Why I like Norman Maclean

(image from Longitude Books)

One of the books I got for my birthday was A River Runs Through It, and other Stories by Norman Maclean. I have long been a fan of the movie because of its subtle but moving storyline of fly fishing and a wayward brother. After reading the book, I was captivated even more by this gifted storyteller.

Why?

Maclean, the long-time professor of English at the University of Chicago, looked for "happenings" in life that would sum up the essence of living. Remembering a time when he was 17 and working for the U.S. Forest Service, he recalls:

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature - not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened."

Maclean had a sense of one's "life as a story". He sifted through the mundane to find the drama that we all feel when life obeys dramatic form: the narrow escape, the perfect one-liner, the introduction of two people who will grow old together. These are what Maclean perceived as "life's rhythms".

Yet I cannot help but feel sad when I read him. In all of his appreciation for the beauty and rhythm (two of his favorite words) in relationships and living, he fails to trace these fully to the Author of Life - the one who wrote the story. He speaks with a mix of loving admiration and condescension when recalling his Scottish father's Presbyterianism. He speaks of God, but usually as an opaque reference to his upbringing. When he touchingly refers to mountains as "poems of geology", I can't help but want him to detect God's poetry which the creation never ceases to recite.

There are some other problems. He is a "western writer" which means his stories will usually involve something raunchy. In Maclean's case, however, raunchiness is his way of setting up natural beauty. Brothels counterbalance the Bitterroot Mountains. Nevertheless, I enjoy reading him and hearing him read. His words capture my ear as much as the waters of the Big Blackfoot river that "haunted" him.