ELIZABETH ENJOYS AN OLD FAVORITE

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing."

Thus begins one of my favorite books, Norman Maclean's A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT. The novella is autobiographical in that it contains pieces of Maclean's upbringing in western Montana, the watershed events that made him the man he became. It is fictional in the sense that he made no attempt at what we think of as autobiography--a more-or-less interesting recital of the facts of a person's life. Instead, he simply looked at that life through a lens of memory, wisdom, and yearning. And then he shared what he saw.

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT is one of the rare books I've read that made me laugh until I ached, made me feel a sense of wonder, made me cry, made me begin to understand one person's arc through life to infinity; and in this understanding taught me much about myself, my own arc to infinity.

I first read the book when it came out in the 1970s. I loved it, my husband loved it, everybody loved it--including both the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review. (In fact, it's one of the few books praised by the NYTBR that I have truly and thoroughly enjoyed.)

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT was nominated for a Pulitzer. (Or was it a Nobel...? Whatever, it was a huge literary honor.) The committee couldn't bring itself to award the prize to a book that was so completely, well, Western. As one committee member was rumored to have said, "How can we give this book the prize? It has trees in it! So rather than reward a book with trees, the committe awarded no fiction prize that year.

Ah, humanity. Gotta love it.

But when I want to start screaming at human stupidity, I remember the laughter and wisdom of A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT: "Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs."

Thank you, Norman Maclean. You left the world a better place than you found it. That is the only prize worth having.