by Kelly Pickerill
It can be a little frustrating to find out that you’ve read a book out of sequence. You pick up an attractive-looking book or a book you’ve heard good things about, not realizing that it has characters that were introduced in an earlier book. While other readers are coming back to a world they’ve already explored, indulging themselves in the nostalgia and familiarity, you are playing catch-up for the first fifty pages or so. Veteran readers tend to avoid this at all costs, I think. I know I do. I even go so far as to read earlier, unrelated books by an author that I’m newly interested in. My interest has been piqued by their newest book, and it’s hard for me to resist going back to check out what I missed.
That said, I recently read Jim Harrison for the first time. Instead of going back to somewhere near the beginning, though, I just plunged right in to his newest book, The Farmer’s Daughter. These are three novellas that are linked by a Patsy Cline song, “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” The second novella, “Brown Dog Redux,” features a recurring Harrison character, the half-Indian libido-driven Brown Dog. Instead of feeling lost as to who this person was, I was delighted to discover that Brown Dog could make me laugh and blush just as well without having met him before. BD is hiding in Canada after various bouts with the law (some of which I assume are hilariously recounted in earlier stories) with his stepdaughter, Berry, who suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome. In this novella BD has to deal with the pain of losing Berry to a bureaucracy that thinks they can take care of her better than he can. For the first half of the novella, that uneasiness combined with the disorienting feeling of being away from his beloved woods put BD in a flux. Once he returned to the natural glory of the Michigan upper peninsula, though, fishing in his familiar creeks and eagerly anticipating a visit from a special lady, both BD and I could breathe easy. I feel after reading “Brown Dog Redux” as though I’ve known BD for years.
And now I’ve done it again! I’m several chapters along in Bone Fire by Mark Spragg. At the opening of the novel, Griff takes her favorite horse to explore her grandfather Einar’s land to make sure it’s fit for grazing. When she notices the fence is broken down at one place, she calls on three men to help her mend it. As I read about McEban, Kenneth, and Paul pulling up to the ranch in an old pickup, I experienced a feeling of reunion; it was almost as though they walked up to Griff and Einar in movie slow-mo. I felt as though I were meeting old friends for the first time, and rightly so, for Spragg’s first novel, The Fruit of Stone, centers around McEban and a then nine-year-old Paul. Bone Fire takes place a decade or so after the events in this novel and his second, An Unfinished Life. In that novel, Griff is a precocious ten-year-old; now she’s nineteen and struggling with the decision to leave her grandfather to go off to college. She and Paul are dating, but at the end of the summer he will be leaving for an internship for his masters in Uganda. Spragg is a master at portraying the atmosphere of the West, and his sparse prose subtly and beautifully takes the reader to a place both foreign and familiar. I am excited to get to know these people at this, the next stage of their lives.
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