Essential to the artistic whole is a wild trout stream, the Big Blackfoot River roaring out of the Continental Divide toward Missoula. It is his success at this synthesis, born of comedy and tragedy and doubt, that illuminates his life and that may help us to make better sense of our own. At the distance of forty years, Norman Maclean creates a summum bonum out of the sometimes painful, sometimes pleasant, events of one summer.

Ultimately, A River Runs Through It is about the synthesizing of the author’s experience. Secondly, the book is about much more than the immediate subjects. In the final analysis, the convincing delicacy remains. First, the masterful construc tion of the scenes defies dissection. Beyond that, though, the novella shares the major virtues of most lasting books. He would not be wrong on either score, for A River Runs Through It contains strong elements of both. Or, alternately, the browser may open the volume to a lyrical passage in which trout, river, and man become one and think the volume a celebration of fly fishing. Judging from this, the book may seem a probing of small-town life in the West. The year is 1937, and by the end of the summer Paul, generous to others though refusing help for himself, will be dead. An artist when out on a Montana river with a rod in his hand, Paul is hellbent on getting himself thrown into jail when he goes off on one of his binges. Off to one side is the author’s brother Paul, son of a minister who taught his two boys the refinements of fly fishing. Day after day, she lies in wait to snare fishermen from Great Falls with lust in their eyes. Beside him sits Old Rawhide, whilom beauty queen of Wolf Creek (pop. Neal, a self-deluded DavisCup aspirant mollycoddled by his mother, is buying the drinks. From its faded side, a mountain goat, trademark of the Great Northern Railroad, stares out, a disinterested observer of the rude bar’s clientele. 124 pages, $25.00.) Wheels off, the boxcar sits on the gravel outside town. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. ADEN ROSS, Salt Lake City, Utah A River Runs Through It. And too often, the writer indulges in jargon lost on a non-Mormon audience, like “being someone’s mouth” or “making points with a Seventy.” Nonetheless, any audience - intellectual or professional, male or female, Mormon or not - will find in these plays ideas worth investigating: the place of the individual in any church, the church in the state, and the state under God. Rogers accuses himself of “Maryolatry,” but, except for Golgotha, not only female audiences would find his women stereotyped when not downright ignored. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ģ50 Western American Literature ing story lines through a wide variety of subjects but his characters sometimes lack definition and individuality.

A river runs through it paul