SOURCE: "Bedrock Americana," in Chicago Tribune, August 12, 1990, p. 1, 4.

In the following review, Coates examines the plots, characters, and themes of The Woman Lit by Fireflies.

For almost the last 20 years, Jim Harrison has been developing into one of our finest novelists, even though he declines to live what late 20th Century America considers to be a writer's life, which these days usually revolves around the universities with their MFA programs and teaching jobs.

Harrison remains essentially the same man who spent years "at manual labor as a block layer, a carpenter, a digger of well pits," as he indicated in a Paris Review interview a few years ago, and he believes "that rural, almost white-trash element . . . stood me in good stead as an artist, in the great variety of life it forced me into. . . ." He legitimately has the kind of resumé that writers used to display on the...