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Summary
Summary
"Among the most indelible American novelists of the last hundred years . . . [Harrison] remains at the height of his powers." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times on The River Swimmer
New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison is one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. In The Ancient Minstrel , Harrison delivers three novellas that highlight his phenomenal range as a writer, shot through with his trademark wit and keen insight into the human condition.
Harrison has tremendous fun with his own reputation in the title novella, about an aging writer in Montana who spars with his estranged wife, with whom he still shares a home, weathers the slings and arrows of literary success, and tries to cope with the sow he buys on a whim and the unplanned litter of piglets that follow soon after. In Eggs , a Montana woman reminisces about staying in London with her grandparents, and collecting eggs at their country house. Years later, having never had a child, she attempts to do so. And in The Case of the Howling Buddhas , retired Detective Sunderson--a recurring character from Harrison's New York Times bestseller The Great Leader and The Big Seven --is hired as a private investigator to look into a bizarre cult that achieves satori by howling along with howler monkeys at the zoo.
Fresh, incisive, and endlessly entertaining, with moments of both profound wisdom and sublime humor, The Ancient Minstrel is an exceptional reminder of why Jim Harrison is one of the most cherished and important writers at work today.
Author Notes
James Thomas Harrison was born on December 11, 1937 in Grayling, Michigan. After receiving a B.A. in comparative literature from Michigan State University in 1960 and a M.A. in comparative literature from the same school in 1964, he briefly taught English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
During his lifetime, he wrote 14 collections of poetry, 21 volumes of fiction, two books of essays, a memoir, and a children's book. His collections of poetry included Plain Song, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, Songs of Unreason, and Dead Man's Float. He received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry in 1969. His essays on food, much of which first appeared in Esquire, was collected in the 2001 book, The Raw and the Cooked. His memoir, Off to the Side, was published in 2002.
His first novel, Wolf, was published in 1971. His other works of fiction included A Good Day to Die, Farmer, The Road Home, Julip, and The Ancient Minstrel. His novel, Legends of the Fall, was adapted into a feature film starring Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt. Harrison wrote the screenplay for the movie. His novel, Dalva, was adapted as a made-for-television movie starring Rod Steiger and Farrah Fawcett. He died on March 26, 2016 at the age of 78.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Though this latest collection of novellas is one of his slimmer efforts, Harrison (Brown Dog) still has one of the most companionable voices in American letters. The first two entries in this collection revolve around animal husbandry-an aging writer in the grip of a "pig trance" and a woman's lifelong "chicken obsession." The rangy title novella tells the story of "America's best-loved geezer," a figure very much like Jim Harrison, who is looking back on his "50-year slavery to language." Restless, losing his once prodigious libido, and beset by recurring nightmares, the narrator impulsively decides to raise pigs, a late-life crisis manifested in a desire to become the "prince of free-range pork." It's a loose, low-key reminiscence that affords some amusing glimpses into the writer's psyche. In "Eggs," Catherine, a woman living by herself on a Montana farm, finds herself in thrall to a biological impulse to reproduce. Catherine is a strange, independent, and phlegmatic heroine whose story steadily accrues emotional weight as we learn about her alcoholic father, her unhinged brother, her harrowing experience in London during the Blitz, and her romance with a wounded British soldier. Harrison revives his Detective Sunderson in "The Case of the Howling Buddhas." Now retired but no less libidinous, "an old boy on the loose again," Sunderson is enlisted to look into a mountebank cult leader, though the real drama involves the detective's illegal dalliance with a 15-year-old girl. This last novella is also the weakest, the shaggy-dog mystery fitting uneasily with the salacious, and not particularly convincing, erotic plot. Agent: Steve Sheppard, Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLC. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An ascended master of the form returns to the novella, turning in three very different pieces with autobiographical elements in common. "To be honest, which often I am not," Harrison (The Big Seven, 2014, etc.) writes in a telling phrase early on, announcing good intentions while reserving the prerogatives of invention. Yet, the lead of the title story, minstrel and mongrel alike, is someone very like Harrison, challenged of eye but not of vision and a trencherman and drinker of formidable appetites and no real interest in scaling back to better fit his advancing years. The big book he has been promising his publisher is slow to emerge, just as his abilities at 70 are beginning to show their age, causing him to ponder the prospects of using performance-enhancement pills and of quitting the writerly world to raise pigs. He settles for trying to write poems instead, inconclusively; as Harrison writes, "Life is short on conclusions and that's why it's often a struggle to end a poem." Some of Harrison's lines are throwaways, though a less accomplished writer would love to have written them; but in the main, he writes with his customary rough grace and bodhisattva wisdom, whether comically treating sexual improprieties or reflecting deeply on the meaning of life. As with Dalva, Harrison is skilled at writing from a woman's point of view, and his second story, set in Montana and across the water in England, concerns a woman, Catherine, who likes nothing better than twitting her moneyed neighbors; she, too, shares biographical points with Harrison, from a love for steak to a fondness for Key West. The closing story, "The Case of the Howling Buddhas," is a touch short for a novella and slighter than the other pieces, a Pynchon-esque goof involving one Detective Sunderson (of The Great Leader fame) who's on the trail of some bad actors inside a cult-y sangha but is never too busy not to ogle the long legs of a neighbortrademark Harrison territory, in other words. Grand entertainments all and a pleasure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The enduring master of numerous literary forms, Harrison delivers one of his loosest and most playful books yet. In three stylistically varying novellas, he returns to his customary subjects: Montana and the Midwest, womanizing and boozing, the writing life and rural living, aging and facetiously himself. The shortest and goofiest tale even revisits a familiar character, retired detective Sunderson from The Big Seven (2015) and The Great Leader (2011), whose age is catching up to his insatiable lust for younger women. Hired on to investigate a Buddhist howler-monkey cult, Sunderson wrestles with ethics while courting a teenage neighbor. In a tamer but more sprawling novella, a Montana farmhand who partially spent her youth in England during WWII recounts her passion for chickens and her vain attempts to find love or, more urgently, get pregnant. And in the delightfully digressive title story here the most autobiographical a writer seems to have hit an artistic wall as he turns 70, tending to some piglets to distract himself from his marital woes and the manuscript he owes his editor. The unnamed and restless narrator, like Harrison himself, refuses to allow death's imminence to keep him from living fully, embodying this witty and inspired collection.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2016 Booklist