Quick: Name your top five favorite novella writers. OK, name one.

Stumped? The novella writer is a strange bird, occupying roughly the same position in the pantheon of fiction writers as a knuckle baller does in a pitching rotation: On a good day, their work can be entertaining and effective, but it's probably not advisable to build a career or a team around them.

Some writers who normally specialize in novels or short stories have one great novella in them, such as Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Café. Others can produce a whole collection of novellas that sit agreeably alongside one another, as in Rick Bass' superb The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness. And a few, such as Katherine Anne Porter, become masters of the form.

Jim Harrison is one of the foremost practitioners of the novella working today. Legends of the Fall, arguably his best known work due to its film adaptation, was the title story in his first collection of three novellas. His new book, The Summer He Didn't Die, is Harrison's fifth novella collection, and the characters that populate it are so disparate that if they were introduced to each other, odds are none would shake hands.

The new collection is a little uneven. Thanks, in part, to those wildly divergent characters, the three stories are so different that readers are bound to choose one of them as the favorite and judge the other two as lacking by comparison.

The title novella in The Summer He Didn't Die is the most fully realized and endearing. The tale concerns Brown Dog, a character that Harrison has returned to on many occasions, an impoverished, half-Indian ladies man who lives in a trailer in Michigan's Upper Peninsula with his two step children while their mother is in jail. The younger child, Berry, is brain-damaged from fetal alcohol syndrome, and she only communicates through birdcalls.

Brown Dog suffers from an intense crush on his friend and caseworker, Gretchen, who's a lesbian and so cannot return his affection. Brown Dog seeks an outlet for his robust sex drive in Belinda, a dentist whom Gretchen pays to extract several of Brown Dog's wrecked, smarting teeth. The pairing of Brown Dog and Belinda, like that of most couples, is not one suitable for Hollywood cameras; the teeth that Brown Dog still possesses are gnarled and rotten, and Belinda is obese and sexually aggressive. Still, as Brown Dog reflects, "the fact that she was a tad burly did not lessen the intensity of his fantasies, the idea that they might mate like bears in the moonlight of her backyard."

This cast of characters becomes united in a mission when Brown Dog receives a letter from Berry's school district notifying him that because it doesn't have the resources to teach children with special needs, in the fall she will be ordered to attend a boarding school in faraway Lansing "that specialized in her kind of infirmity." Berry, who is most at home in nature and can communicate with all manner of animals, would wither in such an institution, and so Brown Dog and the others hatch a plot to sneak the girl to Canada, and their enactment of this plan proves, by turns, goofy and moving.

The second novella in the collection, "Republican Wives," is an account of three middle-aged women who have been best friends since they were sorority sisters at the University of Michigan. Each either comes from a wealthy family or married a rich husband, so when they get into legal trouble, they have private jets and top lawyers at their disposal. But the commonality that binds them together most of all is a lover with whom they have all had extramarital affairs: Daryl, a selfish, insufferable poet that none of them can resist.

"Republican Wives" is funny, but rather unbelievable, and lacks the heart of the title novella. Its breathless prose is amusing, though at times confusing because Harrison never hesitates to omit commas, as he does here, when one of the women explains her marital difficulties:

"Early in our marriage Jack took Nancy Reagan's 'just say no' to heart further dampening his practically no-existent ardor though in contrast to his own disinterest he thinks all teenagers are bent day and night at tearing at each other's parts."

The final novella, "Tracking," is the story of a writer's career that Harrison all but says is autobiographical. All of the details, from the unnamed protagonist leaving Michigan for Greenwich Village as a teenager, to the title of one of his novels, are true to Harrison's life. But it's written in a distant, rambling, sparsely punctuated third-person, lacks the verve and humor of the first two novellas, and the story itself is unfocused.

"Tracking" will be of interest to aspiring writers interested in how a successful novelist has made his way or to Harrison enthusiasts who will enjoy the tidbit about the time he met Jack Kerouac, but it may leave other readers cold.

Indeed, fans of Harrison will best enjoy this collection overall, particularly the opportunity that the title novella offers to catch up with Brown Dog again, but those new to Harrison or to novellas might want to turn to other books for the best of both.

Jenny Shank's short stories have appeared in several magazines, including Michigan Quarterly Review . She lives in Boulder