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The Farmer’s Daughter by Jim Harrison Grove Press, 308 pages, $24

If Jim Harrison is not a pornographer, he’s close. He has always written about appetites—usually for food, drink, sex, sleep, and nature—but the older he gets, the more the one appetite dominates his prose and the less hungry his prose becomes.

His new collection of three novellas, The Farmer’s Daughter, overflows with sex. Often the sex involves a girl and an older man, though occasionally it involves a boy and an older woman. The male characters we’re disposed to like are perpetually erect but never threatening, no matter how wolfish their stares. The female characters, no matter how young, are always in charge (save in one important instance) and generally amused by their tumescent and addlebrained male companions. The whole mix reads quick and easy and fulfills the words of one of Harrison’s familiar protagonists, Brown Dog, who, in the second novella of the collection, responds in the following way to a doctor’s question about whether he has been sexually active: “Now and then whenever it’s possible. You can’t always get what you want. It’s better not to aim too high”.

Harrison certainly does not aim too high, and this has generally been the appeal of his work. His prose is direct and unvarnished, as in each novella’s first line: “She was born peculiar, or so she thought”; “Brown Dog drifted away thinking of the village in the forest where the red-haired girl lived”; and “There was a bit much of me to stay in one locale for very long”. The language itself tells us that Harrison, or Harrison’s narrator, is to be trusted; fancy words and constructions don’t get in the way, and he gets right to the point. And the point, we quickly realize, is also direct and unvarnished: we human beings are nothing more than pretentious animals. We’re beasts—and there’s nothing wrong with that—but we talk ourselves into thinking we’re something lofty. We aim too high.

Not Harrison, though, or any of the characters he likes and means for his readers to like. If fourteen-year-old Sarah, the title character of Farmer’s Daughter, plays classical piano and reads Victorian literature, she also fires 220-grain Silvertips with accuracy, runs in the hills of rural Montana, and regularly offers a kindly and ailing older man glimpses of her mostly naked self (“She even rolled over in case he wanted a butt view”). Sarah loves the beautiful but doesn’t pretend that the animal in us is not also beautiful or that she loves what’s properly lovable and doesn’t get caught up in what certain religious traditions tell us should be lovable. In a word, Harrison might say, she’s real—except that she’s so clearly a fantasy.

The collection’s title, The Farmer’s Daughter, already indicates that the three-part jaunt will be some sort of fantasy, but in Harrison’s world, fantasy can’t simply be tits and ass, even if it must include both. In addition to the tits and ass, any fantasy worth dreaming up—or any novella worth writing—must also contain some rustic elements, cabins and woods, say, and the howl of a wolf. In the Harrison mode, it might also include a smattering of ancient Native American or Eastern wisdom (“His last hope was to get home and have a life that the ancient Confucians thought was the best life, one in which nothing much happened”); an unpretentious brush with great art (“While she was playing the piano it occurred to her that the least tough woman in the world, Emily Dickinson, was one of her favorite poets”); and the easy division of the world into those who whine about the world as it is and those who accept it and quickly make do (Sarah’s “mother had never allowed her a dog because she thought of dog poop as satanic”, whereas a female doctor tells her, “Out in the backcountry where you live you’ll have to carry a pistol against cowboys”). Finally, the fantasy must include the in-on-the-joke chortle of Harrison’s readers and especially of Harrison himself.

I should follow this denigrating enumeration of ingredients with a confession: I have, for a long time, read Harrison’s books the minute they have been published. I have chortled with Sundog and Dalv and Legends of the Fall and The Woman Lit by Fireflies and The Beast God Forgot to Invent and all his other novels and novellas; and with the essays in Just Before Dark and The Raw and the Cooked; and with his memoir, Off to the Side. I have fancied myself in on the joke.

But now, twenty years down the Harrisonian road, as I ride the Red Line El through a dreary Chicago February and shamelessly hold Harrison’s salaciously titled, pastorally decorated book for fellow passengers to see, I find myself wondering what exactly the joke is. It has something to do with how mammalian Harrison is—how enraptured he is with those parts of our bodies and of our behavior that make so many people righteous or squeamish. I believe that the essence of this joke remains valuable but that the joke itself, as revealed in Farmer’s Daughter, has gone stale. The writing is lazy and redundant. Every character sounds like Harrison or someone Harrison is mocking. Every story moves at the same pace and involves the same combination of elements, notwithstanding a wolf man here, a revenged rape there. Every hot young thing laughs at every hapless admirer and laughs most confidently after getting him off.