Description:
Bill Barich casts such deft prose that the thinness of Crazy for Rivers might feel like a disappointment to some readers; at 80 pages in length, you wish there were simply more of it. Barich's skill flows from the way he can layer a book, pulling in disparate venues--as he did so masterfully in Laughing in the Hills with death, mourning, horseracing, and the Renaissance--to form a three-dimensional whole; when he limits himself to a narrower scope, his pool seems achingly fished out. Still, what there is here is choice, elegant, and even stark. When Barich writes about fly-fishing and the pursuit of trout--"That autumn," he begins, "I went a little crazy for rivers"--he's, of course, writing about more, much more: family, friendship, loyalty, identity, obsession, even midlife crisis. For all the good fishing and fish stories he offers, it is ultimately the reeling in of the spirit that becomes his best catch: "I thought about the friends, lovers, and family I had fished with," he writes in his notebook on his last night out: "where they were now and what they might be doing....It must all be catch-and-release in the end, I thought, all part of a flow whose essence we can never truly grasp." Perhaps we can't. But at least Barich provides an angle on it. --Jeff Silverman
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