Volume 33, Number 16 · October 23, 1986
Something Fishy in the Hamptons
By Robert Hughes
Men's Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork
by Peter Matthiessen
Random House, 352 pp., $29.95
'A jerk on one end of the line, waiting for a jerk on the other.' The literature of American fishing is large but not, on the whole, distinguished. It has three chief modes: the reflective-pastoral, the heroic, the technical. The reflective-pastoral descends from the ancient line of Izaak Walton, and is mainly about trout and salmon; the finesse of fly-casting, and the long time between fish, encourage reflection. Piscator is usually a semiretired surgeon with access to a vanity press, writing pensées so coy and homely that one wishes his waders, when they filled with water that day on the Gallatin River in 1957, had drowned him. Once in a while, however, the mode produces a book as lapidarist and admirable as Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It, published in 1976.
Review, 4305 words
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