Explanation:
A friend and I were talking the other day when the conversation ran up against a maddening mystery: How is it possible that a smallish army of discerning readers agree that Jim Harrison is one of the few truly great living American writers, yet he has not gotten the wider audience—or the widespread praise—he so plainly deserves?
The question is especially timely because Harrison has just come out with a new novel, The Big Seven, which reprises his “retired careworn cop,” Simon Sunderson, who just wants to go trout fishing in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula but runs into a clan of inbred homicidal hellions. It’s Harrison’s 36th book, which means that his impossibly varied yet impossibly consistent output—novels, novellas, short stories, poems, reportage, memoir, and some wicked writing about food—now occupies roughly one yard of shelf space. Why isn’t this man regarded as a national treasure?
