There are two great tragedies in the annals of fly fishing literature: that Norman Maclean didn’t write more and that Greg Keeler didn’t write less. I had the great misfortune of spending the length of the book Trash Fish inside the head of Greg Keeler and I can confirm it is an exceptionally vile and puerile place.
Keeler’s book is described as a fishing memoir, but it is so much less. It’s not as much about fishing as it is about failing at life and then going fishing, but without learning anything in the process and then failing at life some more before going fishing. Keeler writes in the tradition of the incredibly self-involved who believe that their every experience is meaningful and deep, when in fact a lot of them are just kind of pathetic. There is no growth here, no self-awareness. Keeler starts this memoir as an unpleasant child and ends it as an unpleasant old man. He does terrible things and he learns nothing. He thinks his selfish behavior is adorable and that responsibility and doing the right thing is somehow selling out.
The author never misses out on a chance to let himself off the hook. He abandons his gravely ill wife and children to run off with a young woman, but he doesn’t own up to it. He refers to this period as when his wife got sick and he had a midlife crisis. See? Keeler is a victim too, he’s just afflicted with a midlife crisis, not, you know, a horrible person. In one of the most pathetic affectations of a heavily affected book, he writes about his penis as a separate character, Dick. Dick is the one who gets Greg into trouble, but as any real man knows, that a sad lie that the weak tell themselves. It’s also an incredibly worn out joke that most men stop making when they are in their early 20s.
Keeler leeching off young people is a theme of this book, although he doesn’t seem aware of it. Again and again, he is picked up by former students, or people young enough to be his children, and ushered through life. Keeler doesn’t seem to understand that this is because he is a man-child and that adults have gotten to be adults by learning to avoid people like Keeler and to keep his sad brand of chaos out of their lives.
Keeler has some children, but they’re pretty much props to him. He recounts in one episode how his wife is tripping on acid, holding their baby and threatening Keeler with a kitchen knife. The whole episode is presented as some kind of zany counter-culture moment in their bohemian lives, not a profoundly disturbing moment of failed parenting. The two deserved each other, but their poor kids deserved better. He notes at the end that one son lives in Washington, DC; gee, it’s almost as if he’s trying to get as physically as far away from his parents in Montana.
In another episode, Keeler recounts how as a professor at a university in Louisiana, he discovers that one of his colleagues is forcing poor black women to have sex in exchange for passing grades. Keeler thinks this is funny, his wife to her credit does not, but neither of them, you know, actually do anything about it. Because they are both idiot children, it doesn’t occur to them to act like adults and try to help these poor women. Once again, they failed a test on the ethics of being a basic decent adult.
For all his failings, Keeler is incredibly judgmental of other people. He’s constantly making nasty references about people who he considers to be establishment and squares and all I could think was, “I bet that guy you just made fun of hasn’t abandoned his gravely ill wife and children.” Keeler is a bad person and that’s his problem and a problem for the people around him, but he is also not a terribly self-aware bad person and that’s a problem for his readers. A jerk can be a good writer, but being a jerk doesn’t make you a good writer, it just makes you a jerk. You’re probably wondering why I finished a book I hated this much. Two reasons, first, Keeler mentioned John Prine at one point and I’m a huge Prine fan, I kept reading in the hopes Prine would turn up again, but no such luck; and second, I started writing this bad review in my head while I was reading the book, including the opening sentence, which I’m quite fond of and wanted to use.
First Fish 