Jim Harrison's "Brown Dog" - NYTimes.com My all-boys high school A.P. English class was presided over by a glamorous, overqualified woman known to us as Dr. Lerner. I might have been in love with her. She smelled wonderful, like lemon trees on a hot day. Knowing she was a doctor of literature didn't prevent me from imagining various medical situations in which she saved my life. Once, I stopped Dr. Lerner in the hall and feigned difficulty with a "Heart of Darkness" essay. This was plainly an excuse to stand close to her. She looked me in the eye and said, "What's the difference between a civilized man and an uncivilized one?" I shrugged. Cotton underwear? "Restraint," Dr. Lerner said, and swept on. I still wonder: Was she talking about Kurtz? Or me? In the decades since, no literary character I've encountered, not Humbert Humbert or Frankenstein or Ahab or even Kurtz, has made me ponder Dr. Lerner's question more deeply than Jim Harrison's Brown Dog. Brown Dog, if you haven't yet run across him, has been the protagonist of five Harrison novellas since 1990. A thick new collection, "Brown Dog: Novellas," assembles them all, and includes a sixth - unpublished until now. Brown Dog has no other name. He's simply B. D., a scoundrel, a "backwoods nitwit," a "kindly fool," a goof as lovable as Sancho Panza and a libertine as promiscuous (if not as discriminating) as Don Juan. Picture a smuttier, older and alcoholic Huckleberry Finn, who happens to be Native American. B. D. lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, home of Hemingway's Two-Hearted River, where summer is "known locally as three months of bad sledding" and where the headline "Old Finn Walks 25 Miles to See Brother" is considered rousing. Raised by his grandfather, he hates loud noises, prefers the company of ravens and bears, and his idea of advance planning is to stash pints of schnapps in tree stumps near his favorite trout streams. If Brown Dog qualifies as civilized, it's only a part-time vocation. He is an "anti-magnet for money"; lust flares in his loins every 15 minutes; four days without a drink seems his best record. He plans to fast before going into "battle" (i.e., chucking fireworks at an ex-girlfriend), but a couple of hours later, he gets "distracted by a pail of fresh smelt" and "two cases of beer." Running from the police, B. D. asks to stop for breakfast. He prefers to sleep outdoors because houses are too warm. He averages one piece of mail a year. He believes sobriety is a "tough row to hoe." And yet B. D. is generally endearing and sporadically admirable. He risks everything to defend an ancient Hopewell burial site, he cares for his disabled stepdaughter with supernatural patience, and he never sheds his childlike naïveté. The first time he saw the ocean, Harrison tells us, he kept his "face in his hands . . . peeking out between his fingers because the view was far too much to be absorbed wide open." What Harrison does on every page of "Brown Dog" is have fun. In the first (and best) novella, we watch B. D. haul a frozen corpse out of Lake Superior, stuff it into a stolen ice truck and convince himself it might be the father he never knew. In the second, we watch him dodge angry and lethal cuckolds, convince local newspapers he might be leading a secret "Red Power" brotherhood and team up with an "erstwhile though deeply fraudulent Indian activist" who is required back at U.C.L.A. soon "to head a colloquium: "Will Whitey Ever See Red?" " In the ensuing novellas, we watch him steal a bearskin from a Hollywood producer, fall for a sex-addicted dentist, ride on a tour bus with a rock band and have "real trouble dealing with" a Montana Costco. The kind of fun Harrison prefers above all is bawdy. B. D. connects with an implausible number of women over these 500 pages, and I don't care to estimate the number of times Harrison employs the word "weenie." His sentences can be careless, the later novellas feel repetitive, and the uneven addition, "He Dog," is not Harrison's best work. Anthony Doerr's fifth book, the novel "All the Light We Cannot See," will be published in May.