Harrison a muscular, romantic writer

56. Sundog, Jim Harrison. Fiction, 6-19, p. 241

Harrison is a muscular writer and a romantic, sort of a second-tier Hemingway (and that’s no faint praise). Sundog, a story about “a man totally free of the bondage of the appropriate,” is standard Harrison fare; peppered with references to food and sex, manly work (building bridges and dams), exotic travels, the theory and practice of rivers and man’s efforts to escape his physical limitations.

Part of his appeal is that Harrison struggles to escape the limitations of a writer. Not his limitations, but the limitations of paper and words in attempting to convey a story of the human heart and mind and spirit. Harrison writes with a boldness that keeps you reading even if the concept of the story is improbable.