"McGuane writes with wit, grit, and grace; the result is a book as entertaining as any you will find on any subject." —The Seattle Times The New York Times Chicago Sun-Times Minneapolis StarTribune Jim Harrison The Denver Post Financial Times Publishers Weekly (starred review) Kirkus Reviews Booklist
The Barnes & Noble Review The Longest Silence features more fly-fishing than A River Runs Through It . Some readers may take this as a warning. Yet when an author mines his obsessions -- as McGuane does in this ode to fishing -- there is always something interesting to learn.
Throughout his life, McGuane has repeatedly gravitated to where the bonefish, mutton snapper, and permits are. He has traveled extensively in the States and abroad: in addition to fishing in the Florida Keys, Montana, and Rhode Island, he has fished desolate sanctuaries in New Zealand, Argentina, Iceland, Russia, and British Columbia. During his travels he has met a succession of anglers, crusty and competitive, who share his undying devotion to the sport and his habit of returning his catches to the river. Anglers are quirky people, and in his 33 essays McGuane recasts some of their touching and humorous stories.
Like most fly-fishers, McGuane enjoys company but prefers the solitude his sport has to offer. He repeatedly expounds upon fly-fishing's bare essentials: the tackle, the fish, and the river. "I subject the reader to my inventory for two reasons," writes McGuane, "First, I myself love to read this sort of thing, sniffing around the author's tackle room; and second, to suggest that what's at work here has nothing to do with necessity but rather with the elaboration of the dream that is fishing." McGuane has mastered the craft of fly-tying, and his knowledge and adoration of fish is obsessive. He suggests there is a correlation between the personalities of fishermen and the fish they stalk: the predator and the prey.
McGuane's physical descriptions of fly-fishing and light philosophical musings are entertaining, but there remains something important and mysterious about the sport that is more difficult to communicate. The driving force behind The Longest Silence is McGuane's attempt to understand and flesh out precisely what it is that he loves. To this end, his tone oscillates. At times he is earnest and reverent, "An undisturbed river is as perfect a thing as we will ever know, every refractive slide of cold water a glimpse of eternity." Elsewhere in the book, McGuane is entirely whimsical. He is most effective when he combines the two: "I try to tie flies that will make me fish better, to fish more often, to dream of fish when I can't fish, to remind myself to do what I can to make the world more accommodating to fish and, in short, to take further steps toward actually becoming a fish myself."
As he struggles to uncover what is closest to his heart, McGuane's recollections are permeated by nostalgia. This is a problem when McGuane mines his own past, giving detailed descriptions of inconsequential actions. This same nostalgia, however, enhances McGuane's dramatic stories of angler friends. One story in particular stands out, of a New Zealand father and son who enjoy a month-long fishing trip. Not long after the best month of their lives, the father passes away.
McGuane's nostalgia extends beyond the boundaries of friendship to inform the theme of the book itself. In The Longest Silence McGuane leaves us with a recurring symbol: that of an unhooked fish swimming to its freedom. The fish McGuane most covets is the permit, yet on the rare occasions that he catches one, he quickly lets it go. To the uninitiated, McGuane's and other fly-fishers' actions are seemingly unexplainable. Yet, as McGuane teaches us, that is the way it is with fly-fishing. It is a sport with sturdy emotional underpinnings, where the ability to recapture what has been lost is constantly replayed against the wisdom of letting go. (Brenn Jones)
Novelist McGuane (Nothing but Blue Skies, etc.) celebrates everything about angling in this collection of 33 essays, which is certain to entertain fellow enthusiasts and fans of his writing. Any notion that fishing is humdrum is dispelled when McGuane describes eloquently his lifelong love affair with the sport, from the joys of tying flies and testing different rods, to sharing ghost stories and observational gems with fellow anglers, to absorbing quietly life's mysteries. He puts into historical and literary context the classic fishing writings of Izaak Walton and Roderick Haig-Brown. Throughout, McGuane's awe at nature's splendor shines in his prose. Releasing a trout after catching it becomes a moment of reverence: "Suddenly the fish was there, its spotted back breaking the surface, then up showering streamers of silver from the mesh of the net.... I stood in the river for a long while, holding him into the current and feeling the increasing strength in a kicking tail I could barely encompass with my grip. To the north, the Aurora Austral raised a curtain of fire in the cold sky. My trout kicked free and continued his journey to the Andes." Such moments emphasize McGuane's call for preserving the world's rivers from overdevelopment. Whether he's fishing for trout in a beaver pond in Michigan, salmon in Iceland or tarpon in Key West, McGuane casts not only his fishing line, but also his magic at turning a precise phrase and evoking a delightful image. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
From Michigan to Key West to Russia--33 essays on why novelist McGuane is obsessed with fishing. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
[A] bewitching collection...Those not interested in the sport need not fear; McGuane has more in mind then fishing when he writes about fishing...Nowhere else in McGuane's writings is his self—indeed his soul—more triumphantly resonant than in this book.American Spectator
An outlaw spirit moves through these fish stories. It flashes like the glint of a knife or the back of a trout holding in a pool, and marks these tales from novelist McGuane (Some Horses, p. 699, etc.) as his iconoclastic, unpredictable own. McGuane is a serious angler. He watches and listens to the whole nine yards: from rigging up to the birdsong, the cut of the trees along the horizon line, the fluid dynamics, those heavenly fish. His approach is vivid, focused, and intense, as he plays hard and gets dirty in his "willingness to deepen the experience at nearly any personal cost." For the payoff is sublime: "I could feel glory all around me," he says after one of those times when it all came together. He attends to the most minute details, knowing, for instance, that in Ireland, "you would have to be born not only among these lanes to find our aperture of unguarded water but also among its rumors," and acknowledging when he is tinkering with his fly selection that "the deep voodoo of salmon is something I am unready to disturb." All the narratives are instantaneous, as if your attention had been momentarily diverted and McGuane were reporting what had just transpired, but not all is skittish esoterica. He allows notes of sentiment when revisiting favorite haunts ("universal irony might just have to eat hot lead for the moment"), and readers will take him at face value when he says, "If the trout are lost, smash the state," in a classic piece that is included here among stories that range from early more-outrageous-than-thou fishing high jinks to recent fishing in remote venues, the fury of his pursuit now in his head rather than on his sleeve. "Of course, it's all in myhead; that's the point." It's a daring head, too, audacious and unrepentant and wild for the type of experience you could write about.
McGuane uses stories from a lifetime of fly fishing to touch on many subjects, but mostly the arcana of fishing itself. Grover Gardner renders complex passages with care, using his considerable talents to vary his delivery. But no one could make some of these technical disquisitions interesting to a non-fisherman. McGuane is an intellectual and lyrical writer, but also a rancher raised in Montana. One suspects he does not sound like Gardner, whose voice is dry, precise, at times nearly prissily so, and who seems to have a Northeastern accent. The book is fine, if only for fishing aficionados. Gardner is fine. But the two are not a match. W.M. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
