Maclean regrets not sticking to his own rules

Last year, Norman Maclean’s (that’s Maclean, not MacLean) A River Runs Through It was presented as the Dartmouth Book Award to hundreds of ravenous juniors hungry for a college prize filled with ivy league succulence. The author’s masterpiece novella (though he considered it an elongated story, as he rejected the novel as an art form that is “mostly wind”), complete with expert, precise language in its evocation of the nature that surrounds fishing, was perhaps doled out as a symbol to these students to give pause and appreciate the world they were enveloped in.

As a recent Dartmouth admit, I anticipated the story as one would anticipate the words of a brother, hoping to encounter the truth that designated Maclean as one of the college’s most celebrated offspring.

But the novella did not portray the “haunting tale” that the back cover of the 25th Anniversary Edition described it as. While Maclean describes fly-fishing and its science and art with language matched only by the greatest of American literary naturalists, what lies beneath such language is unclear until the last paragraph, and by then it seems the message has been so delayed by repetitive description that it was not worth getting to in the first place.

Maclean tells the true story of two brothers, Norman (himself) and Paul who spend their lives working and fishing (and try to spend more of their lives doing the latter). The general plot involves the visit of Norman’s “slow” brother-in-law, Neal Burns, whom Norman and Paul hate but whom are forced to take fishing by order of Norman’s wife.

However, when Norman leaves Neal alone more than once, potentially doing harm to him, Norman’s wife gets on edge, and practically orders Norman to spend a few days out of the house with Paul, fishing at a summer house.

The plot itself virtually ends thirty pages before the story closes, but the story ends where it should have begun, with the words “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time…under the rocks are words, and some of the words are theirs.”

The world Maclean tries to transport the reader to is one cut through by a river, that river deceiving us all, masking the depths of what we think we know with its shining surface. In the end, Norman’s father tells us “‘It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.’”

These are powerful words indeed, but they are words that are never explored until the story’s close (which is much less exciting than I expected it to be), instead replaced with paragraphs and paragraphs of “But I’ve already told you about the Bee, and I’m still sure that there are times when a general won’t turn a fish over. The fly that would work now had to be a big fly, it had to have a yellow, black-banded body, and it had to ride high in the water with extended wings, something like a butterfly that has had an accident and can’t dry its wings by fluttering in the water.”

Maclean would have done well to stick by his mantra, “I saw early that…stories have to be short….I learned that your friends won’t listen to a story unless a lot happens in it.”