Short, bittersweet, and simply superb - I "discovered" Jim Harrison while in college thirty-some years ago when I read of his first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir. When he mentioned Reed City in the first line of that book, I was hooked. I never imagined that the little town where I grew up would ever make the pages of good fiction. I shouldn't have been surprised though. Jim Harrison did some growing up in Reed City too. His dad, Win Harrison, was the county agent here. The Harrisons moved away to the Lansing area around 1949, but Jim still credits Reed City as a formative influence in his memoir, Off to the Side. There have been a lot of Harrison books since Wolf, and I've read most of them, but, in re-reading it recently, Farmer still holds up well after more than 30 years. In fact, I still think it is his best novel. It is so much more than just a love story, although it certainly is that. It is a tale of lust and longing, but also one of regret and redemption. Joseph Lundgren, the title character, is at once complex and simple. He is Everyman. In Wolf, the protagonist looked for a wolf in the wilderness mountains of Upper Michigan in the sixties - a time when wolves were all but gone from the state. That same theme - chasing a ghost animal of an earlier time - shows up again in Farmer, when Joseph tries to get a glimpse of a coyote. What he finally sees is no more than a blur for "a tenth of a second." What the middle-aged teacher/farmer Joseph wants in his ill-advised affair with a beautiful high school student is nearly as impossible to define as that search for the elsusive and all-but-extinct coyote. "I wanted to be carried away," he says, trying to explain things to his twin sister. And, at least for a little while, he succeeded. And, while I know there is no "political correctness" about this thirty year-old novel, any man today who can still be honest about his real feelings and simply say the hell with propriety and political correctness, will understand Joseph and what he did. Harrison puts you inside Joseph's skin. You feel his despair, his regrets, his longing for something more. Farmer may be a very short book, but it is as nearly perfect as a novel can ever hope to be. ( )