‘The Big Seven,’ by Jim Harrison

A startling moment occurs in Jim Harrison’s 2011 novel, “The Great Leader,” when the protagonist, Detective Sunderson, abruptly reflects on an incident that has landed him in the hospital. His soon-to-be ex-wife, Diane, has left with all of her things, and Sunderson drinks a bottle of Canadian whisky. “This had gone on a couple of days and . . . a colleague had checked up and found him facedown and comatose on the floor of the unheated enclosed back porch after a 10-degree night.” Up until this point, Sunderson’s steady drinking has been recklessly celebratory in this whisky-soaked novel, the kind of soaking one expects from a divorced detective at the outset of his retirement. But when he blithely reveals that he spent a few days unconscious, all the previous pages are cast into a foggy doubt. Just how screwed up is this guy, and exactly how stewed has he been for the past several chapters?

Such is Harrison’s gift for conveying human consciousness and all its vexing diversions and understatements and circular thoughts. In his latest novel, “The Big Seven,” a sequel of sorts to “The Great Leader,” Sunderson’s troubling consciousness returns, particularly unreliable, the circles circling tighter. Regrets over Diane’s departure compete with his vast culinary and sexual appetites. Fond memories of his dead brother and nascent ruminations on the nature of the seven deadly sins churn in a mind that eddies and pools and presses on. Beneath the surface, retired Detective Sunderson is quite a lot like the rivers he fishes.

“The Great Leader” ended on a grace note, with the bad guy comically debilitated in an ATV accident, and Sunderson reconstituting his family. Sort of. He and Diane, though divorced, adopted an abandoned minx named Mona who had been flirting with Sunderson and badly needed a father figure. The relationships at the close of that book remain tenuous at best, but you come away with a sense that Sunderson is going to be all right, simply by being the strange kind of father and ex-spouse he can manage to be.

And so “The Big Seven” finds Sunderson coming to the rescue of his strange family, heading to New York to save Mona from a musician who has spirited her away from college. Of course, nothing goes according to plan. He extorts $50,000, and winds up with a broken back. Mona runs off to Europe, but Diane shows up to nurse him back to health, if not let him back into her life. You lose some, you win some.

Thinking the rehabilitation he needs is a cabin and some good fishing, Sunderson finds and purchases a property adjacent to a family by the name of Ames, the most outlandish of the Upper Peninsula’s outlanders. They are an ardently murderous, incestuous clan, existing in a horrific feudal system, with the men alternately eating, drinking, working the land and fighting one another when not raping their wives, sisters, cousins and daughters with an alarming lack of consequence. Neighbors and cops alike steer clear.

As in “The Great Leader,” Sunderson’s detective work provides a bit of comic noir — for one thing, he proves to be mind-­bogglingly intimate with the Ameses, who are murdering one another to a purpose that Sunderson cannot help trying to suss out. Complications ensue. Brawls and gunfights erupt, often during car chases. Bodies wash up on the shore of the river. It seems that one of the Ameses is steadily killing off the rest of the clan. It’s not entirely clear why Sunderson cares. He’s mostly haplessly mixed up in it because of professional curiosity and proximity. When a young Ames woman finds her way into his bed and, just as important, his kitchen, he’s drafted into their war.

Also as in “The Great Leader,” the bad guys aren’t the main draw. The back story of the Ames clan is largely prepared for Sunderson by Mona. She vaguely hacks the Internet for the information when not driving him crazy with her flirtations. Indeed, the main pursuits of this retired detective aren’t villains but women, food, fish and alcohol. Which is another way of saying that he is running away.

The pleasures of “The Big Seven” are found most often in Sunderson’s troubled, heavily marinated meditations. He thinks a lot about sin, in particular the “eighth sin” of violence, which he commits himself to describing on paper. “He had been still in high school when he read about the siege of Leningrad,” he thinks. “He recalled trying to fish when his mind was drowning in the idea that the world was a madhouse and had always been one.”

Among Diane’s complaints about Sunderson was that he wouldn’t change jobs, but it’s clear he’s drawn to the scene of the crime. He rather likes being the one who gets to say, “Move along; there’s nothing to see here” — partly, no doubt, because he recognizes there’s perhaps everything to see there.

Sunderson’s reading and reflections on his job would be ample material for a treatise on the iterations of human evil, and the Ameses keep providing grist for the mill. Scarcely a page passes without beatings, incest, gunfights, poisonings, blackmail and the rampant child abuse these backwoods maniacs visit on one another. Coupled with the plaguing memories of Sunderson’s police work, the book is a litany of pulped spouses, burned children and terrifying encounters with senseless violence. Sunderson is terribly inured to it, and Harrison’s rangy prose restlessly delves into these horrors. But the hardest part of the proceedings is watching Sunderson try to cope through meatloaf, bourbon and sex. He is supernaturally gifted at finding succor in the form of women who will cook, make love and, if not fix him a highball, at least tolerate his alarming intake.

Despite his thorough recklessness, though, Sunderson is a tough old survivor. And like all of Harrison’s protagonists, he is supremely aware of his predicament and the biological absurdities of being a man. Usually this means observing women with a constant, helpless lust, as when he escapes to Europe late in the book: “Her legs were brown and when she sat on the bench for a few minutes her skirt flashed up a bit in the breeze off the river and his heart felt a pang at the bareness of her legs. How hopeless. When does it stop?”

Never. It never stops. The ego, the wandering, the violence, the bottomless hunger, the lust — they just might be life enacting itself. What else is there?

It’s in this late chapter, the book’s finest, that Sunderson recalls “a rare honest evening,” realizing that the “drinker was the intense center of his own universe, his perceptions rather lamely going outward but colored utterly by the false core.” Hence the constant fishing, because “it was hard to think about yourself while staring at a river. In fact you couldn’t do it.” Sunderson at last realizes that he’s been “sunk in the male hoax of fishing and drinking,” perhaps in the nick of time. He may never get Diane back, but he just might be capable of love again.