CATCH AND RELEASE:
Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life.
By Mark Kingwell. Viking.
242 pp. $21.95

Books populated by brothers, fathers, and fish invariably elicit comparisons to Norman McLean’s poetic memoir A River Runs Through It (1976). Catch and Release has those elements, though not the larger-than-life loggers, Indians, prostitutes, and poker players of McLean’s Montana youth. But like McLean, University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell skillfully merges fishing with insights about love and loss, nature and human finitude, and grace and patience.

Kingwell emphasizes from the start that “This Book Is Not About Fishing,” as he titles the first chapter, but rather about “thinking about fishing.” The narrative spools around Kingwell’s annual fishing trip to British Colum­bia with his father and two brothers. Fishing, he reflects, invites a “basic restoration of a state of native receptivity” to inward clarity. With a weekend on the water as his aperture, he examines what swims below the surface of life.

Kingwell manages to raise a mundane physical act—sitting silent in a boat with a line in the water—to the level of the metaphysical. His eye for comparisons and distinctions calls to mind a time when philosophy was as much aesthetic experience as rational enterprise. Anglers are like philosophers, he writes, in that “against all odds and evidence, they are liable to cling to methods and arrangements that worked once, or seemed to, yet do so no longer.” On the debate over dry flies versus wet flies (dry flies lie on the surface whereas wet flies sink), he writes: “Dry-fly fishing necessarily puts wet-fly fishing down because it is more difficult to master, and therefore the odds against catching any fish at all are markedly high.” But given the counterintuitive distinctions of angling (like those of philosophy), “elegantly catching nothing” while pursuing “the mastery of subtle technique” is preferable to inelegantly catching a bucket full of fish.

Kingwell manages to cover a large canvas with fine brush strokes. He muses on masculinity and the comforts of male silence, Aristotle’s treatment of the tension between action and contemplation, and the relative virtues of polenta and risotto—all this from having sat in a boat on a lonely lake in British Columbia. Throughout, his approach is more fly-fisher’s cast than archer’s shot: The lure is dispatched in a general direction, not aimed at any target in particular.

Catch and Release casts a series of lures in hopes of playing and landing memories, grasping such meanings as life allows us to catch, and then, often, letting them go. In the end, this is a book about hope, for fishing is, “like all hope, an embodied paradox of desire and desire’s defeat.”

—Peter Church