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My friend Jess told me a long time ago to read Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. I experience a modicum of joy when throwing an occasional line into an occasional body of water and maybe pan-frying an occasional perch or sunfish, but Jess likes fishing a great deal more than I do, and knows scads more about it than I do. And because I assumed our disparate levels of interest for the sport would indicate corresponding levels of enjoyment of a book ostensibly about that sport, it took me a while to get around to this recommendation. That was foolish of me. I found this beat-up Dell paperback edition (1972) in a bookstore in Vancouver with section titles like “wanderlust”, “polar peril”, “getting high”, and my personal favorite, “wet adventure”—featuring several copies of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—and figured I owed my friend the decency of another modicum—this time of trust. So back to Trout Fishing…I’m finally reading it and even though I’m only about 30 pages in to a trim and satisfying 112—I’m here to tell you that when someone you know really gets you recommends a piece of art or writing or music or film to you, you had better get right on it. I feel so far like I’m reading the writing of the child of Sherwood Anderson and Anne Carson. The beat-adjacent (if not properly off-beat) prose is vivid and natural, the imagery is warm and raw, the characters are seen through kind eyes, and the narrative shifts focus and perspective in a way that feels active but not unmooring. It might seem or in fact be unwise to write about a book I haven’t finished yet, but a chapter I just read really landed with me and I wanted to read it to you all right away and there are no rules I’ve read about this kind of thing. There are about 46 seconds of introduction and context—forgive me for the light redundancies between there and here—and then you’ll hear the very short vignette that is entitled “The Last Year the Trout Came Up Hayman Creek”. Click HERE or on the image below to listen.
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