Let the Stories Speak for Themselves

In many ways, Monte Burke’s new book Rivers Always Reach the Sea: Angling Stories is exactly what it sounds like: It’s a collection of fishing narratives and profiles of legendary fishing personae, as well as a few other oddities mixed in. The through line is fishing—flyfishing mostly—though certain themes reappear: What makes a good fly guide? Why are people drawn to flyfishing? What are the complexities and challenges and constraints of flyfishing that set it apart from other forms of angling? Why do we do this thing that is so hard and yet alluring to go back to again and again, venturing to new waters or returning to the same? What is it about certain difficult fish like permit, who defy the angler’s best laid plans?

The book is a little like a place near my home in St. Louis, the Busch Conservation Area just 20 miles west across the Missouri River: it’s made up of a bunch of lakes and ponds that, as urban myth has it, were originally craters from bomb testing sites in the mid-20th century. (Much later, the land was donated to the Missouri Conservation Department and turned into a nature preserve.) The point is that it’s a funny cluster of bodies of water, and each one has a different array of species, and their shapes and surroundings are all different. It’s fun and a little disorienting and weird to tool around them for a day, trying for Pitbull-size carp in one, crappie in another, little wily warmouth in a third, and still muskie in another! (In the winter, they even chuck some hatchery rainbow trout in some of the ponds.) Fishing this place is how it felt to read Rivers Always Reach the Sea: each chapter requires a bit of reorientation: Okay, where am I now? Curiously, for all the excellent profiles of other people, from Lefty Kreh to George H. W. Bush to Carl Hiaasen, the reader doesn’t really get a sense of Monte Burke himself.

I found myself wondering if the book could have been organized differently, perhaps chronologically. As it is, the pieces—which span the past 25 years—kind of meander through time, from 2004, up to 2016, then 2020, back to 2012, and so on. It’s a little bizarre. Would the book feel more organic if the reader watched Monte Burke evolve as a writer (and a person) over time? And if so, would the reader get the critical buildup of ecological consciousness that he seems to develop—if in a quiet, rather low-grade way? Perhaps. Burke is rightly worried about the health of the planet and its fisheries, what with waterways polluted and drying up—which is why I say, all rivers don’t reach the sea anymore. They’re threatened by human impact, attempts at control and overuse.

In that sense, the book misses an opportunity to really comment forcefully on the ecological crisis. It’s there, but relatively buried beneath the assorted tales of trophies, and long days not catching trophies. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book. I read the whole thing, in the order it was presented to me: Every chapter, all the “angling stories,” as the subtitle has it.

But I did feel, in the end, a more judicious editorial hand could have given the book a different shape—something that would set it apart from all these fishing books that are really just collections of stories and essays and opinions, profiles and trips, like when you walk into a fly shop and see the boxes of all the familiar fly patterns staring back at you and you get an unpleasant feeling in the stomach. The hodgepodge gets a little tedious, to be honest.

This dawning awareness really snapped into focus during a chapter on Nick Lyons, the fabled book publisher, English professor, writer and editor. That chapter was one of the longest in the book—and I loved it. It went into detail about the ins and outs and textures of writing and editing and putting together books and how one can live and move in this profession. And I thought to myself as I was reading it: Well, this is a peculiar reflection on the importance of editorial work. And it made it all the more glaring that Burke’s book didn’t seem to have had a strong editorial hand. But maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s what authors like Burke earn or deserve over a long career: Don’t mess with the work. Let the stories speak for themselves. I can certainly respect that as an author. (I am lucky to have a very generous and hands-off editor at my publisher.)

But as a book editor—I also founded and co-edit my own series of books; we’ve published a hundred books so far, little books called Object Lessons; someday I hope to have one about flies or fly rods, or maybe canoes—I’ve learned a lot about what makes a good book. Even a collection can benefit from a guiding narrative, a through-line or consistent punctuating moments that create a beat and remind the reader why they’re reading and what they’re reading. The book nerd in me wanted more of that from Rivers Always Reach the Sea, despite how much I enjoyed it otherwise. Looking back at my copy I see a few dogeared pages, which is how I keep track of noteworthy lines. It makes me wonder, though: what kind of flyfishing book am I looking for? What sort of story or series of essays would really surprise and thrill me? Burke’s book left me still asking that question.