McGuane’s known among fly fishermen for his liberal application of fly fishing scenes in his novels, but also for The Longest Silence; his seminal collection of fly fishing essays that many feel define the sport better than any other single book (“book on tape” version here).

McGuane’s latest novel will no doubt find its way to the Underground’s bookshelf, but Charles McGrath’s insightful profile included this rather charged McGuane quote:

“Like everyone, I have that general sense that we’ve been cast adrift. It’s almost banal to say it, it’s so obvious. But at the same time, living out here I have sense that I’m living in a world that hasn’t quite changed. I see it in some of the kids who work here — they’re still so in touch with natural world.”

These days there are plenty of good writers practicing the art, and yet McGuane continues to deliver single-sentence insights that rock me back on my heels.

A year ago I suggested our lives changed when a brick got tossed through the plate glass windows that contain our existence, and that nowadays, the bricks were coming with increasing regularity.

It’s a theme that apparently plays out in Driving on the Rim:

But like much of Mr. McGuane’s recent writing, it’s also partly about the collision of the Old West and the New. Dr. Pickett finds himself involved in a very contemporary malpractice prosecution but also spends a lot of time hunting and fishing and thinking about the old days.

Fly fishermen have long described their sport as an escape from everyday life; should we add the concept of fly fishing as an anchor against the changes washing over us with increasing frequency?

See you in the bookshelves, Tom Chandler.

With so many of McGuane’s novels and screenplays set against fly fishing locations – and populated by fly fishermen – it seems only right that McGuane would receive this honor on that basis alone.

To do so would be to overlook his publication of the best fly fishing essay book ever written: The Longest Silence.

That book – which solidified many of my observations about fly fishing – opens with a startling passage about fish counters robbing the trout (and the sport) of its soul:

The fisherman now is one who defies society, who rips lips, who drains the pool, who takes no prisoners, who is not to be confused with the sissy with the creel and bamboo rod. Granted, he releases what he catches, but in some cases, he strips the quarry of its perilous soul before tossing it back in the water. What was once a trout – cold, hard, spotted and beautiful – becomes “number seven.”

I could strip mine McGuane’s book for enough material to fill a hundred blog posts, but I’ll leave the discovery (or rediscovery) of those gems to my readers.

Instead, I’ll reprint part of what fly fishing publishing legend Nick Lyons has to say about McGuane on the FR&R site:

In Tom McGuane we have a different species of writer. He has loved fly-fishing for more than five decades, since he fished the rivers and small creeks of Michigan as a boy; he has pursued trout, false albacore, steelhead, bonefish, striped bass, permit and salmon with great passion and success; he has fished from Tierra del Fuego to Russia, Iceland, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, Florida and throughout his now-native Montana, and widely elsewhere; and along with his great novels and stories and films has written, with dazzling skill, much about what he calls his “life in fishing.” He is Fly Rod & Reel’s Angler of the Year and my Angler for the Last Hundred Years.

McGuane says that “what fishing ought to be about” is to use “the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.” Reverberations: a richer response to all aspects of the natural world, perhaps—and our responsibilities to it; something telling about ourselves, surely; more about our subtle connections to all the texture and detail of fly-fishing; and a lot about our understanding of leisure and friendship and expertness and the enduring value of ritual, and so much more. Mostly, what we know about these matters comes from those with words—words that shock us into some new awareness, that, long after we’ve read them, echo in our brains.

This is, of course, what we call “literature” which is not something fancy dan or pretentious or irrelevant to any other matter in the universe, not sentimental (which is exaggerating sniffles), not trading ever in clichés (which is like claiming fish you haven’t caught). McGuane does these things in a major body of nearly a dozen novels, from The Sporting Club in 1968 to one he just finished, in time for a trip this past summer to Iceland and his annual fall trip to the Dean for steelhead, around which week he says he designs his year, “for these pools, these beautiful fish.” And he does it in what has become a major body of work about fly fishing—parts of An Outside Chance, all of Live Water and The Longest Silence. He is, as all of the best writers must be, a man on whom nothing is lost.

He knows that “the best angling is always a respite from burden,” not part of a competition or PR jaunt or a chance to transact business with those you fish with or a banquet for your ego. He knows we need to be stewards and riverkeepers, lest “there will be less than nothing, remnant populations, put-and-take, dim bulbs following the tank truck.” He knows how to make memorable and precise observations about our emotions and affections: “Young anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives.”

Speaking as a writer, I revere McGuane for his ability to deftly peel back the unsightly layers that obscure what should be a beautiful sport. As a fly fisherman, I never tire of his obvious love for the sport itself.

See you with a good book, Tom Chandler.