Word: humphrey
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...William Humphrey is to minimalists of the Raymond Carver school what an old silk-wrapped, split-cane fly rod is to a shiny new graphite lunker stick. The proof lies in these 13 glowing tales gathered for the first time in one volume...
...Moby Dick finds Humphrey in the Berkshire Hills of lower Massachusetts, resolved to take a 30-pounder in a sporting manner befitting its own dark nobility. In the fading light of the trout season's last day, with the strains of Beethoven's Ode to Joy still echoing down from the Tanglewood concert shed above, he finally hooks the great fish. But then...
...humor in this collection. The Fishermen of the Seine evokes, in a style as spare as Maupassant or Simenon, the ponts and iles of Paris at dawn, when rough-clad men hunker in the fog to hook Gallic mysteries like goujon, breme and chevaine. Two hunting pieces extracted from Humphrey's poignant 1977 memoir Farther Off from Heaven call back the hot dust and snaky swamps of his Depression-era boyhood in east Texas, along with the ghost of his hard-drinking, bar-fighting, trick-shot artist of a father...
...loveliest, most self-revealing story appears near the end. Birds of a Feather is an ode to the woodcock, that plucky, reclusive little game bird of the uplands. Preparatory to a hunt in upstate New York, Humphrey reads up on the bird. "He gets curiouser and curiouser. His brain is upside down. His ears are in front of his nose . . . Like the woodcock, I too am an odd bird; I know I am, and I would change if I could, because being odd is uncomfortable, but, no more than the woodcock can, I can't, not anymore...
...Reagan, one surmises, would have been equally successful in the age of radio, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, or in the age of newsreels, like Warren G. Harding, or in the age of steel engravings and the penny press, like Franklin Pierce. Presidential candidates in the television era -- Johnson, Nixon, Humphrey, McGovern, Ford, Carter, Mondale -- hardly constitute a parade of bathing beauties calculated to excite Atlantic City...