'll be returning to this book again, and am positive that I will find more in it than I did on this first pass-through.

[KG · Rating 5 out of 5]

Julip is a collection of 3 uniquely written novellas about 3 different but equally spectacular characters. Jim Harrison's writing is easy, flowing and deliberate but at the same time complex and coordinated. I'm constantly jotting down sentences, words and notions from his books that move me enough that I don't want to forget them. Each character somehow shadows my own life - periodically reminding me of myself, those I love and even, sometimes, those I hate. Oddly enough, Jim Harrison's writing is like the thing he writes about so often, a steady river with a constant flow.

I have heard and read a fair amount of negative reactions to his storytelling. Simplistic. Sexist. Perverted. When writing about a man who is thinking about/dreaming about/looking at a woman, Harrison doesn't shy away from overt sexuality and even, it's true, objectification. My argument is this - men are perverts (God love them) and to offer the inner monologue of a middle aged man confronted with a young woman in a short skirt without a little salaciousness would be dishonest. If anything, Harrison's honesty about men's imperfect and impure appreciation of women (demonstrated most expertly by Brown Dog in the second story, "The Seven Ounce Man") shows just whose side he's on. His telling of the young and exceptional Julip, worthy female star of the first novella "Julip", gives her all of the strength and worth and paints her male counterparts, "the Boys", as 3 middle aged men trying sloppily to rescue their own long-dead youths by possessing this powerful and certainly un-possessable 21-year old feminine force.

The last story, "The Beige Dolorosa", is a calm portrait of a middle aged man in an uncomfortable but, ultimately, necessary transition and discovery of himself. This story is an examination of nature and literature woven into the foreground of a weak-kneed but wonderful Midwestern professor forced through exigent circumstances to spend his 50's on a cattle ranch in the wilds of Arizona.

Harrison's books offer extraordinary humor, nature, desperation, discomfort and personal discovery in equal measure and this collection is one of his best.

[Matt Miles · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title story is the leanest, and unsurprisingly the best. The title character defies the reductionist categories of virgin or whore by simply being a dog trainer who uses her knowledge of human and animal nature to navigate the world she finds herself in. Add taut but meaningful pacing and Harrison's skewering of faux manhood, and the result is pretty much the perfect novella. Alone, this story would have been worth the price. I only wish the other two stories had as much economy and imagination.

I'll admit I don't know what to make of Brown Dog, the perpetually drunk and horny protagonist of "The Seven-Ounce Man." I'm not sure if a tighter story would have made being in his head less of a chore, but it couldn't of hurt. Here's a guy who hits on a lesbian even after he finds out she's not into guys, then decides maybe she's different than the lesbians he saw in that movie that time.

We're meant to laugh at his excesses, but at what point are we allowed to find his frequent objectification of women offensive? Maybe that's part of the point of the final story, "The Beige Dolorosa", a missed opportunity to take a swipe at the out of control political correctness in academia. Such a reckoning is long overdue, but I've yet to see it done right. In Harrison's story, it culminates in sorority girls taking offense at being called attractive and conspiring to stage a rape as a conspiracy/witch hunt. To recover from this, the protagonist finds solace in nature while being drawn into a relationship with an actual prostitute. This could work if her character is complex, but sadly this doesn't happen. She falls neatly into a category Harrison deftly avoided in "Julip." Given where this collection started, the ending is an even sadder inverse of coming full-circle, thematically.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a lover of northern Michigan, I have been a long distance fan of Jim Harrison for years. Julip was recommended to me so figured it was time to time to dip my toes into the icy prose and disturbed characters conceived by Michigan's native son.

The book has three novellas, each roughly 80-90 pages long. Novellas aren't for everyone. All three are pretty short and dramatically different than one another.

I really enjoyed the first novellas, "Julip". A story about a young bold woman trying to free her brother from jail, I could absolutely see how easy it was for the men in her life to quickly fall in love with her. A nice cast of characters and a great protagonist. This was a 5 star story for me.

The second story featured Brown Dog who is a frequent visitor to Harrison's stories. He's like an idiot savant - seemingly simple and singularly focused on sex and alcohol but he's resourceful and surprisingly deep.

Finally, the last story is about a very odd disgraced professor at a small college in Michigan seeking to find answers within himself in the southwest U.S. after he gets embroiled in sexual abuse allegations related to one of this students. My only problem with him is that he's kind of a creep with an awareness of societal norms but he doesn't seem to care a whole lot. Harrison packs a lot into this story and but it's still the weakest of the three.

All in all I enjoyed my first foray into the worlds of Jim Harrison's flawed characters. He has an amazing ability to pack a ton into a short story. When you couple this with his gritty prose these are well worth the time.

[Huw Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Jim Harrison. I really enjoyed these three novellas. Without getting into too much detail, what impressed me most was how he was able to create a distinct voice/ tone for all three stories. Aside from them sharing some thematic similarities, they all seem as though they were penned by different writers. I'm glad I started with this book, as it's a great showcase for Harrison's versatility. It would be hard to choose my favorite of the three stories, but I think it's a draw between 'The Seven-Ounce Man' and 'The Beige Dolorosa'. The opening story 'Julip' was a fine read, but very maudlin in tone and lacked the dark humor of the other two.

As a complete work, the book seems to have something to say about human weaknesses, especially the dangers of desire. Sex has an undermining/ damning quality for all the principal characters, especially when they pursue it in spite of their best interests. In every story it's used as currency, and comes with a price, whether literally or figuratively. The women are intensely aware of the power their sexuality wields, and the men are similarly aware of how weak they are in its presence, and their inability to resist it. The stories could be considered a celebration of these traits, or a condemnation. I'm not quite sure yet.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stories. Begins with one featuring the eponymous character in an absurd and slightly claustrophobic setup.

The Beige Dolorosa, the second most moving story of academic exile I've read (HUAC testimonials aside), is runner-up for the best story of the three. It must be said that Coetzee's Disgrace - which was published five years later - bears some resemblance to it. But then, the commonalities, like sex scandal, exile to the countryside, and exposure to a criminal element, serve different purposes here.

The Seven Ounce Man, a Brown Dog story, remains my sentimental favorite. Brown Dog, the main character, blunders into quite a bit of trouble and falls in with a pretty humorous radical charlatan type. In that ambition (though not vanity) is completely alien to him, he seems a more enlightened character than the heavy-hearted patricians who frequently feature in Harrison's stories. In the sense that he is largely unaware of earthly matters, he is a character (along with the "beast" in the Beast God Forgot to Invent) who fills a shadowy corner cleared by Harrison's other work. I am very happy that he exists.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book would be worth owning for The Seven-Ounce Man; the continuing saga of Brown Dog, the lost boy grown up to be the befuddled lost man. If God watches over drunks and lunatics She has her hands full with BD who, if he ever saw his ship coming in, would somehow sink it. Not to give short shrift to Julip though, which proves once again that Harrison writes perfect women. Like his men, they are strong, weak, flawed, perfect, stubborn and pliable all at once. I ran aground with the third story The Beige Dolorosa, for a bit. A defrocked (if I can use that term in a secular way) college professor disappears to a mountain cabin to heal his psyche by communing with nature and hard cowboy labor. The story to me started out sounding like McGuane-not the good early McGuane of madmen but the mundane later McGuane of rich guys catching trout and talking. Harrison rescues it though by letting poor Phillip Caulkins learn slowly to stop paying so much attention to himself: "The first hour I drove tentatively, then noted the dogs barked when I slowed down. So I drove faster, for want of anything better to do than please dogs." On second reading this story is a great second-act life lesson.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three stories about widely different individuals who come to terms with their situation and find a simpler place for themselves in the world, mostly the natural world. One is a young dog trainer who decides to focus on dogs rather than the three older men she's been seeing. The middle story brings back Brown Dog, from Michigan, who discovers that his simple life in the woods works just fine for him. The third is about an academic who is brought low by cascading problems with political correctness who ultimately finds joy in a quieter and simpler life in the Southwest. I enjoy Harrison's writing style, which is a little wry, bawdy, and evocative without being too "poetic."

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of humor in Harrison's writing about male foibles, and they are largely male, and largely preoccupied with sex, thinking about it, getting it, avoiding it. The Beige Dolorosa is my favorite of the three with its western setting. The increasingly befuddled professor, on leave after inappropriate behavior on campus, shows his vulnerability most openly. Julip seemed the least moving of the three novellas.