The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison

 

This book has two novellas in it.  In the first, Clive is a sixty-year old man.  He had been an artist but gave it up and became an art professor and someone who served as an expert when validating authenticity of paintings. He lives in New York City far from his surviving family, his mother and a sister back on the Midwestern farm he fled as a young man.  Now his mother is aging and his sister wants a break and a vacation.  Clive agrees to come home for a month and take care of everything while his sister travels.  He rediscovers his love of painting while there as well as rekindling the attraction of his first love who lives next door.

The second novella is about the River Swimmer.  Thad was born to swim and feels most at home in the water.  He takes long journeys, swimming miles to Chicago and other locations.  He falls in with a rich girl and she takes him traveling and he swims some of the largest rivers in Europe.  But his heart lies back home and the rivers he grew up with and the water babies only he is able to see.  

Jim Harrison was the author of The Legends Of The Fall and thirty other novels.  I love his spare yet beautiful writing.  He often writes of men attempting to make human connections and find love.  He was also a lover of nature and it plays a large part in most of his work.  He also delves into family connections and what they mean to us as adults.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.