CASTING A LINE

The hard-bitten genius of Norman Maclean.

- KATHRYN SCHULZ

When I am stuck on something I’m trying to write and have exhausted all the other options—ignoring the problem, staring blankly at the problem, moving the problem around to see if it’s less annoying in some other location, eating all the chocolate in the house—I eventually do what I should have done in the first place and go read some writer who is much better at this business than I am. The candidates are legion. But, from the whole long, idiosyncratic list of authors I regularly turn to for intellectual and aesthetic resuscitation, one of the most consistently useful is Norman Maclean. If you know Maclean, it is likely because of his first work, “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories,” a triptych of tales—about, among other things, families, fly-fishing, love, death, and a time when virtually all hard work in this country was still done by hand—that was published to enormous acclaim and considerable astonishment when the author was seventy-three years old. For many years before that collection appeared, in 1976, Maclean had tried to write a book about the Battle of Little Bighorn. For all the years afterward, until his death, at eighty-seven, he worked on a book about a different tragedy on a hillside—a wildfire in Montana that killed twelve smoke jumpers and a forest ranger—which was published, posthumously, as “Young Men and Fire.”