The river swimmer, by Jim Harrison

These two novellas are the first works by this well-known writer that I have read and although they were glowingly reviewed, I am not inclined on the strength of this book to look for his earlier works.  The first novella, The land of the unlikeliness, is a fairly traditionally written piece about an aging art historian returning home to care for an elderly parent and encountering an old love, reconnecting with an estranged child, and returning to his long-abandoned painting.  The second, the title piece, is very different and quite odd.  The sentences are short and declarative which contrasts with the mystery of this mythic story.  A young rural man, who is also intellectually gifted, loves to swim, particularly in rivers with currents.  He encounters “water babies” in one of his swims, which are described as being the souls of dead children – or maybe they were supposed to recall the popular Victorian book, The water babies, which I actually owned an ancient copy of as a child and could never get into (turns out to be some kind of lightly veiled Christian allegory…..).  But most of the novella is about his adventures when, fleeing the ire of the father of a girl he is involved in, he swims a hundred miles down Lake Michigan to Chicago, meeting another girl and another father….  I dunno. 240 pp.