I have never loved the novella “A River Runs Through It.” (Though I do like the movie adaptation of Norman Maclean’s classic novella of flyfishing and family.) Maybe it’s because I was first and foremost a Midwestern bass angler, and I came to Western trout fishing later in my life. But most of my flyfishing is warm-water stealth fishing for bass and bluegill in glacial lakes in Michigan. This is how I learned, and this is what I return to.

I’m learning to love stream flyfishing again these days, thanks to my new friend Steve Ehrlich introducing me to the majestically clear creeks in Missouri, places I never thought I’d fall in love with, if you’d asked me a few years ago. Now I dream of tossing olive and blue woolly buggers beneath little cutbanks, and watching for that occasional flash that follows. But I digress. Norman Maclean just wasn’t on my list of flyfish sages, much less one of my favorite writers.

This summer, when I read Kathryn Schulz’s hagiographic New Yorker article about Maclean, loosely pegged to Rebecca McCarthy’s new biography, I found myself rolling my eyes and yawning. But I had recently blurbed another (more academic) book on Maclean, and so I had been thinking about his status as an icon of Western writing and fly fishing. I just don’t think his writing is that profound or poetic—I’m sorry! Taste is a funny thing.

Then a few things happened, after that New Yorker article came out.

First, the editor of this publication asked me to review Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, and I jumped at the opportunity—if only to see just what had prompted Schulz’s ecstatic musings. But I was up in Michigan for the summer, and wouldn’t receive my copy back home in St. Louis for a few weeks.

So I picked another book off my shelf, Wayne Fields’s 1996 What the River Knows, which a colleague had recommended to me during the previous school year. This book got me thinking a lot about flyfishing books and their odd relationship to academics. Fields was an English professor at my university when he was writing his book. As he pursues his obsession in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan during July and August, wading the extent of the beaver dam-choked Cook’s Run, he also periodically carps about his neglected scholarly obligations that await him at the end of summer. He’s late on his academic manuscript. It’s nagging at him, and his colleagues are not happy.

Then I remembered a stray scene in Matthew Roberson’s hilarious campus novel from 2022, Interim: The main character Rob Roy, a blundering interim associate dean at STATE university, tries to connect with old-timer English professor Bob Baganoosh about flyfishing, saying “I really should give it a try some time. […] Maybe I’ll see you around the fishing holes.” Rob then mimes “what he imagined a fly fishing cast might look like” only to be cut to size by Baganoosh: “Rivers. If you want a challenge, you fly fish in rivers.” This exchange has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of Interim, which is a picaresque about the foibles of contemporary higher education and the insidious creep of online instruction. But there it is, in the middle of the book: the unmistakable specter of flyfishing. It’s almost the obverse of Fields’s What the River Knows, which is through-and-through a flyfishing chronicle—and yet, the mundane toils of academic life seep in at the edges, like the swamp water that creeps into Fields’s leaky waders.

The reason I am taking you on this meander, dear reader, is that as I read Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, it gradually dawned on me that even though most people will be drawn to this book because of A River Runs Through It, the contents are far less about rivers, and much, much more about the “letters” in the subtitle. It’s basically a campus novel, told in the form of a hybrid memoir-framed-biography. College-bound, aspiring poet McCarthy meets the nearly retired Maclean by way of her attending the University of Chicago, and the chapters are really lengthy accounts of his teaching, mentoring, administrating, friend-making, and fallings-out (and sometimes back in) with various characters and leaders across the campus. It’s almost tedious, in the best sense of that term, as far as this genre goes: Only those who’ve spent sustained years with the often insufferable personae who haunt the corridors, classrooms, and offices of universities will truly appreciate the nuances and complexities of this life that Maclean carved out when he was far from Montana rivers and fishing. As McCarthy notes, Maclean left his gear in Montana during the school year, and had no interest in fishing the Midwestern waters not so far from Chicago. (For shame! So many missed opportunities! The flyfishing is incredible around the Great Lakes!)

In fact, flyfishing is a curious enigma throughout McCarthy’s book—it’s just off the page, rarely present as often as one might expect based on the “rivers” in the subtitle and the back jacket image, which prominently shows a photograph of Norman’s tragic brother Paul from 1937, deep in a backcast while standing on a boulder mid-river (it’s almost the same pose that Brad Pitt made famous in Robert Redford’s movie). But so where is the fishing in the book? It’s just barely there. Norman takes the author flyfishing once, teaching her the basics; but when Rebecca asks Norman if they can make a fly, he defers, saying they don’t have the right equipment and materials, and anyway “you don’t make a fly, you tie one.” Another cipher for the uninitiated.

McCarthy’s book is informative and the stories are told with real care and devotion to its subject, there is no doubt. But the chapters are somewhat disjointed, moving back and forth in time while patching together the convoluted drafting, revising, and editing and publishing history of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, as well as the posthumously published Young Men and Fire. It’s finally a pretty sad story, of someone haunted by loss and struggling to recover truth in writing. Not for McCarthy—no, she seems fine with all the imperfections and missed connections that riddled Maclean’s life.

I appreciated McCarthy’s frank takes on things she thought Maclean was wrong about, sprinkled throughout the book. A lot of the time when he’s toiling with the drafts of Young Men and Fire, McCarthy is actually out there in the woods, working jobs for the Forest Service! I found myself wondering about her stories. McCarthy also could have provided more details about Maclean’s actual flyfishing habits and interests. What flies did he especially like? (We get hints of this sort of stuff in “A River Runs Through It,” of course.) Did he ever use those specially-boxed Dan Bailey flies given to him along with the H.G. Merriam Award for Contributions to Montana Literature? What happened to his rods and reels, after he died? That late fall on Swan River, when he “woke up in the river”—I would have loved some more thick description of that place, if just to picture the accident more clearly.

Go for the rivers, leave with the letters. That’s my takeaway from McCarthy’s book. For readers who have done time with academic nitwits and middling scholars who fail-up into leadership roles, you may find yourself getting the heebie-jeebies from time to time, as the campus dynamics on display at the University of Chicago are all too real; and they rather crowd-out the Montana mountains and streams. I just wish Norman had let himself discover those waters closer to his Windy City home, during those long school years. It’s not just about the past, or the West. Flyfishing can happen almost anywhere on this planet where there’s water. Set the writing aside. Flyfish while you’re here.

Christopher Schaberg is Director of Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of ten books, including Fly-Fishing (2023).

Read more from The FlyFish Journal and Christopher Schaberg

Norman MacLean: A Life of Letters and Rivers by Rebecca McCarthy. 2024.