Reviewed by Craig Nova

Sunday, October 27, 2002; Page BW09

THE FOUNDING FISH
By John McPhee
Farrar Straus Giroux. 358 pp. $25

It is probably true that all happy, generalist fishermen are the same, and that each fish chauvinist is obsessive in his own way. But I think one has to cut this second category a little slack, since if obsession doesn't make for interesting reading, what will? I speak as a trout chauvinist, who feels that any pursuit of a fish less than rainbow trout is somehow "sketchy," as my teenaged daughter would say, and yet I recognize, with a kind of self-lacerating thrill, that my own delusions about the fish I like to cast flies for are repeated by other authors. I often notice in myself a fishy intensity that I suppose makes me a lot like those Commies in the early decades of the 20th century who would fight you to the death if you suggested that anyone but Lenin invented the airplane.

There is a lot more going on in John McPhee's The Founding Fish than obsession. Perhaps that may have been the initial impulse for writing, but the result is a masterpiece of fishing literature. McPhee, like all great nonfiction writers (such as Tracy Kidder and Jonathan Harr), hasn't only assembled information that he has painstakingly acquired, but he has also (as in his other books) rendered an entire and previously unknown world.

In this case, it is not so much the world of shad fishermen as that of the fish itself. There is not much about the fish we don't learn here, from its birth, its time in the ocean, its spawning, how it has been caught (with nets, traps, hook and lines, and – my own favorite – a variety of tidal dam), not to mention its natural difficulties. For instance, in shad water, McPhee notes, "Shad larvae, in their millions, darken the river and look like one-inch eels. Minnows eat them. Shiners eat them. Ninety percent of fish in the river eat shad, and ninety percent of what's in other fishes' stomachs will be larval shad."

And then there is the impact of human industrial activities, such as pollution and the building of dams, that have diminished the shad runs over the years. And, in the detailed losses of these populations, there is another unstated but still constant reminder of what such losses mean: The fish we try to catch operate for us like canaries in coal mines. When their populations fall, we should be considering not our fishing so much as ourselves.

McPhee, though, is not content to introduce some natural history and his own experiences catching shad, some of which are hilarious, and to let it go at that; he also places the fish smack in the stream of American history. There is hardly a striking or memorable American figure, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson and onward to participants in the Civil War, who did not have some congress with shad, although there seems to be some doubt as to the providential appearance of shad during a critical stage in Washington's military campaign. Thomas Jefferson was born in Shadwell, and he liked to have his fresh shad laid open, broiled and addressed with pepper, salt and butter – a method, I think, that is still popular in the McPhee household.

What, at the end, are we to make of this collection of details of history, both natural and national, of fishing tackle, of people who know of or who have studied shad, of fishing techniques, of the manufacture of shad darts, of arguments over position in a shad river, of overwhelming, untiring desire to catch shad? First, this book is good fun and exceedingly informative, and its heart is surely in the right place, which is to say, concerned with hard-to-come-by facts and the pleasure of catching fish. Yet there is also something here that elevates The Founding Fish into another realm: an all-consuming vision of how the fish interacts with its world and ours. It is this vision, carefully rendered, delightful and often ominous, that makes this book compelling and important. ‹

Craig Nova's most recent novel is "Wetware."