It's as though William Butler Yeats had written a scenario for Sam Peckinpah. Or as though James Dickey had done a Western—though Dickey wraps the violence in Deliverance in a context that attempts to explain and redeem it, while Jim Harrison gives the pure, raw, macho daydream. Harrison's three long stories [in Legends of the Fall] are full of silent men and lovely women who desire to be ravaged. The bad guys are nightmare figures with names like "Slats" who just won't listen to reason. You have to zap them hard….

The violence [in Legends of the Fall] is a norm, a daydream, a fantasy of male power that we could call adolescent if it weren't so clearly middle-aged….

And yet Harrison's style can be pretty decent, as you would expect from a man who has published four volumes of poetry. (p. 23)

Harrison sees the weather and...