CANR
WORK TITLE: The River View
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.jamieharrisonbooks.com/
CITY: Livingston
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 336
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in MI; daughter of Jim Harrison and Linda May King; married; husband’s surname, Potenberg.
EDUCATION:Graduated from the University of Michigan.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has also worked as an editor, cook, caterer, and researcher.
AWARDS:Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award, for The Widow Nash.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
The Edge of the Crazies, the 1995 debut novel of Jamie Harrison, daughter of noted author Jim Harrison, is a mystery set in Blue Deer, Montana, a picturesque small town near the Crazy Mountains. County sheriff Jules Clement is a failed archaeologist and the worldly wise and introspective son of the former sheriff. Blue Deer attracts a mixed citizenry of artsy types and rural independents, who are suspicious of Clement. When a sniper shoots but does not kill Blue Deer resident George Blackwater, and Blackwater’s domineering wife disappears and is later found murdered, Clement must investigate both the distant past and the present. The plot thickens when the murders of other prominent citizens are revealed, the Yellow Stone river overflows, and high school seniors practice graduation pranks.
“ The Edge of the Crazies is a remarkable debut,” asserted Gary Dretzka in the Chicago Tribune. “The characters are quirky yet believable, and the plotting, while intricate, is fast-paced and sexy.” Praising the work as a “sparkling, caustic first novel,” New York Times Book Review critic Marilyn Stasio added: “In this madly original debut, Ms. Harrison speaks up in a fresh, animated voice to say something worth saying about the festering animosities of small minds cooped up in small towns.” “ The Edge of the Crazies is refreshing for what it is not: This is not the usual romanticized travel-guide picture of Montana, but rather a documentary photograph, grainy but focused, with plenty of sex, booze and death to hold the eye,” remarked David McCumber in Los Angeles Times Book Review. “Harrison’s harsh verity is leavened with humor—cynical, wise, grown-up humor—that makes reading the book an uncomfortable pleasure.” Writing for Washington Post Book World, Pat Dowell described The Edge of the Crazies as “an agreeably wry and laid-back tale of murder and malice” that “deserves the praise” of its jacket blurbs, one by well-known mystery writer James Crumley. “Edge of the Crazies isn’t quite crazy enough to carry its several dramatic coincidences on sheer bravado, the way Crumley himself does, but Harrison has an assured novelist’s grip on characters and scenes, and the right sensibility for such a story.”
“Crazies will remind readers of early Crumley, Tom McGuane and Harrison père, but Jamie Harrison obviously has her own stories to tell,” observed Dretzka. “This is a surprisingly rich novel, intricate without becoming sluggish, not an easy thing for any writer to achieve, and all the more unusual in a first novel,” asserted McCumber. Barbara Arrigo in the Detroit Free Press expressed a few reservations about what she characterized as Harrison’s thesis—evil deeds are more disturbing when committed in a natural paradise—and style. “Harrison’s style is a bit choppy, especially at the beginning, and early on a few characters pop up without enough context.” Nevertheless, Arrigo declared, “Jules is introspective and self-deprecating, he’s good company,” adding that Harrison “has turned out a very agreeable first novel.” McCumber concluded: “ The Edge of the Crazies is an auspicious debut, by any standard a polished and eminently readable mystery novel.”
Further entries in the series drew praise from many reviewers. In Going Local, published in 1996, Clement returns to Blue Deer after a month of recuperation from the action in The Edge of the Crazies, only to be confronted with more murder and mystery. The first victims are Otto Scobey, a lawyer who was working to create an environmentally sound housing development in the area, and the woman with whom he was camping. Suspicion falls on rival developers, including Otto’s ex-wife Sylvia, but she is also found slain. The horror escalates when, during a local rodeo, a terrible accident involving a drugged horse causes yet another death. “As in her first mystery … Harrison mingles dark and (sometimes strange) comic elements to good effect,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who further praised Harrison’s skill at “creating an assortment of characters, tossing them together, giving them something to squabble over and setting them loose.” A Booklist contributor noted that Jules Clement “is an excellent hero” with “many of the qualities of the world-weary hard-boiled detective, urban version, but the rural setting brings new textures to the character.”
An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence is the next Clement mystery. Walter Kirn, in a Time review, deemed it even better than Harrison’s first two mysteries. Blue Deer is experiencing a crime spree in this novel, and Clement has to deal with problems ranging from murder and a serial rapist to a divorced couple involved in a vicious fight over custody of their dog. Clement’s attempt to relax with a little trout fishing only leads him to more horror, when he trips over a rotting corpse in the stream. Kirn praised Harrison as “literate and handy with a plot but possessed of a voice and a vision as well. Her off-the-cuff eloquence and easy sarcasm remind one of a small-town courthouse wit, loitering on the steps with a cigarette, flipping digs at starchy passersby.”
The author’s success continues with Blue Deer Thaw, the fourth Clement mystery, in which the lawman confronts an unusual number of bodies revealed by the spring thaw, considers quitting his job, and finds himself falling ever more deeply in love with his female deputy. Reviewing this book, a Publishers Weekly writer commented: “Clement continues to be one of the most interesting and believable mystery heroes working the American turf, and Harrison demonstrates once again that she’s among the most talented writers to grace the genre in recent years.”
The stand-alone novel The Widow Nash is set in 1904, and it follows Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey, who goes by Dulcy. The young woman returns home to care for her dying father, Walton. Doing so means that Dulcy will have to face her rapist Victor Maslingen, who is also her father’s business partner. Even worse, Walton is dying of syphilis, is no longer coherent, and has somehow misplaced the funds from a recent sale. Victor is desperate to know where the money went, and Dulcy is desperate to avoid him. After she survives her father and Victor, Dulcy buries her father, boards a train, and reinvents herself as the Widow Nash.
Reviews of The Widow Nash were largely positive, and a Publishers Weekly critic stated that “Harrison’s lead is a strong and clever woman. … Readers will treasure Harrison’s rich characterization and sharp turns of phrase.” Mara Panich-Crouch, writing in the online Missoulian was equally laudatory, asserting: “Harrison is artful in her writing and most of the events influence the plot in important ways. … The Widow Nash delivers an excellent story. Harrison has crafted an atmospheric historical novel with original characters for readers to enjoy. Her writing is sophisticated and quick witted, ideal for a pleasurable summer read.”
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In a departure from her Jules Clement mysteries, Harrison taps themes of memory loss, tragedy, and recovery in The Center of Everything. In rural Montana in 2002, middle-aged mother Polly Berrigan falls off her bicycle and sustains a head injury, leaving her with migraines and short-term memory loss. When Ariel, the babysitter for Polly’s children, goes missing at the Yellowstone River, the incident dredges up Polly’s memories of people who have died around the river, memories her mother, Jane, tries to squelch. Flashbacks to Polly’s childhood in 1968 eventually reveal tragic family secrets.
Speaking with V. Jolene Miller at Shelf Media Group, Harrison described her process writing from the perspective of someone with a brain injury: “I had always intended to write about the supposed iffiness of Polly’s childhood memories, but this gave me a way to think about how a child really sees, and give Polly back some of that ability.” In an interview with Thomas McGuane at Literary Hub, Harrison explained her inspiration writing about Polly as a child: “The Center of Everything is partly told from the point of view of a child. I really tried hard to remember how a kid sees the world, and I relied on images rather than the memory of events. Things that hung in our house when I was little, books I’d spent hours with.”
A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented on The Center of Everything: “Harrison shines with passages of vivid imagery as Polly gains an added dimension of perception from looking at art and photographs.” In Booklist, Cari Dubiel reported that Harrison pulls “Polly’s memories together into a surprising conclusion. Recommended for book clubs and fans of complex, literary fiction.”
Harrison returns in 2024 with book 5 in the “Jules Clement” series, The River View, the first since her 2000 Blue Deer Thaw. In the new installment, archaeologist and private investigator Jules is back in Blue Deer, Montana in 1997 with his wife, Caroline, and their baby. As he revives an investigation into the 1972 murder of his sheriff father, Jules juggles a series of other frantic events, including the suicide of a priest that looks more like a murder, neighbors who want Jules to spy on each other for them, graves that have to be moved for a new road being laid, and shadowy Russians driving fast cars through town.
Despite the characters and plotlines that come fast and furious, “What’s riveting is the ethical conflict Jules unearths: protecting (or surviving) the people you love versus defending justice. Serious issues here, but they take a back seat to Harrison’s sharp, bordering-on-absurdist humor,” noted a Kirkus Reviews critic. In Publishers Weekly, a writer reported: “The episodic structure works wonders, with each vignette highlighting Jules’s damage as well as his brilliance.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 1996, George Needham, review of Going Local, p. 1679; December 15, 1997, John Rowan, review of An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence, p. 685; November 1, 2020, Cari Dubiel, review of The River View, p. 17.
Chicago Tribune, April 2, 1995, Gary Dretzka, review of The Edge of the Crazies, p. 7.
Detroit Free Press, May 10, 1995, Barbara Arrigo, review of The Edge of the Crazies, p. F3.
Library Journal, April 1, 1995, Rex E. Klett, The Edge of the Crazies, p. 129; July, 1996, Rex E. Klett, review of Going Local, p. 167; January, 2000, Rex E. Klett, review of Blue Deer Thaw, p. 165.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 16, 1995, David McCumber, review of The Edge of the Crazies, p. 10.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2024, review of The River View.
New York Times Book Review, May 21, 1995, Marilyn Stasio, review of The Edge of the Crazies, p. 39; August 18, 1996, Marilyn Stasio, review of Going Local, p. 28; February 8, 1998, Marilyn Stasio, review of An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence, p. 22.
Playboy, July, 1995, Digby Diehl, review of The Edge of the Crazies, p. 36.
Publishers Weekly, February 27, 1995, review of The Edge of the Crazies, p. 89; May 20, 1996, review of Going Local, p. 242; November 17, 1997, review of An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence, p. 56; January 24, 2000, review of Blue Deer Thaw, p. 294; April 24, 2017, review of The Widow Nash; October 19, 2020, review of The Center of Everything, p. 44; June 3, 2024, review of The River View, p. 90.
Time, February 9, 1998, Walter Kirn, review of An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence, p. 101.
Washington Post Book World, June 18, 1995, Pat Dowell, review of The Edge of the Crazies, p. 11.
Wilson Library Bulletin, April, 1995, Gail Pool, review of The Edge of the Crazies, p. 97.
ONLINE
Jamie Harrison Website, https://www.jamieharrisonbooks.com/ (December 18, 2017).
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (January 7, 2021), Thomas McGuane, “Jamie Harrison on Finding Her Way to the Writer’s Life in the American West.”
Missoulian, http://missoulian.com (June 25, 2017), Mara Panich-Crouch, review of The Widow Nash.
Seattle Refined, http://seattlerefined.com/ (December 18, 2017), Kelly Blake, author interview.*
Shelf Media Group, https://shelfmediagroup.com/ (June 1, 2022), Interview: Jamie Harrison. Author of The Center of Everything.
About the author
I've lived in Montana with my family for more than thirty-five years. I've worked as a caterer, a gardener, and an editor, and I'm the author of seven novels, including the upcoming Jules Clement series: The River View (August 2024) and four other novels set in the fictional town of Blue Deer, Montana: The Edge of the Crazies, Going Local, An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence, and Blue Deer Thaw, all reissued in July 2024. The Center of Everything (2020) and the The Widow Nash (2017) share two key characters; The Widow Nash was awarded the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award, and was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award.
Jamie Harrison
JAMIE HARRISON has lived in Montana for more than thirty years. She is the author of the Jules Clement novels as well as the novels The Center of Everything and The Widow Nash, a Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award winner and a finalist for the High Plains Book Award.
Genres: Mystery, General Fiction, Literary Fiction
New and upcoming books
August 2024
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The River View
(Jules Clement, book 5)
Series
Jules Clement
1. The Edge of the Crazies (1995)
2. Going Local (1996)
3. An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence (1998)
4. Blue Deer Thaw (2000)
5. The River View (2024)
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Novels
The Widow Nash (2017)
The Center of Everything (2021)
Interview: Jamie Harrison. Author of The Center of Everything.
shelfmedia
Interview
June 1, 2022
By V. Jolene Miller
Interview Jamie Harrison
Meet Jamie Harrison, daughter of a poet/novelist, author of several books, and a woman who didn’t dream of growing up to be a writer. What?Thankfully, Jamie resisted a nonwriting life and recently completed her newest novel, The Center of Everything. Polly, the main character, lives an idyllic life in Montana until she’s involved in an accident and a beloved friend of hers goes missing. Now, Polly must navigate a sudden loss admit this new and strange normal.
Tell us a little about you. Did you grow up wanting to be a writer? What has your journey into being a writer been like?
JH: I didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer; my father was a poet and a novelist and I knew it was a rough way to make a living. I cooked and worked in magazines and eventually, after leaving New York for Montana, became the editor of a small press. When it went out of business, and I had trouble finding work, I tried writing a mystery for the sake of earning a living, and I got away with it.
Tell us about the inspiration for your newest novel, the center of everything.
JH: It came out of several things I’ve been curious about and wanted to write about—children and memory and grief—and earlier projects that somehow came together as one. I’d worked on a kind of a ghost story about children on Long Island in 1968, a short story about a young woman cooking in New York in the mid-eighties, and a contemporary mystery set in my town in Montana. And I also wanted to go back to some of the characters I loved in my previous book, The Widow Nash.
How is the center of everything different from your previous books?
JH: In a way, I’m not sure it is—it’s about the same family that is introduced in Widow, but because most of Center is set in 1968 and 2002 rather than 1905, Center just gets to be called a novel rather than historical. I have a bone to pick with that idea. The writing is the same, and I hope the characters are equally real—I wonder what the cutoff year for “historical” is. I edited out sections set in 1920 and the late forties, which will hopefully end up in a third book. And a lot of the 2002 section is pretty similar to my Jules Clement mysteries—the same basic world, and much of the same sensibility. Polly’s cousin Harry is pretty close to Jules.
You give us a close-up view of polly (mc) and her life after a brain injury. What was your research process like?
JH: A lot of reading. I’ve known several people who had closed-head injuries, and I have had a minor brain injury. So some of the details are drawn from life, but squared.
The confusion that comes with a brain injury is evident in Polly’s life after the accident. What was it like to write that perspective with such clarity?
JH: That kind of confusion can be completely denting—it just shakes you to your core. Writing about it was a good way of finding my way out of it, if only by imagining it being worse. I had always intended to write about the supposed iffiness of Polly’s childhood memories, but this gave me a way to think about how a child really sees, and give Polly back some of that ability. I really tried to remember how I saw the world at eight, and it helped to look back at things I’d seen and heard — LIFE Magazine to book illustrations, top 40 songs, and Walter Cronkite.
The imagery and word choice in the center of everything is achingly beautiful. Does this come naturally to you while writing, or does it develop over time through the revision process?
JH: Thank you! I think some of anyone’s best writing is deeply felt and often comes out of nowhere—the thoughts that send you scrambling for a piece of paper—but consistency and overall quality is definitely about revision. My first drafts are awful, and getting all the bits to work together sometimes feels endless. My husband reads everything, and I have a wonderful agent, Dara Hyde, who knows what works and what doesn’t, and then I have Dan Smetanka, the best editor in the world. Though he’s occasionally heartless.
Who are a few of the authors you like to read? How do their books influence your writing?
JH: I read a great deal by the time I was twenty-two, everything from the supposed great books canon to Ian Fleming, Daphne duMaurier to Faulkner to Aeschylus to hundreds of mysteries, and I’ve been behind ever since. I just finished Hamnet and it was gorgeous; I’d die happy if I could write a story as spare and incredible as Train Dreams or as fluid as The Known World. So many great writers, so little time: my bedside table is currently piled with Jess Walters, Denise Mina, Lauren Groff, Ladee Hubbard, Tod Goldberg, David Mitchell, James McBride.
When can we expect your next book? And, can you tell us anything about it?
JH: Aaargh. I’m two-thirds of the way into two mysteries with my old character Jules Clement, which is a kind of hell-zone of shoveling sand. But I’ll pop through, soon. And when I can’t bear my plot problems, I’m scribbling down bits of a third book in the Polly series.
The Center of Everything
About the Book
Set against the wild beauty of Montana as a woman attempts to heal from a devastating accident, The Center of Everything by Jamie Harrison is a generational saga from the award-winning author of The Widow Nash is a heartfelt examination of how the deep bonds of family echo throughout our lives.
For Polly, the small town of Livingston, Montana, is a land charmed by raw, natural beauty and a close network of family that extends back generations. But the summer of 2002 finds Polly at a crossroads: a recent head injury has scattered her perception of the present, bringing to the surface long-forgotten events. As Polly’s many relatives arrive for a family reunion during the Fourth of July holiday, a beloved friend goes missing on the Yellowstone River. Search parties comb the river as carefully as Polly combs her mind, and over the course of one fateful week, Polly arrives at a deeper understanding of herself and her larger-than-life relatives. Weaving together the past and the present, from the shores of Long Island Sound to the landscape of Montana, The Center of Everything examines with profound insight the memories and touchstones that make up a life and what we must endure along the way.
ATW Interviews
Jamie Harrison
September 10, 2024
How did you become a writer? Out of desperation! I’d lost my job as an editor and I lived in an area with extremely low wages—Montana—and didn’t want to move back to New York. I’d read mysteries all my life, and tried writing one, and managed to sell it as part of a series.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My father was a novelist and poet and our house was full of books and talk of writing. I went to a tiny public school—most kids didn’t go on to college—but we had an English teacher who taught everything from Gilgamesh to Hamlin Garland, Goethe to Faulkner, and he let me spend study hour alone in the cafeteria, reading novels. There are too many writers to mention, but let me start with Louise Erdrich, David Mitchell, Edward Jones, Penelope Lively, Michael Ondaatje, James McBride. I’d also recommend Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode and James Woods’ How Fiction Works.
When and where do you write? Anywhere and anytime I can, but I usually start with a block of time in the morning, back in bed with coffee. When the weather is good (as I mentioned: Montana), I try for the picnic table. My office is currently a mound of paper.
What are you working on now? Another Jules Clement novel and an essay. I’m touring off and on, and because my work time is fragmented, I’m also letting my head float around another book linked to The Widow Nash.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No. The problem is always distraction or avoidance, or simply not knowing how to approach a scene or an edit.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I can’t remember any one perfect and succinct line, but here’s a couple that work: Reading makes you a better writer, and when you’re stuck, reading will free you up. Take time away from your manuscript for the sake of perspective, and embrace edits. Less is almost always more.
What’s your advice to new writers? Work through different ideas on top of the novel, and try to avoid I.
Jamie Harrison is the author of The Center of Everything, The Widow Nash, and five mysteries in the Jules Clement series, most recently The River View. She’s the winner of the Reading the West Award, a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, and a Ucross fellow. Before writing, she worked in food and magazines, and was the editor of Clark City Press. She lives in Livingston, Montana.
Jamie Harrison on Finding Her Way to the Writer’s Life in the American West
The Author of The Center of Everything in Conversation
with Thomas McGuane
By Thomas McGuane
January 7, 2021
Photo by Melanie Nashan
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Jamie Harrison’s The Center of Everything is forthcoming from Counterpoint on January 12. Harrison talked to old family friend Thomas McGuane about the writer’s life, her father Jim Harrison, avoiding the clichés of the West, writing mysteries, and more.
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Tom McGuane: I know that you were not attracted to a writing life at first because of memories of growing up on your father’s $8,000-a-year income, which eventually changed for the much better; but then you budged and have been productive ever since. Is this a legacy? You’re a very different writer.
Jamie Harrison: My father would sometimes read things out loud when I was a teenager—I especially remember an early passage about a swan in Neruda’s Memoirs—and it wasn’t for the love of his own voice but to show me the beauty, the importance of getting the right words and having them fall the right way.
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I don’t know of anyone who writes like him. He funneled books in my brain from the age of five on. I think the legacy is simply loving to read, being surrounded by writers, growing up reading things in manuscript form. I admit that I hoped that mysteries would keep people from comparing me to my dad. Our friend Peter Matthiessen asked me when I was going to write a real novel.
I started to write because I needed money after I lost my job as an editor when Clark City Press went out of business. My oldest son was three, and I didn’t want—couldn’t afford—to move back to New York. I thought I’d try writing a mystery. I never thought of it as a calling, and I was surprised by how much I loved it. But productive—not so much. After four books I wrote screenplays, and it was more than 15 years before I sold another book. So I must love it.
TM: In those penurious times, your father’s great award was translated into your girlhood horse, Thunder Guggenheim. Are you sorry he spent his prize on a horse, instead of the OED or coffee table Vermeer?
JH: Our family intends to take apart Dad’s memoir and annotate it with different colored pens. Thunder cost a couple of hundred dollars, and was a bit of a dud, and my parents spent far more on wine. We had many horses over the years—we boarded for a neighbor who trained Belgian draft horses. I gave lessons to younger kids with a sweet pony-cross and a crazy under-trained Morgan. And we had a colt named Ben that Dad lost in a poker game. Shoveling manure is definitely one way to learn to daydream.
I remember in the long ago, your father throwing John Hawkes’s Adventures in the Skin Trade across the room and shouting, “No plot!” Might’ve had an effect.
TM: Of the many things I admire about your book, is the granular detail of ordinary life in a place, Montana, where a certain obeisance to the Chamber of Commerce list of regional classics is a requirement. I don’t think you did this on purpose as that detail is so compelling. I know that to introduce a nurse, a FedEx driver or a computer salesman in a Western setting feels defiant, a bold road for the risk-averse.
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JH: I love living in Montana but I dislike the kind of faux western thing you mostly see in people like our new governor. I was pleased when a prepub review said Center was “devoid of Western clichés.” Most people I know are devoid of Western clichés.
TM: You have a lot of experience as an editor of nonfiction and scientific material. Has this given your work its striking specificity?
JH: I don’t think so, beyond the idea that I wish I had a biology degree. Acting as an editor does soften you up for being edited (and I have a great one, Dan Smetanka at Counterpoint). People need editors. Where are the editors? One early job was writing magazine captions and headlines, shrinking to fit. It wasn’t bad training, and screenplays teach compression, too.
The Center of Everything is partly told from the point of view of a child. I really tried hard to remember how a kid sees the world, and I relied on images rather than the memory of events. Things that hung in our house when I was little, books I’d spent hours with, like The Family of Man, gothic illustrations of King Arthur, Aubrey Beardsley’s Ali Baba, an FBI most-wanted poster for Eldridge Cleaver, pulp fiction covers, album covers. There was always a lot to look at.
TM: By the evidence of your own books, you like plots. I remember in the long ago, your father throwing John Hawkes’s Adventures in the Skin Trade across the room and shouting, “No plot!” Might’ve had an effect.
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JH: It might. Growing up with a fabulist (assuming that you enjoy that fabulist) and you learn the joy of making things up heedlessly, what the Irish call “craic.” He’d have a handful of index cards, maybe thirty, and then he could actually sit down and spool a novel out, beginning to end; he really did write Legends of the Fall in something like ten days. But mostly it was story over plot; he only sometimes stuck to a plot. He could get by on language and the whole rich mess of his characters.
Maybe my novel’s plot is about a woman looking for a friend in a river, death and misfortune and revenge; maybe the story is old friends and old lovers and the way we try to protect our children.
Memory can be tyranny for writers or it can be a reliable source of departures.
TM: Because I’m old and forgetful, I go back to first impressions of books I read and I felt reading your book was that it was so interesting, never mind how, just on the paragraph and page, so interesting. That effect for me is template free, a writer with good instincts one jump ahead of me but hanging onto the leash, the first day in a new town. Narrative tension dawns on me more slowly.
JH: I have no deliberate craft ideas that I’m aware of. If I have anything, it’s only an ear and a life of reading.
TM: You’re a wife, mother, sophisticated cook and eater, gardener, editor; politically active in and outside the community. How do you find time to write? Am I right to guess that writing makes you happy?
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JH: Yes, it makes me happy. It wasn’t a calling, but I can’t do without it. But I’m immensely distractible. I haven’t even been able to read lately. I’ve wasted so much time, reading news stories about things I can’t change.
TM: You’re a self-conscious person. Is this a useful trait for an artist? I remember watching Updike and Cheever on the Dick Cavett show, twisting and squirming, muttering in fantasy accents. But Updike wrote eloquently about self-consciousness. You are modest about your work and you don’t write so exclusively about yourself.
JH: I think if you’re self-conscious and insecure, you study other people or make up a stand-in for your self.
When I wrote mysteries, I had to come up with something that wouldn’t be ridiculed or patronized, given Dad’s great and deserving standing. It was a challenge to imagine a likable, fair-minded cop. No one seemed to notice that Jules was me. He allowed me to have bar fights, tortured affairs, hangovers without pain, revenge. I loved it.
TM: I know that you keep up with new writing but may feel, as I do, that there aren’t many homes to which you might pass those books on. I’ve tried it with ranch hands but things tended to go south after The Red Pony, and Magister Ludi stays on the shelf.
JH: I don’t keep up enough, but I keep buying. Great sloping stacks of books on the table by the bed. I have friends who read a lot, really stay current, and they help me vet my own stuff. I don’t have many opportunities to talk about writing. I wish I did.
TM: Some of your early books were mysteries, all carefully made, until The Widow Nash, very different; and this book has some useful narrative drivers, but less the point than formerly. Can you imagine, after Flaubert, writing an absorbing book in which nothing happens? Or are we dyed-in-the-wool B-listers?
JH: I would love to try but I think I’d find the result too precious. Someone else’s nothing can be interesting; I’m less sure about mine. We’re here to entertain.
TM: How do you work? When do you work? Where do you work?
JH: I have a little office but sometimes I can’t bear it. I move around the house, dodging people. In the summer I spent most of the day outside with my laptop. I’m claustrophobic in the winter, if I don’t have to work another job, I write as much as I can in the morning in bed with the dogs piled around. They love it and it delays a freezing walk.
A question to you: do you ever write about the people you miss, just for the pleasure of keeping parts of them alive in your head, giving them new things to do, new lives, new minds?
TM: I’m trying to do that now!
Memory can be tyranny for writers or it can be a reliable source of departures. Have you thought about its relationship to your way of working?
JH: We’re always looking back, in the dark, at something we saw in the light.
Hilton Als has a wonderful essay called “Ghosts in Sunlight” about existing in multiple worlds, your past as a palimpsest:
Take it from me: memory is your greatest ally and your primary source material, because memory is your body as it was in the world and the world as it was and will be; memory is the people you have loved or wanted to love in the world, and what are we if not bodies filled with reminiscences about all those ghosts in the sunlight?
A lot of this book came out of thinking about the unreliability of memory and about how families handle loss—my father’s sister and father died in an accident when I was young. I played with versions of the part of the story that’s set in 1968 for years. When I started again soon after my parents died, and focused on my protagonist and her damaged head, it was brutal to realize that I had no one left to let me know if what I remembered of childhood—drunken poets, the path from our house in Stony Brook to the Sound—was even somewhat true. I started writing this in grief for my inadequate memory , and I ended in grief for my parents.
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Jamie Harrison’s The Center of Everything is forthcoming from Counterpoint on January 12
The Center of Everything. By Jamie Harrison. Jan. 2021.304p. Counterpoint, $26 (97816400923411.
Polly Berrigan's mind has fractured. After falling off her bicycle, she sustained a head injury, causing her memories to splinter and fragment. Polly, who lives in rural Montana and runs a restaurant with her husband, tries to ignore her new, dreamy state. But when a local girl who babysits Polly's children disappears after a river rafting trip, Polly finds herself immersed in pieces of her old memories while also trying to puzzle out the circumstances of the tragedy. Told half in flashbacks to Polly's past and half in 2002, the story unearths a dread Polly has nearly forgotten: her proximity to death. Death truly is "the center of everything" in this lyrical, profound novel; Polly herself has survived, while many of her relatives and people close to her have not. While readers may feel at times as if they're meandering down that long, winding river, Harrison (The Widow Nash, 2017) reels them back in by the end, pulling Polly's memories together into a surprising conclusion. Recommended for book clubs and fans of complex, literary fiction. --Cari Dubiel
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Dubiel, Cari. "The Center of Everything." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 5-6, 1 Nov. 2020, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A643989010/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2fc1e187. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.
The Center of Everything
Jamie Harrison. Counterpoint, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-1-6400-9234-1
An undercurrent of tragedy runs through Harrison's brilliant latest (after The Widow Nash), about the effects of a brain injury on a 42-year-old Montana * woman. Three months after a bicycle accident, Polly Schuster suffers from migraines and short-term memory loss, and has trouble concentrating on work at her husband's restaurant. After family friend Ariel goes missing during a Yellowstone River kayak trip, Polly tells her mother, Jane, she remembers seeing four dead bodies by the time she was nine. Jane insists these are just "photographs [she's] turned into memories" after her accident, and gradually Polly begins to grasp why Jane is trying to mislead her. As Polly grows suspicious about Ariel's disappearance, her world cracks open with revelations about the truth behind her family's tragic past. A series of chapters set in 1968 reveal the sources of Polly's memories, covering her childhood spent in Long Island living with her renowned archaeologist great-grandfather who moved east decades earlier, after Jane's mother died in an accident on the Yellowstone River, and an incident involving a suicidal private plane crash. Against the backdrop of Polly's family history and the author's exploration of the vagaries of the human mind, Harrison plumbs complex family relationships and sheds insight on the power of memories and how they shape her characters. Harrison shines with passages of vivid imagery as Polly gains an added dimension of perception from looking at art and photographs. Readers will find themselves wishing this won't end. (Jan.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Center of Everything." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 42, 19 Oct. 2020, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A641074243/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=890f50fc. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.
Harrison, Jamie THE RIVER VIEW Counterpoint (Fiction None) $28.00 8, 6 ISBN: 9781640096325
To the relief of Jules Clement fans, the former sheriff and his beloved Caroline have returned to Blue Deer, Montana, in 1997, following a year of travel, in this first installment of Harrison's series sinceBlue Deer Thaw (2000).
Caroline is back working part-time in the Absaroka County sheriff's department, but Jules has sworn off law enforcement and juggles jobs as an archeologist and private detective. About to build their dream house along the river, they have a 10-month-old baby whose constant physical presence becomes the novel's symbol of hardy innocence. Domestic calm does not preclude comic, homicidal mayhem, though. A seemingly inconsequential death shows up on the first page, and soon Absaroka County is awash in questionable suicides, fatal accidents, mysterious murders, deadly family feuds, equally deadly land disputes, and random body parts. Responding to a request from his mother, Jules begins investigating the details surrounding the death of his father, Ansel, a popular sheriff gunned down while giving a routine speeding ticket more than 25 years ago. Soon, Jules senses friends are keeping secrets from him. Meanwhile, because Jules and Caroline keep their professional lives separate and don't always fully communicate--"the mysteries of cohabitation" are a definite theme here--they miss some obvious connections among the myriad plotlines. Aside from Ansel's killing, these involve ancient gravesites interfering with a proposed right of way, the complicated ownership of a potentially valuable ghost town, the murder of an unpopular retired priest, and a missing acting sheriff. Expect the usual host of darkly colorful local characters, plus some shadowy Russians passing through. Characters and crimes come so fast and furiously that they clog up the first third of the book. Once the novel relaxes, patterns start to emerge. That the villain is obvious midway through doesn't matter. What's riveting is the ethical conflict Jules unearths: protecting (or surviving) the people you love versus defending justice.
Serious issues here, but they take a back seat to Harrison's sharp, bordering-on-absurdist humor.
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"Harrison, Jamie: THE RIVER VIEW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A801499485/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b3bf7a2b. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.
* The River View: A Jules Clement Novel
Jamie Harrison. Counterpoint, $28 (352p)
ISBN 978-1-64009-632-5
Harrison's riveting fifth adventure for Montana PI Jules Clement (after 2000's Blue Deer Thaw) is worth the wait. In 1972, when Jules was a child, his father, the sheriff of Blue Deer, Mont., was gunned down during a traffic stop. Patrick Bell was convicted of the murder--he claimed he'd been on the way home to kill his unfaithful wife and the sheriff "was in the way"--but the precise circumstances of the crime were never made clear. Now, in 2001, Jules's mother urges him to learn as much as he can about his father's final moments. While Jules reluctantly revisits that case, he juggles others: his meddlesome neighbors separately hire him to spy on one another; a priest's suicide starts to look like it may have been a murder; and Absaroka County hires him to determine where, exactly, the bodies are buried in an abandoned graveyard that officials want to build a road over. Eventually, most of the plot's individual strands come together, with the death of Jules's father as a linchpin. The episodic structure works wonders, with each vignette highlighting Jules's damage as well as his brilliance. Here's hoping the PI's next case arrives sooner than this one did. Agent: Dara Hyde, Hill Nadel Literary. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"The River View: A Jules Clement Novel." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 22, 3 June 2024, pp. 90+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A800536248/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=236787e9. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.