Looking for Oregon books, I ran across David James Duncan’s The River Why. It’s an improbable love story set against the backdrop of an improbable fly-fishing story, or maybe an improbable fly-fishing story set against the backdrop of an improbable love story, or a long didactic philosophical and spiritual journey. Or all of the above.
The novel’s hero, Augustine Orviston (get it? get it?), is described at birth as caught from the womb of Ma Orviston. He is as much trout as boy, a bait- and fly-fishing prodigy, an idiot savant, balanced between his parents, Henning Hale-Orviston (H2O) and Carolina Carper (the above-mentioned Ma). H2O is a British accented, tweed-wearing, pipe smoking fly fisherman and fly-fishing writer, author of the Summa Anglia, while Ma is a Camel-smoking blue-jeaned eastern Oregon cowgirl defiling the holy water of the Deschutes with a Sears Roebuck bait caster. Ma and H2O are forever joined and (apparently) forever in conflict. Ma kills fish. ‘Nuff said.
While fishing Gus (Gus is short for Augustine) finds his love, a water nymph who disrobes to swim steelhead down in the river. They romance over fish and fly rods and fishing. She sends Gus on his final quest with three pound tippet by hooking Gus’s spirit animal, an egg-laden hen Chinook moving upriver to spawn and die, and then handing the rod to Gus. For the next night and day, day and night, Gus moves upriver with the fish by holding it on the too-light leader with a soliloquy on the power of love.
It ain’t no brief soliloquy either.
Not much in the novel is brief. It’s a long, rambling narration by Gus, and sometimes I wished Duncan would just skip a few of the sideshows and get on with things. It was rejected by major publishers because it needed more editing. They were right, and it shares it’s anti-structure of disconnected misadventure (and an other-worldly misfit hero) with A Confederacy of Dunces, which was also rejected by major publishers and finally published by LSU two years before in 1980. The River Why was published by the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club? Okey-dokey. At least Gus, unlike Ignatius J. Reilly, is likable, if not as amusing. The River Why finally ends gratuitously with a long baffling tag about the Vietnam draft, which even in 1982 was a bit dated.
All that said, it’s a fun book, which I think is what Duncan wanted. One (that’s me) just wishes he wasn’t quite so entranced with his own story. There’s a nice movie version of the novel, though Duncan spent three years suing to get his name taken off the credits. I liked the movie too, but Duncan, for all his Oregonian secularism, seems to have a Puritanical streak.
When I recently wrote about another great fly fishing romance, Shelley and Mark, I got an email from Shelley setting some things I got wrong. The photo, she says, was not taken in Houston but Iceland.
Those are not bluebonnets behind him—they are Lupine which are kind of like giant bluebonnets. When we landed in Iceland, they carpeted the fields leading from the airport. We thought it was such a nice welcome for Texans.
Icelanders, being descendants of taciturn Norwegian Viking raiders, aren’t the first people who come to mind for their thoughtful friendliness, but there you are. They spread out the lupine.
More important, Shelley explained to me that Kris and I, however large my ego, weren’t responsible for her and Mark’s romance. I kind of suspected that, since we didn’t find out about it until after it was pretty far along and then only by accident, but I’ll never admit it to Shelley.
I had one of those newspaper articles about Mark on my nightstand (plans for flycasting instruction) before I met him. There were lots of other common threads as it turned out—his sister and my brother were on double dates in college, she was the sweetheart of his fraternity; Mark was at a party thrown by my childhood friend, Nancy, that I also attended (there are disputes about whether we actually met there—I say “no”); my friend Ellis was standing in the living room of Mark’s best friend, Herman, the night Mark introduced me to all of his music friends. I could go on and on.
Shelley said she had the newspaper article on her nightstand so that she could track Mark down for casting lessons. Between you and me I think she was already learning to sight cast. Or maybe the clipping got there because Mark was practicing his blind casting. Shelley also said that early on she thought that Mark surely could talk a lot. I guess just like Gus Orviston, literary or real, talking is a necessary talent of anglers.
Shelley also pointed out one last thing I got wrong:
Houston is really a very small city when it comes to lawyers and flyfishermen. And some other things.