SOURCE: "At Home in the World," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 14, 1994, p. 8.

Cherry is an American poet, fiction writer, and essayist. In the following, she favorably reviews Julip, characterizing the three novellas in the collection as a triptych whose "motifs and references recur, patterning a book as artistically whole as it is emotionally revivifying. "

How life gets into art is mysterious and miraculous. A writer shapes some fictional clay, breathes a few words and then—maybe!—the clay stands up and goes for a walk. Jim Harrison's new book, Julip, performs this amazing act of creation three times, in three novellas that seize us by the hand and take us on three different paths through the world.

In the title novella, we experience the world among women; in "The Seven-Ounce Man" we experience a Native American world; and in "The Beige Dolorosa" we visit a largely...