Rating: 
Summary: Suprised by the River Why
Review: This book seemed to me like sort of a C.S. Lewis's "Suprised by Joy" meets Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It." As someone with typical conservative tendencies, when I read how Duncan's book was endorsed by the Sierra Club, I was instantly wary and pondered whether or not reading it would even be worth my time. O, how wrong I was!"The River Why" has instantly become one of my favorite books of all time. In my opinion, this book would make a horrible film, because everyone who reads it almost surely paints vastly different pictures in their minds, and they come away with their own distinct interpretations. But I have no doubt that all readers will find bits and pieces of Duncan's lively and passionate characters in themselves and their own friends and family members. Some may just love "The River Why" for the obvious...the fishing, others because of his vivid descriptions of the landscapes and the environment, some because of the underlying conservation theme, and still others because of the philosophical quest at the heart of the story. I think what hooked me, though, was Duncan's ability to convey with only words (and quite often unrecognizable ones) emotions and experiences that would be seemingly impossible to express with only pen and paper. While relatively short, "The River Why" will run you through a gamut of emotions and have you yearning to be a part of the story yourself. I just couldn't put the thing down and cannot fathom anyone not falling in love with this closet masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: This is far and away my favorite book of all time - I have consistently given this book as a present to all of the people I like best. While it did take me a little time to get into the novel at first (hey, I was in college), at some point without me even noticing, Duncan set the hook. After that, I blew off a day of classes to get through the rest of this fantastic novel.
Rating: 
Summary: The River Why do I like this book?
Review: I liked "The River Why." And I admit that I'm not sure why that is. By my usual standards for reviews, it's not a great book. The spirituality found in its pages is the usual fluff churned up for popular consumption by amateur philosophers. Many of the characters are unbelievable, even downright silly. The plot wanders around aimlessly, characters appear only to vanish later on, many of the various plot lines get hopelessly tangled... But it's a great book! The unbelievable characters - Gus' parents, his little brother - make sense if we think of "The River Why" as a fishing story! Of course characters are exaggerated! It's a story! Just as a fisherman will lengthen his catch additional inches to press upon a listener the thrill of the moment when the fish took the bait, so does Duncan prop up his characters to comic proportions to convey their reality. Real people aren't engaging to most of us. We see real people every day. Heck, we ARE real people! And we don't have a lifetime to grow to love a novel's character, we have to love them right away, by the end of the first chapter at least. Duncan makes them lovable through humor, exaggeration, absurdity. And the plot is a vehicle. It's the river in which we catch our fish. Its twists and turns, its loops, the tributaries, eddies, and salt marshes make the landscape colorful. It's the natural, untamed ride of a first novelist. Its rawness is also its strength. The spirituality...all I can say is that Duncan is a mensch. "A person of integrity and honor," according to Miriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary. Sure, all this talk about higher powers as evidenced by nature and fishing in particular is a sort of nineteenth-century romantic belief in the superiority of nature and natural things, and it is hopelessly optimistic, but Duncan believes in it. For him, our salvation lies in a river and in our friends and loved ones. While simplistic, it works. And I admit I prefer it to your standard book-thumping and intrusive kinds of spirituality. But what REALLY makes this book shine is the fishing. That's kind of an obvious thing to say, but it's true. There's a ton of lovely detail in this book about all sorts of fishing. Fly fishing, bait fishing. The history of fishing. Fun fishing techniques. Fly tying. Pole making. All kinds of trout. Fish habitat. Native American fishing techniques. Reading about somebody doing something well is a joy. Laxness describing sheep farming, Patrick O'Brien writing about sailing, Jack Kerouac telling us about hopping freight trains. And now David James Duncan and fishing.
Rating:
Summary: The River Because
Review: This book is beautiful, simple, funny, and deep like a dark, swirling undercut bank of a good trout stream, in which secrets lurk, and wonder is promised on the very next cast. This is only fiction because the characters themselves are the creation of the author's imagination...yet in reality they are an amalgamation of all of us, each one having a purely human experience. Fishing is a metaphore in this book, not what the book is about, though folks who do fish, especially those who study the stream and just "know" where the fish will be will find a special appreciation for this book. It is philosophy told in the context of a story, like "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, or Richard Bach's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," or as has been mentioned many times, Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I am certain that The River Why would be read and understood 60 different ways by any 50 people who read it. For me, it was a compelling journey of a young man, trying to navigate the waters of understanding between what is true, what is not, and finding that those two extremes don't exist. Old ways of seeing the world didn't work when he was confronted with real life "stuff," like death, love, time, and the creatures with whom we share this little wet planet. Over the course of a year on one of any Coast Range rivers of western Oregon, he discovered the "middle path," a path that made sense to him, brought him peace, brought him understanding, and ultimately brought him love, reunion with his family, and a sense of his place in the universe. This is a book for those who are drawn to nature and native wisdom as doorways to spiritual insight. It is a book I will give away as gifts to special people whom I believe it could touch as it touched me. Spend 15 minutes with it, and you, too will be "hooked!"
Rating:
Summary: eloquently written
Review: I've read quite a few fishing books, and this one takes the cake. Duncan is a great writer and storyteller. He is obviously writing about something he is passionate about: fishing. Better than Thomas McGuane.
Rating:
Summary: Mark Twain meets Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Review: Witty, detailed, touching. As a sometimes fly fisherman, and certainly as someone interested in figuring out the meaning of life, I really enjoyed reading this. There were passages so hilarious they reminded me of sections of Mark Twain's "A Tramp Abroad" (remember the part when he describes a bluejay trying to fill a hole with nuts -- only to discover that it was a hole in the roof of a house?) Then there were parts that reminded me all too much of my own dysfunctional family and my striving for meaning independent of parental guidance. The writing itself is gorgeous, very poetic in places, and the story builds well on itself without revealing too much about what's coming around the next bend, or what's tucked under that overhanging bank. If you have any affinity for river fishing, especially fly fishing, and you have a spiritual nature, you'll appreciate David James Duncan's hilarious, insightful, poetic, and moving book.
Rating:
Summary: my all-time favorite book
Review: This is my all-time favorite book. It is witty, thoughtful, touching and sometimes flat-out hilarious.
Rating:
Summary: !
Review: David James Duncan has pieced together a work which has ranked as my favorite book to date. Fun and kooky, lighthearted and whimsical yet, reminescent of "ZEN AND MOTORCYCLE MAINTANENCE", there is as much found between the lines. I highly recommend this to all who enjoy quality literature and amusement rolled into one!
Rating:
Summary: The River Why runs deep.
Review: "There's just nothing like the feel of a trout dancing through the river," Gus "the Fish" Orviston says, "making the pole pulse like a heart in your hands. It does to the hands what the sight of your sweetie does to your body, what dreams of eternity do to your heart, what milk chocolate does to your mouth . . . And yet we killed two trout. It's strange to kill your dance partners, but that's what we did. We did it because the world is strange" (pp. 281-2). I discovered this fishing story for thinkers after first reading David James Duncan's more recent MY STORY AS TOLD BY WATER (2001), and now I'm hooked on his writing. Because of fishing, Gus started school a year late and was considered "a kind of mild-mannered freak" by his schoolmates. He grew up "osprey-silent and trout-shy," and developed early on an ability "to slide through the Public School System as riverwater slides by logjams, rockslides and dams that bar its seaward journey" (p. 17). Duncan's irreverent protagonist tells us, "years before I could have put it into words, I realized that my fate would lead me beside still waters, beside rough waters, beside blue, green, muddy, clear and salt waters. From the beginning my mind and heart were so taken up with the liquid element that nearly every other thing on the earth's bulbous face struck me as irrelevant, distracting, a waste of my time" (p. 17). After he leaves his quirky, fishing-obsessed family with his favorite flyrod, "Rodney," who Gus calls the "Strong Silent Type" (p. 88), for a life of solitude and "fishing with total absorption" (p. 91), Gus soon wades into life's deeper waters. "And so I learned what solitude really was," he tells us. "It was raw material--awesome, malleable, older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless--for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself. One needed either wisdom or tree-bark insensitivty to confront such a fearsome freedom" (p. 148). In his solitude, Gus develops environmental wisdom. "No, it wasn't simply the death of fish that bothered me," he says. "The thing I found offensive, the thing I hated about Mohican mountain-makers, gill netters, poachers, whalehunters, strip-miners, herbicide-spewers, dam-erectors, nuclear-reactor-builders or anyone who lusted after flesh, meat, mineral, tree, pelt and dollar--including, first and foremost, myself--was the smug ingratitude, the attitude that assumed the world and its creatures owed us everything we could catch, shoot, tear out, alter, plunder, devour . . . and we owed the world nothing in return" (p. 134). Ultimately, while searching for trout, Gus discovers his soul. "I pictured rivers--December rivers, mist-shrouded and cold--and thigh-deep in the long glides stood fishermen who'd arisen before dawn . . . They stood there in the first grey light, in rain, wind, snowfall, or frost; silent, patient, casting and casting again, retrieving nothing yet never questioning the possibility of bright steelhead hidden beneath the green slicks; numb-fingered, empty-bellied, aching-backed they stood, hatted or hooded like rabbis or monks, grumbling but vigilant, willing to pay hard penance for the mere chance of a sudden, subtle strike. What was a fisherman but an untransmuted seeker? And how much longer must be the wait, how much greater the skill, how much more infinite the patience and intense the vigilance in the search for the gift men called the soul? 'Titus,' I said, 'I've been walking around for years with my metaphysical dry fly stuck in my ear!'" (p. 179). And then there's the woman who hooks Gus by the heart. THE RIVER WHY runs deep. It is as much about flyfishing as asking life's hard questions. Like Gus, we're all fishing for meaning in the River Why. Duncan's incredible novel moves with spiritual, insightful, humorous currents that pull us through some profound reflections along its course. THE RIVER WHY will make you laugh, and at the same time it will make you cry. Wade into this RIVER, and like me, you just might find yourself baptised. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: one of the finest novels written
Review: Like others, I've read this book multiple times and endlessly recommend it. It's a book about fishing only on the surface and a book about our personal quest for love and meaning on many deeper levels. Incredibly written, touching, and funny--it's absolutely beautiful. Duncan's other novel, 'The Brothers K,' is TOTALLY different but an equally rewarding read.
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