Knowing that this is a book that has many passionate admirers, I was surprised that the only epinion of the book was entirely about Robert Redford's film (the author of an epinion says the movie is better, but gives no other indication of having actually read the book).

I am a fairly dispassionate admirer of the book. I consider it a rival of The Great Gatsby as "the great American novel" of the 20th century. The two books are both observations of destruction of another, destructions that the narrators are unable to avert or to understand. Both books illuminate a particular time and place (nouveau riche Long Island of the Jazz Age and hard-scrabble rural Montana of the late-1910s through late-1930s) but focus on timeless — indeed,  archetypal — tragedies.

Even more than The Great Gatsby, A River Runs Through It resembles two of the great American plays of the 20th century, Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night" and Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie." Like these two plays, River is a haunting/haunted elegy, a recollection of growing up with difficult, demanding, Calvinist parents and a much-loved but doomed sibling. I have to admit that the mother in River is less vivid and rounded a character than the mothers of either of those plays, but the father is as domineering as James Tyrone, Sr. in "Journey" (there is not a father in "Menagerie").

The author (stand-in) has to get out in all three works. He cannot save the doomed sibling ( the pathologically shy Laura in "Menagerie," the increasingly alcoholic Jamie in "Journey," the increasingly alcoholic and street-fighting Paul in River). The brother who survives recognize both the doom and the superiority of the doomed sibling they want to help, but don't know how to. Years later the narrator/brother/survivor tastes the ashes of seeing that doom was coming for the sibling, understands some of the reasons for it, and knows even better than at the time that he could not have saved the doomed sibling.

Norman Maclean's masterpiece shows the destruction, whereas it is still to come at the end of the two plays, after Tom and Edmund leave home. Perhaps it is possible to save someone else who is headed for destruction, though my own experience is that it is nearly impossible to tell anyone, and particularly a sibling, that they are on a path to a certain crash (in my own case, it was a less-glamorous sister rushing into marriage and child-bearing at 18, plodding through an increasingly abusive and alcoholic marriage, and on to a drunk-driving conviction after getting out of that... throughout I was totally unable to convey my acute analysis of what was going to go wrong and what she should do to avoid the disasters I foresaw).

Well, besides relating to the archetype of the doomed sibling and the helpless analytic, recording one, I want to note that Norman Maclean's prose is diamond-hard and diamond-pure, the kind of prose Hemingway aspired to. I don't know if Maclean (1902-90) spent decades preparing to write this book or worked on it for decades. (He submitted it to the University of Chicago Press a few years after his retirement in 1973 from a position in the English department at that august university. The book was published in 1976 and was a major commercial success. Maclean wrote one other book before dying, also a story of destruction from the Montana of his youth, Young Men and Fire.)

But Isn't It About Fly-Fishing?

No! I've already laid out what I think the book is about. I have no interest in trout-fishing and greatly admire the book, so it ca not be about fly-fishing for trout, even if the characters are heavily involved in that activity.

(BTW, I don't think that Moby Dick is about whale-hunting, though I do think there is too much detail about whale-hunting technology in Moby Dick, though not in the accounts of particular hunts.)

I would not say that fly-fishing is just a metaphor, but it is an activity very important to the three Maclean males and one at which Paul, not Norman is the champion and the model brother. It is the activity at which their father is more human. The river (the Great Blackfoot) in which they fly-fish for trout is the site of particular transcendence both for the earthbound father and son and for the son only briefly visiting this earth. It is where Norman sees Paul and their father at his best.

One of my favorite moments in the book is when Norman thinks that he has perfectly applied what Paul taught him. Paul assures him that no one could have landed the fish, but Norman ponders it (for perhaps 50 years?) and realizes that "one trouble with hanging around a master [is that] you pick up some of his stuff, but you use it just when the master is doing the opposite." It is obvious to me that this and the other lessons are not confined to or applicable only to fishing.

Conclusion
I am completely confident that in the 22nd century, A River Runs Through It will be regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th-century American literature, as Billy Budd and Huckleberry Finn are now regarded as masterpieces of 19th-century American literature.



(There are many editions of this book. This was not posted as a review of the one with Mosher drawings, which I have glanced at.)

©2000, 2011 Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: Yes