Streams of Consciousness: Hip-Deep Dispatches From the River of Life

Friday, June 1, 2007

• Nonfiction. By Jeff Hull. The Lyons Press, $19.95. Grade: A

Book in a nutshell: I am a fly-fisher and a sucker for the feel-good philosophy of fishing books. When they're done well, they speak to a bigger world than the water and fish they pretend to examine. When they're written badly, I just pass and go fishing.

Hull's new book is a collection of essays in the best tradition of sporting literature that takes you to exotic places (Belize, Patagonia, Tuamotus, a mental institution in Kansas) for the fishing and then leaves you wondering how you went somewhere else internal and elemental.

He guides you on the usual suspect rivers, too (the Big Hole, the Battenkill, the Bitterroot and Slough Creek) and writes of them with a skill that puts him right in there with John Gierach and Tom McGuane at their best.

Here is Hull writing in the expected fly-fishing tradition, from an essay titled Brothers in Waiting: "The trout flicks away at the last second, but swirls beneath the fly, still looking up, its flanks lucid flashes of light in the spring water. Take it! I hear in my head. Take it, take it, take it!"

And then he's breaking new ground, going into reflections that even the best don't dare to brave in Rorschach Bluegill: "Oh what do you say about deciding to kill yourself that can possibly make any sense? . . . I had written the sad, sorry farewell notes and schemed carefully so that nobody who knew me would find my body."

Hull brings you to the edge, addressing his temporary bout with depression and insanity, racial tension on a reservation in Montana and the slow death of his brother, and in doing so within the confines of a fishing story he helps you realize that life isn't all sport but a serious struggle with yourself. It's an effort to inject structure - through fishing or writing or drinking or loving - into a world that defies control.

Best tidbit: In "Knots," Hull looks at how such a useful construct as a knot can also be a maddening obstacle when tied by the wind, but he's also touching on the serendipity in life overall: "I have, in the past, just quit, walked right off the river over a knot, seeing it as a portent, or a totem of the day to come." Me, too. You, too. But we, and Hull, always come back.

Pros: Hull isn't afraid to lay himself bare in his writing. It's captivating and results in a grasp of the beauty of nature and its contrast to the sometime horrors of life. He takes on both bravely.

Cons: The title is almost too cute. Ignore it and read on.

Last word: Superb.

Pete Warzel