The River Swimmer: Novellas

The prolific Harrison (Legends of the Fall) writes in an appealing tough-crusty fashion that has attracted almost a cult following. Fans (and others) will delight in the two novellas here, which effectively bookend human life. "The Land of Unlikeness" features a washed-up academic—he's divorced, estranged from his daughter, and quit of his beloved painting—who returns to Michigan to tend his ailing mother. While there, he reconnects with his artwork, his daughter, and an old flame in a tentative act of renewal as real and touching as a Hallmark movie is not. Of the Upper Peninsula farm boy featured in "The River Swimmer" (cheeky, putting his story second), the narrative says: "If there was a body of swimmable water nearby he would enter it. It was his nature." Thad's strokes take him past the dock where fetching Laurie sits (the beating he gets from her father propels the plot) and all the way down to Chicago. Through good and bad, a swimming scholarship, a terrible accident, and troublesome water babies (a magical touch told laconically), water defines Thad's life.