By pond or river

Ian Frazier’s got an Eye for fishing’s prose

By John Freeman

The Fish’s Eye By Ian Frazier, FSG; New York 162 pages. $20.

IAN FRAZIER: tackling the personal essay admirably

Ever since he was a boy, Ian Frazier has been nuts about fishing. Growing up in Ohio, he “used to draw fly rods on my school notebooks the way other kids drew cars or fighter planes.” When he later moved to New York City, that urban jungle surrounded by water but smothered by soot and smog, he fished the Big Apple’s harbor next to bums and frequented a bait and tackle shop above Grand Central Station.

Now, with several decades of fishing under his belt, Frazier has collected the pieces he’s written about angling and the great outdoors into a slim, but wonderful little volume called The Fish’s Eye. In spite of how much prose exists on the topic, it’s hard to think of a book that better captures fishing’s mixture of occult holiness and earnest lore.

The Fish’s Eye proceeds chronologically. As the book opens, Frazier is living in New York City, where folks go to odd lengths to satisfy their craving to dangle bait in water. In the first piece, he records a conversation between two men as they fish one of the city’s polluted ponds. A girl comes over to inspect their catch and tells them to throw it back, prompting another to reply: “Are you kidding? Those fish could die out in that water.”

Given that he spent a fair amount of time living in and around New York, Frazier has developed a decidedly unromantic practicality about the sport. The grimier the locale, it seems, the more he enjoys it; in one piece he fishes along the Hudson River in a spot where “[t]here is no shore, no beach,” just “a walkway paved with asphalt, a railing, and a concrete drop into the dark-olive water.” In another article, he describes getting up at four in the morning and riding the subway into Manhattan to fish for stripers in the East River near Chinatown.

Although Frazier moved on to fish some spectacular spots, these essays suggest it’s not where you fish but how you think about it that counts. As a kind of Chevy Chase of literary comics, Frazier brings a bumbling, slapstick humor to writing about the game, and how pathetic it is mankind does not often outsmart an animal which possesses a brain the size of a nut.

So, while he rattles off a few yarns about The One That Got Away, most of Frazier’s tales revolve around his own ineptitude. In one scene, he tries to ford a river and nearly drowns. In another, he asks for advice and gets the usual run-around locals give traveling fishermen.

“When I go through the door of a Pappy’s or Cappy’s . . . usually there’s a fat older guy sitting behind the counter with his T-shirt up over his stomach and his navel peeking out. That will be Pappy, or Cappy. Sometimes it’s both. Pappy looks at me without looking at me and remarks to Cappy that the gear I’ve got on is too light for the country at this time of year, and Cappy agrees, crustily; then I ask a touristy, greenhorn question, and we’re off. Cappy, backed by Pappy, says the rig I’m driving won’t make it up the Forest Service road, and I’m headed in the wrong direction anyhow, and the best place to camp isn’t where I’m going but far in the other direction, up top of Corkscrew Butte, which is closed now; as is well known.”

Although he gets this treatment quite a bit, Frazier is a good sport about it. In fact, he seems to enjoy the edgy, borderline personalities fishing attracts, and celebrates them with loving tribute. The collection’s best piece, “An Angler at Heart,” profiles Jim Deren, the late owner of “Angler’s Roost,” a fishing-tackle shop on East 44th Street in Manhattan. Deren, as sketched by Frazier, is the penultimate angler; his recommendations have the weight of law and even the most bull-headed customers swallow his advice hook, line, and sinker.

“All day long, Deren hands out and receives information. People are eager to share with him the one thing they know. Sometimes he will throw cold water on them by giving them an answer that begins with his standard ‘That’s one of the great misconceptions of fly-fishing.’ Sometimes (less often) he will tell them they are absolutely right. His agreement or disagreement is never less than vehement. A very large number of people, in his opinion, have no idea what they are talking about.”

Being that he’s quick to place himself in this latter camp, Frazier has a lot of fun with a sport that’s inspired great writers — Thomas McGuane for example — to write some pretty bad prose. Not so for Frazier, who hooks his reader immediately and, with his blend of reportage and humor, reels us right in.

John Freeman can be reached at freeman109@hotmail.com.

Bill Roorbach: Maine Woodsman Into Woods Essays by Bill Roorbach, University of Notre Dame Press 180 pages $18.95. Ten years ago, Farmington writer Bill Roorbach made his literary debut with Summers with Juliet, a peripatetic memoir about trips he and his wife took before they married. Unlike many love stories, here was a book in which the natural world formed the conduit for romance. Now, after all this time, Roorbach offers a companion volume entitled Into Woods. The book sheds intriguing light on how difficult it is during married adult life to stay devoted to the idea of living a self-reliant existence in the great outdoors. As the book opens, Roorbach and his wife have flown to a tiny village in France, where Juliet plans to study at an atelier. This opening piece reveals Roorbach to be deeply out of his element. At first, it’s just a language issue: “I lack verbs, Juliet is fluent but rusty and shy,” he says. But as Roorbach and his wife settle into this community for a month, they realize that if painting earns them entrée, Roorbach’s writing marks them as outsiders. Sitting down to work one day, he overhears two women mocking him: “Look at the beer lover just sitting there,” says one woman. “He says he writes.” Writing and working move abut one another in this collection in intriguing ways. In the book’s finest piece, “Into Woods,” Roorbach relates how he repeated wood shop four times during high school, much to the chagrin of his guidance counselor. Although he eventually went on to college, working with hands — sanding, planing, lifting, and cutting — is what sustained him until his late 30s. In a later piece, Roorbach goes on assignment for a magazine to suit up with some wormers in Maine, and finds his loyalty split with their earthy labor and his sedentary profession as a writer. Although Into Woods is a hodgepodge collection, when bound together these essays tell the story of a man fiercely dedicated to carving his existence out of his own thoughts, yet living that life in cahoots with the natural world. Thus, as the book progresses, Roorbach crafts poetic reminiscences of duck walks, loving tributes to a pond he has visited, and humorous pieces on catching fish with an old friend. To call Roorbach a modern day Thoreau might be overstatement, but it’s not far from the truth. “It’s about geography,” he writes in his beautiful concluding essay, “My Life as a Move.” “One has one’s internal landscape painted by age 40 or so. One’s external landscape had better match.” By that yardstick, Roorbach is at home in Maine: “[h]ome in the bosom of friendship, among people who need to know the sea is near, who must climb a hill, dive in a pond, eat blueberries by the fistful.” —JF Bill Roorbach reads in the Robins Room, Roberts Building, at Colby College, in Waterville, April 23, at 7 p.m. Call (207) 872-3257.