When I was about fifteen, I started reading Kerouac's On the Road, and I gave up because reading it was a tedious trudge through Kerouac's myopic, self-absorbed prose. The "plot" is just cobbled together accounts of booze, women, drugs, the open road, yadda yadda yadda. An adventure signifying nothing.

Jim Harrison's Wolf is largely about booze, women, drugs, and the open road. The narrator, Swanson, recalls low-wage jobs, hitchhiking, spurned lovers, and crummy rented rooms . Interspersed between these unrelated accounts is the story of Swanson, older now, but scarcely more mature, camping in northern Michigan, where he hopes to sight a rare wolf and avoid drinking alcohol.

I'm not sure why I liked this book more than On the Road. It deals with many of the same things. Maybe it is because the narrator is more honest. He likes to drink, eat, and fuck. There's no grander search for some corny Meaning or the American Dream. But he also likes to read and observe the natural world. And his more mature self reconciles with the limits of a purely sensual existence during his sojourn in the Michigan woods. But the novel feels grounded in its recognition that we will go on eating, drinking, fucking, working, reading novels, fishing, and admiring birds and trees. There's no lame beatnik Transcendence through mescaline or bongo drums or rejecting bourgeois Society, after which all will be good and we won't have to be bored.

Wolf, to me, seems to say, "That's all folks. Life's just what it says on the tin." Learn how to live with that, then you'll have your meaning.