Brook Trout and the Writing Life
by Craig Nova
The Lyons Press, New York
Hardcover, 128 pages, $20.
ISBN # 1-55821-974-9
Craig Nova became a few years ago one of a handful of writers whose works I eagerly anticipate and whose books I buy without reservation and generally without the predispositions of reviewers or reviews because I admire the writers. Or more accurately, I admire their voices, their language, their ethos, their stories.
I read Brook Trout, then, with the expectation that it would offer much to like, and I was disappointed only by the fact that there is not much book here--111 comfortably paced pages covering some fifty years of a life that encompasses a courtship, marriage, two daughters, the writing of nine novels, several streams, hundreds of days on those streams, and countless fish--most of them brook trout. The book is at most a sketch, a drawing as artful and as selective as one of the author’s Mongaup Creek brookies taking a Potamanthus distinctus with a "watery snap" on an evening in June.
Like all good sketches this one suggests with a few deft strokes details and textures of a complex and intriguing picture--in this case, the life of a writer intermingled with fishing for brook trout. There is some autobiography here, some sense of the writer’s work, some glimpses into the development of his angling style and values, and a lot of appreciation for the fish and for the streams they inhabit.
Brook Trout and the Writing Life is a quiet, reflective book; a book much like the small pools of Fish Cabin Creek where Mr. Nova learned to fish--clear, cool, and capable of producing vibrant surprises. RWOL
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