From today’s NY Sun, my review of Howell Raines’s fly-fishing memoir:
Big Fish And Bigger Blunders
By Elizabeth Spiers
The New York Sun
‘The One That Got Away” (Scribner, 336 pages, $25), the fourth book and second memoir by former New YorkTimes exec. editor, Howell Raines, opens with an ode to the author’s longest-running loves after newspapers and immediate family members: the fish that has not yet been caught and the obvious corollary, for which the book is named.
An obsessive fly-fisher, Mr. Raines wrote the sequel to his best-selling memoir, “Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis,” after a professional career in newspapers that ended very publicly and dramatically three years ago when Times reporter Jayson Blair was accused and found guilty of plagiarizing material in a number of prominent stories over the course of his short career. In the shadow of those events, it’s easy to assume that the “one that got away”would be a reference to Mr. Raines’s professional losses and perhaps even to Mr. Blair, whose transgressions went unnoticed by Times brass until it was too late.
But Mr. Raines offers a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the particular propriety of the metaphor in another, entirely different sense: “Here, several hours in this story of a modern-day Nantucket sleigh ride, we – or at least you, reader – must confront the sensitive fact that in our culture, ‘fish story’ is a synonym for ‘lie.’ Are you to believe what I’ve told you up to now and what I’ve yet to reveal simply because I promise here and now that everything happened just the way I’m telling it? Oh, yes, indeed, you may!”
And everything that has happened up to now, according to the author, has been a rollicking jumble of hard fishing in hard places with a cast of characters that includes benign fish-inflating liars, educated but sometimes ignorant people who met grisly deaths because they took their own stubborn advice, Mr. Raines’s family members who, like Mr. Raines himself, simultaneously embrace and reject their Alabama roots, shameless practitioners of an unsophisticated substitute for fly-fishing that Mr. Raines derides as “fish-killing,” corrupt politicians, and at least one totalitarian managing editor.
The journey begins with the author’s early fishing experiences and ambitions to catch more elusive, challenging fish and culminates with more recent expeditions off of Christmas Island and in Russia. It also involves the acquisition of a new permanent fishing partner in the form of an unexpected second wife. Mr. Raines’s elegiac prose is sprinkled with short expository digressions that contextualize or otherwise explain the personal significance of lost fish, the behavior and philosophies of people who have influenced the author’s life, and the author’s own beliefs about fate and one’s ability to elude it, or lack thereof.
The most notable interruption to the fly-fishing narrative is Mr. Raines’s forced analysis of his role in the Blair scandal and how it led to what he now believes was the inevitable result: his departure from the Times. But he takes his time getting there. Mr. Raines refers to Mr. Blair briefly in the first third of the book and then moves on to mourn the loss of a Florida marlin hooked off the coast of Christmas Island, a romantic if implausible prioritization for a man of his ambition and talent. This dismissiveness suggests that rather than reliving that particular episode of his editorship at the Times, Mr. Raines will eventually insist that the elephant in question is merely a large, ornately-shaped coffee table, and keep insisting as much to the last page. It isn’t until the final third of the book that he finally addresses the Blair saga and his tenure at the Times in full. Mr. Raines’s unsentimentally articulates his position, admittedly contested in other quarters, clearly and without conflict. He writes: “I realized I could spend the rest of my life thinking about ways that I might have handled the Jayson Blair scandal rather than ordering the publication of the 7,400-word story that I read while John McPhee cast his fly tirelessly from the bow of Mike Padua’s boat. … one could read the story closely and come away with the impression that I had ignored the stop-Jayson memo and all the other warnings that did not reach the top of the pyramid.”
“The One That Got Away” might have been a summary defense masquerading as a fly-fishing memoir rather than a series of damn good fish stories with an obligatory (and possibly publisher-mandated) analysis of the most notorious public event in which Raines was a material participant had Mr. Raines still felt the need to exculpate himself three years after the fact. Neither is optimal, but the latter is certainly preferable.
That’s not to say that Mr. Raines should have skipped the Blair episode entirely, but the memoir as a whole is more a volume of bits of wisdom gleaned from personal experience and supporting anecdotes than a look at the author’s interior and undoubtedly complex motivations, which would have made it infinitely richer. Raines doesn’t want to confess too much, personally or professionally, and in failing to do so, his own story becomes a fish tale of sorts, albeit a good one, told eloquently and with great wit.
Even the best memoirists are inherently unreliable narrators – unwitting well-intentioned liars and benign tellers of fish tales. If they were not so, we would be left only with a dry chronology of facts, journalistically sound and more amenable to Times standards, but devoid of any hint of the personal biases, stubborn wrongheadedness, and radical revisionist interpretations of facts-as-they-happened that truly explain why and how the events occurred and how they affected the subjects.
It would be easy to attribute Mr. Raines’s lack of regret and reluctance to delve any deeper into the Blair situation to arrogance rather than reflection and resolution, but, if true, he exhibits an unusual self-awareness even on that count. In responding to charges of hubris – an accusation lobbed at successful New Yorkers like so many tennis balls, and in the same sporting fashion – Mr. Raines writes unapologetically: “When was the last time they handed out important jobs in New York on the basis of humility? If hubris was going to take me home, so be it. At least I’d be leaving on the horse I rode in on.”
Ms. Spiers is the publisher of DealBreaker.com
