I’ve been busy with a writing project since the start of the year. Longer than that. I wrote the story it’s based on for a newspaper in Wyoming eight years ago. I’ve been fussing with it since, but the pace really picked up this year when I enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts writing program.
MFA programs are the post-modern salon. Ernest Hemingway and his gaggle of American expat, Lost Generation writer pals had Gertrude Stein’s Paris apartment. Today, we gather in workshops, earning graduate degrees.
As part of my studies, I’m rereading some of the books I discovered as a young man who aspired to be some sort of outdoor writer. So of course, “A River Runs Through It” is on my reading list.
I was in my early 20s when I first read “River.” Then, before the movie, it was a niche novella, enjoyed primarily by fly fishers in search of literature or any pop-culture references to our sport. When I read it today, I read it as a man who has become a father, has married, divorced, a man who has moved to and away from Montana three times.
Each time I left it broke my heart.
I’m still entranced by Norman Maclean’s beautiful fishing scenes and his descriptions of 1930s Montana. I plan to read the book a few more times as I finish my own story of family and the outdoors. It serves as an important reference point for my work.
The story is best known for its portrayal of the relationship between the Maclean brothers, Norman and the ill-fated Paul. The story details Norman’s unsuccessful struggle to help his younger brother steer off his path of self-destruction. That relationship provides the structure of the story. There isn’t a scene that doesn’t include Norman and Paul. But I believe the relationship between Norman and his wife, Jessie, is the heart of the story.
Jessie struggles with a troubled sibling of her own, her brother Neil, who lives on the “West Coast” and comes to Montana with much fanfare to visit family in his hometown of Wolf Creek. Neil seeks the company of the Maclean brothers while on vacation, and Jessie urges her husband to include Neil on the fishing trips they have planned during his visit. It’s a bad idea. Neil does not share the brothers’ reverence for fly fishing. He fishes with worms and he drinks liquor while fishing, an act that was always reserved until after the day’s fishing is over, for the Maclean family at least.
Neil also has an affair with a woman he meets at a bar in Wolf Creek, a woman whom the brothers derisively refer to as Old Rawhide. The story suggests her “business” may be exchanging sex for compensation in some form, whether it be money, alcohol, or a roof over her head during long Montana winters. The Maclean boys rather casually refer to Old Rawhide as a “whore.”
“River” is a product of its time. In a recent workshop, one of the participants said she considers the book misogynistic. That’s not a label I would use, for the book at least, but when I reread it, I didn’t like the way Old Rawhide is depicted.
Calling that depiction misogynistic wouldn’t be wrong.
Old Rawhide is the vehicle Norman Maclean used to illustrate how Neil was Paul’s less-cool doppelgänger. She’s the story’s one-dimensional villain, and there are few things as boring as characters without nuance or depth, characters whose only purpose is to get the plot to a predetermined destination.
If Maclean were writing “River” today, I suspect Old Rawhide would be different, fully formed. You might call that “woke,” but it’s really about creating authentic characters. The rest of the characters in “River” ooze authenticity, and that’s why I’ll keep reading, even if the story isn’t perfect.