The writing itself is gorgeous, very poetic in places, and the story builds well on itself without revealing too much about what's coming around the next bend, or what's tucked under that overhanging bank. If you have any affinity for river fishing, especially fly fishing, and you have a spiritual nature, you'll appreciate David James Duncan's hilarious, insightful, poetic, and moving book.
Because of fishing, Gus started school a year late and was considered "a kind of mild-mannered freak" by his schoolmates. He grew up "osprey-silent and trout-shy," and developed early on an ability "to slide through the Public School System as riverwater slides by logjams, rockslides and dams that bar its seaward journey" (p. 17). Duncan's irreverent protagonist tells us, "years before I could have put it into words, I realized that my fate would lead me beside still waters, beside rough waters, beside blue, green, muddy, clear and salt waters. From the beginning my mind and heart were so taken up with the liquid element that nearly every other thing on the earth's bulbous face struck me as irrelevant, distracting, a waste of my time" (p. 17). After he leaves his quirky, fishing-obsessed family with his favorite flyrod, "Rodney," who Gus calls the "Strong Silent Type" (p. 88), for a life of solitude and "fishing with total absorption" (p. 91), Gus soon wades into life's deeper waters. "And so I learned what solitude really was," he tells us. "It was raw material--awesome, malleable, older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless--for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself. One needed either wisdom or tree-bark insensitivty to confront such a fearsome freedom" (p. 148). In his solitude, Gus develops environmental wisdom. "No, it wasn't simply the death of fish that bothered me," he says. "The thing I found offensive, the thing I hated about Mohican mountain-makers, gill netters, poachers, whalehunters, strip-miners, herbicide-spewers, dam-erectors, nuclear-reactor-builders or anyone who lusted after flesh, meat, mineral, tree, pelt and dollar--including, first and foremost, myself--was the smug ingratitude, the attitude that assumed the world and its creatures owed us everything we could catch, shoot, tear out, alter, plunder, devour . . . and we owed the world nothing in return" (p. 134). Ultimately, while searching for trout, Gus discovers his soul. "I pictured rivers--December rivers, mist-shrouded and cold--and thigh-deep in the long glides stood fishermen who'd arisen before dawn . . . They stood there in the first grey light, in rain, wind, snowfall, or frost; silent, patient, casting and casting again, retrieving nothing yet never questioning the possibility of bright steelhead hidden beneath the green slicks; numb-fingered, empty-bellied, aching-backed they stood, hatted or hooded like rabbis or monks, grumbling but vigilant, willing to pay hard penance for the mere chance of a sudden, subtle strike. What was a fisherman but an untransmuted seeker? And how much longer must be the wait, how much greater the skill, how much more infinite the patience and intense the vigilance in the search for the gift men called the soul? 'Titus,' I said, 'I've been walking around for years with my metaphysical dry fly stuck in my ear!'" (p. 179). And then there's the woman who hooks Gus by the heart.
THE RIVER WHY runs deep. It is as much about flyfishing as asking life's hard questions. Like Gus, we're all fishing for meaning in the River Why. Duncan's incredible novel moves with spiritual, insightful, humorous currents that pull us through some profound reflections along its course. THE RIVER WHY will make you laugh, and at the same time it will make you cry. Wade into this RIVER, and like me, you just might find yourself baptised.
G. Merritt