The Big Seven, by Jim Harrison

...People from his class never spent a hundred dollars an hour to toalk to a shrink.... it was thought to be a scam. Only lawyers got that much.

...One professor used to like to quote Faulkner as saying "Keats 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of broken-hearted old ladies." Hemingway was ruthless with his children but would head to bed with a case of sniffles. Sunderson always thought Hemingway wrote very well but if you peeked under the covers you saw one of the worst pricks in the history of literature. Faulkner stayed home and drank and wasn't into serial marriages...

...what could you do about a fourteen-year-old boy who would commit cold-blooded murder? The paper failed to mention whether he was a Boy Scout or a junior member of the NRA. There were no clues other than the implicit one that he was a member of a culture dying of dry rot...

Back in the fifth grade each student had received a packet of Audubon cards resembling baseball cards but with photos of birds rather than players, and they were let out into the woods to match them to what they saw. An oriole was a prize sighting. Some boys cheated and sat around in the woods smoking cigarettes. He told his dad about this and his dad had said, "Once a cheat, always a cheat." He had pondered what this meant and came up with not much because he had noticed that cheaters seemed to do well at everything and being one might well prepare you for a career in business.

Another rough, drunken Sundersen novel by Jim Harrison. This one is a sequel to the one I just read, Great Leader. In it, Sundersen acquires a hunting cabin with a nearby family of backwoods people who are vodka-swilling armed maniacs, to be generous. A merry series of events ensue.

Great Leader, by Jim Harrison

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NY Times review

This is the first book I've read by Jim Harrison. His writing is unusual. There's a kind of economy to it that can be just a little confusing. He doesn't waste words on transition; a character will move from one place to another, one action to another, one time to another, with little or no explanation. Several times I had to stop and go back to see what I had missed, and usually discovered that I had missed nothing--I was simply being challenged to use my head to figure out what's going on. In general, I like this in an author; I don't enjoy reading unnecessary reams of exposition, but maybe Mr. Harrison overdoes it a little.

The story is pretty good. I like the Upper Peninsula Michigan setting, the cold and bleak images of Lake Superior, its role as a sort of symbol for evil in the book. Sunderson is a State Police detective who retires soon after the story begins, but who continues to hunt down his last suspect, a religious cult leader that he sometimes calls the Great Leader. The Great Leader's main transgression is statutory rape: he likes to have intercourse with underage girls who join the cult. He also welcomes adult women as long as they have lots of money to donate.

Sunderson is a complicated person, probably an alcoholic, although his personal brand of alcoholism doesn't exactly ring true, and I have a little expertise in this area. He is extremely sexually active for a 65-year-old man, and doesn't seem to have much in the way of moral compunction. Add to this his habit of spying on his 16-year-old female neighbor Mona, and it's a little difficult to see exactly from where his intense moral outrage against the Great Leader comes. Perhaps it's one of those instances where we hate others the most when they remind us of ourselves.