River Music: A Fly Fisher's Four Seasons [Hardcover]

James R. Babb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2001

James Babb is one of the funniest essayists at work today, and each of the ribald tales in River Music is imbued with his devastating wit, ornery perspective, and musical language. As he writes in the Prelude, his newest opus about "the occasional laugh, the occasional thought, a bit about fly fishing and a bit about Life, and all of it underpinned by the music of rivers." The pieces are arranged by season, as are our lives, and touch on the music that rivers make.

He recounts a disastrous - and hilarious - spring canoeing trip with a friend in "The Darling Buds of May," where the snow accumulated so quickly on their hats that they "looked like Conehead voyageurs from Remulak." In "The Coriolis Effect," Babb rhapsodizes about the sights, smells, and culture of what he considers to be the last great place on Earth, where pristine Chilean waters and native way of life relieve him of an obsession about which direction the water flushes. And in "Little Jewels," he weaves an exquisite, deeply humorous, and haunting nocturne with peccadillo accompaniment that considers the mating habits of trout and men, mortality, and a thirty-nine-year-long unrequited love.

Babb is a maverick whose latest offering is a true departure from conventional essays on fly fishing, or on any subject, and will be relished by the growing circle of Babb fanatics everywhere.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Babb has successfully carved out a niche, alongside Norman Maclean, as a superior fly-fishing writer, and moreover as a keen observer of human comedy. This sequel to his successful Crosscurrents expands (and organizes by season) essays from Gray's Sporting Journal and positions Babb as fly fishing's tastefully restrained counterpart to Dave Barry. Babb's wit surfaces at every turn: he observes a psychological battle between two fellow fishermen he nicknames Phlegm and Spleen, a "loudmouthed highliner" and a "quivering bundle of silent intensity," respectively; he muses that due to the sport's anal and passive-aggressive nature, it's "small wonder" that "the invasion of Normandy, one of the best-planned and most devious military assaults of all time, was masterminded by a fly fisherman"; and he points out that Vienna sausages, the "cornerstone" of Southern fishing lunches, taste like "an initial burst of garbage-disposal grease followed by a salty metallic aftertaste that leaves your mouth puckered and sour, as though you'd upchucked chunks of green persimmon then fellated a rusty exhaust pipe." Discussing his midlife crises, he never gets maudlin: for example, describing an object of his flirtations, he writes: "modernize Veronica Lake with a big stir of Gwyneth Paltrow and weird things up with Dorothy Parker playing I Love Lucy." Throughout, Babb calmly discerns connections between life and the sport, distinguishing his writing from typically obsessive, self-indulgent sports writing: "having acquired the habit before the onset of sentience, fly fishing is for me more an involuntary act of everyday living, like sleeping or eating or watching reruns of The Simpsons."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This reviewer once compared Babb's Crosscurrents: A Fly Fisher's Progress (LJ 12/99) to fellow fly-fishing author John Gierach's Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders (LJ 615/00). Babb's latest book is better than anything Gierach has written in five years. Babb, the editor of Gray's Sporting Journal, takes his readers on a roller-coaster ride through farce and satire to elegy and folktale. He's a flyfishing Mark Twain who knows a little bit too much about Beavis and Butthead. The stories meander and turn like the streams on which they are set, leaving the reader wondering where each essay will deposit them. The result is a joy to read and essential for any library. Jeff Grossman, Milwaukee Area Technical Coll.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: The Lyons Press; 1st edition (July 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585742791
• ISBN-13: 978-1585742790
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,520,066 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Editorial Review by Charles Rangeley-Wilson from The Field, April 17, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: River Music: A Fly Fisher's Four Seasons (Hardcover)

Two years ago Jim Babb published a collection of fishing essays in a book called Crosscurrents. I enjoyed that book more than any book I'd read on fly-fishing in some while. When I get Gray's through the door, the magazine Babb edits - a kind of US version of The Field in camouflage with adverts for bigger utility vehicles - I always turn first to his fishing essay. Babb elevates the ordinary and makes accessible the far-fetched. He can get inside your head and say something to which you'll think "oh yeah, that's right, that's how I see it" - only Babb expresses it for you.
In River Music you will find essays on Riverside cuisine and theories on social grouping according to whether you drink beer or spirits when camped by a river. There's also an exploration of a mid-life crisis played out while fishing and a brilliant story of ice-fishing.
The theme that links it all is the heritage of a musical father, Babb's tinnitus that sounds like a river in symphony and accompanies him wherever he goes, and the endless and soothing music that rivers make. This is a good book and I recommend you read it.
Charles Rangeley-Wilson

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grandiloquent Piscatorial Musing, February 17, 2011

By 

Lightman (New York) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: River Music: A Fly Fisher's Four Seasons (Paperback)

There's a peculiar style of writing that often attaches itself to fly fishing narratives, why I'm not sure. This literary form revels in its own complexity, challenges the reader, and coaxes the English language to do things that seemingly never were intended. Ted Leeson is a workmanlike practitioner of this style; James Babb is its master.

What is it? I'll call it grandiloquent piscatorial musing.

Three key elements of this genre of fish book are the use of esoteric vocabulary, outrageous similes, and long and complex sentences. Let's take a look at each, with references from River Music.

Here's an example of off the beaten path vocab -

"And then I had a piece of tarte au sucre - sugar pie, a thrombotic Gaspesian concoction of eggs and cream and butter and caramelized brown sugar quivering lasciviously in a crisp buttery shell".

What does thrombotic mean? Grab that dictionary and look it up.

How about this for a simile that makes your hair stand on end?

"Then came a day when sun in the east floodlit the soggy black behinds of clouds fleeing toward the west - the weary remnants of the storm that after a week of hanging just off the coast had finally come ashore in the night howling like a Shop - Vac swallowing a cat, fire hosing the hotel with hard edged raw ocean, and sending coconuts and lawn chairs flying around like soccer balls".

Yikes! A Shop - Vac swallowing a cat!

And here is a typically long sentence - not a run on sentence, mind you, but a suitably long and complex one to make clear that we won't be impaling a worm on a hook below a red and white bobber any time soon:

"Still, an electric aura seemed to crackle around us, particularly on those days when the plaid-jacketed, white-belted old gent in the adjoining music store would sit down to fiddle with his Wurlitzer and we, partly as therapy for the customer-free tedium and the jerkily painful polkas, and partly as permission to almost innocently touch, broke into a pre-disco-crisis dance called The Bump - a rhythmic riot of colliding rumps and red-faced laughter that sent the clock spinning quickly toward quitting time".

Do you think you'll enjoy reading this stuff?

I did...

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than Expected, August 2, 2010

By 

troutchaser - See all my reviews

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This review is from: River Music: A Fly Fisher's Four Seasons (Paperback)

Honestly, I expected Babb's writing to go by the way of so many other fly fishing books . Maybe something on the 3-4 star scale, and a little dry to my tastes. I was pleasantly surprised. Babb is as witty as he is seasoned in the sport. He's friendly and unassuming. He caught me off guard and gave reason to smile in nearly every vignette. A good laugh wasn't out of the question.
I'll be picking up his other titles.