“The River Why” by David James Duncan is one of those novels that could’ve been prevented by a good editor (Flannery O’Connor’s sentiment, my paraphrase). By that I mean, there’s a good story in this book, but the author kept getting in the way of letting the story evolve and play out. The crux of the novel is that Gus grows up in a family that both obsesses and is famous for fishing, both pole and fly. He was an only child until he was […]
If you like Thoreau or Emerson or the outdoors, this might be for you.
D has our book club pick for November, and we got two choices: Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose or David James Duncan’s The River Why. We chose The River Why, because it was shorter. D is from the West Coast and was interested in a West Coast author, so his pick went there. I had never heard of the book, but saw its enormous ratings on Goodreads. I was sufficiently intrigued to get it from the library. Our narrator is Gus Orviston, the product of […]
Gus the Fisherman
The River Why, by David James Duncan, is one of those books that I love to re-read. I’ve read it probably ten times over the last 20 years, and it always makes me happy. Sure, I basically know the story by heart, but it does my heart good to re-read it. So, what’s it about? Well, it’s about a lot of things. And if you asked me the last time I read it what it was about, I’d probably say something different than I’m going […]
The story of an eight-way tangle of human beings…
Sometimes, you find a book that draws you in so slowly and slyly that you don’t realize you’re invested until you finish it, and then you can’t stop thinking about the characters, and wondering what they’re doing now. The Brothers K was that book for me. It appeared in my Kindle inbox with a sweet note (as an aside, how awesome is it that you can just send books to people that way?) and some very endearing texts about how loved the book was, and […]