‘The Ancient Minstrel,’ by Jim Harrison

The collective grief that comes when a great artist passes, now magnified a thousand times with the advent of social media, often finds its roots in a simple sentiment:

Harrison, who died March 26 at age 78, offers his loyal readers “The Ancient Minstrel,” a collection of three novellas that feels like a lingering, lusty, weepy and deeply entertaining farewell; it’s a lovingly constructed finale for an author often admired for his ability to live and write in ways that were truly on his own terms.

Rather, this volume finds a place in the Harrison oeuvre alongside his hilarious Brown Dog novellas (collected in one volume by his publisher three years ago), playful and freewheeling meditations on wilderness, writing, eating, drinking, family and love (though sometimes lust is the more appropriate term).

The feeling of farewell is especially poignant in the title novella, which is a quasi-memoir of an aging writer trying to raise pigs, write one more “big novel,” and rekindle, with a kind of breathy desperation, a long marriage that was as complicated as it was good.

The poet protagonist spends a great deal of this book eulogizing the end of his lusty ways and perhaps his writing chops, but as the novella gains strength, there is also a bitterly sad subtext in the novella, about his own failings as a husband, and a recognition that his 55-year marriage to his wife was an existence somewhat better than “the poet” deserved.

The breeziest and least satisfying of the three novellas is “The Case of the Howling Buddhas,” in which Harrison’s recurring detective Sunderson returns in the case of a cult gone wrong set in northern Michigan and Ann Arbor.

The celebratory and ridiculous, perhaps self-destructive role that lust plays in an aging man’s melancholy is front and center here, more interesting than the rather silly plot.

Harrison himself often admitted that he never fully recovered, emotionally, after his father and sister were killed in a car wreck when he was a teen; in his later work, he meditated long and moodily about one’s failure to fully appreciate the love of one’s life.

For Harrison and his most memorable characters, wilderness and wild places are the sole salves for a kind of pain that is something like existential, but in Harrison’s world might be better called essential.