Issue #04/59, February 25 - March 10, 1999  

By John Dolan

Reeling in Russia by Fen Montaigne St. Martins Press New York 1998 $24.99

Here's the concept: a chirpy American journalist, burdened with the ludicrous name "Fen Montaigne," decides to do a fly-fishing tour of Russia from Karelia to Kamchatka. But wait! This isn't just a vacation. No, there's a higher purpose: "I wasn't so much after fish," he says, "as I was after a glimpse of Russia from the bottom up. My fly rod would be my divining stick..." Aside from all this disgusting talk about bottoms, flies, rods and sticks--I mean, it's enough to bring Freud back into fashion!--there's the question: why a fly rod, Fen? Why the fishing schtick? Here's how Fen explains his plan: "Unconstrained by pressures of time and work, and driven by an ill-starred desire to plumb the depths of the Russian psyche, I wanted to lose myself in the Russian countryside."

In other words, this rich guy had some spare time and decided to catch a few fish--and along the way, on those muggy afternoons when the bass ain't bitin', he'll do that Radischev thing: commune with the peasants, and figure out what's wrong with poor Russia. And he gets a book out of it, too. What a concept!

It's a pity earlier travel writers didn't have the wit to come up with similar gimmicks, taking quirky sports-tours of stricken countries. Think of the fine essays they could have made: some cheery Brit's account of his polo trip through Famine Ireland; beach volleyball tours of Pol Pot's Cambodia; clock-golf 'neath the smokestacks of Dachau.

But the aspiring sports apocalypse tourist has to choose the right sport. Fen's choice can only be understood in terms of some very weird footnotes to American literary history. Hemingway fly-fished--but then he liked bullfighting too, and you don't see any of Fen's goretex brotherhood taking up the red cape. Too gory, too Tijuana. Fly-fishing is bloodsport for the effete. Richard Brautigan used it to unite the he-man and hippie lines in Trout Fishing in America. A generation later, some workshop novelist again made fly-fishing the central fetish of a pompous memoir called A River Runs through It. Then came the movie: Brad Pitt and Robert Redford on the same screen, two dumb blonds flicking a piece of lint onto a river. So, by taking his American fly to the rivers of Russia, Fen imports an entire sensibility: sensitive yet manly, with a literary voiceover cadenced by slow, fruitless casts.

One little problem: the poor bastard can't write. In losing himself in the Russian countryside, Fen (definition: "swamp") also lost any sense of what makes for decent prose. Count the cliches in Fen's own account of his project: "ill-starred desire" "plumb the depths", "Russian psyche" and "lose myself." Four major cliches in one sentence. Sometimes Fen is not even capable of writing a cliche correctly, as when he says that "cast[ing] your own fly...provides a kick unlike few others in sport." Uuuuh, Fen? That phrase doesn't make sense. I think you meant "...a kick like few others in sport." Fen's prose problems intensify when he has to narrate complex events: "One of the witnesses was Olga Manet, at the time a young Polish Jew who had been arrested in Minsk on her way to visit her sister in Moscow." So later on she stopped being a Polish Jew? I think Fen means here that Olga Manet was young "at that time" (and old at a later time, as is often the case)--but I still can't guess what Olga's sister in Moscow has to do with her age, arrest, or ethnic identity.

Like all really bad writers, Fen can be counted on to trump his idiotic remarks with something even more fatuous. After going into raptures over the "kick" of decieving a two-pound fish, he slobbers, "Like all good sport, fly-fishing provide[s] the ultimate in pleasure." Like many of the things chirpy Americans say, this is either a lie or proof of psychosis. Sport is "the ultimate in pleasure"? Softball is more fun than heroin? Hacky-sack is better than flattery laid on thick and hot? Soccer beats out fellatio? Perhaps Fen really does find "sport" better than grown-up pleasures. His treatment of sex suggests some serious problems. When bodies are mentioned, he resorts to childish euphemisms: "The dashboard was plastered with stickers of naked women, their enormous bosoms and derrieres beckoning." "Bosoms"? "Derrieres"? And for that matter, " beckoning"?

A sort of cultural vertigo occurs when I try to imagine how people can write like this. Listening to Fen and the fifty million other Fens who have turned North America into one big sactimonious marsh, you ask yourself in horror: are they really that stupid, or are they just pious hypocrites?

Perhaps it's a willed retardation; perhaps they want to be stupid. Fen seems to suggest this when defining the appeal of fly-fishing. He actually asserts that his goal is the annihilation of thought: "When I was on a stream and the fish were biting, I was able--as a writer once observed--to quit dragging around the chains of my mind. All thought ceased."

"All thought ceased"--yes indeed. Which was not good news for Fen's other project: diagnosing the problems with the Russian Soul. Fen casts for the Russian Soul in all the best places: he fly-fishes for herring in Solovki, giving the reader a quick tour of the abandoned Stalinist deathcamp there in between fishing sessions. He fishes for pike in the Volga, among the ruins of aristocratic mansions and failed private farms. He fishes for nearly-extinct giant trout on Lake Baikal, among the drunken remnant of the Buryat. Everywhere he goes in Russia, it's the same formula: a little apocalypse, a little fishing. A little mass death, a little fishing. A little ruined dreams of yet another generation...and then, just for variety: a little fishing.

Sometimes he catches fish, sometimes he doesn't. But everywhere he goes, he comes up with the same stunning insights into the Russian Problem:

      1. Russians drink too much.
      2. Communism was bad for Russia.
      3. Capitalism is good for Russia.
      3(a) Or, er, will be once they work out the kinks.

Fen's faith in the power of American-style capitalism to redeem poor Russia is laughable. He really believes all that Reagan crap. (Or does he? That's the recurring question: are they fools or hypocrites?) He uses Reagan's speechwriters' tag phrases, even the Reagan-era cliche "trickle-down": "I found myself wishing that as capitalism rolled over Russia, its sweet benefits trickling down from big cities to little Volga villages, that Johnson or Evinrude would set up a factory and make reliable, cheap engines for the legions of Russian fishermen tortured by shoddy motors." Amen! Visions of outboards roaring up the Volga!

The problem is that Fen has trouble finding any evidence of this trickle-down. In fact, after a decade of capitalism has "rolled over Russia," the Russian countryside is a mess. In southern Russia, Fen fishes the Volga and catches up with an old friend, a real go-getter. By the early nineties this guy had set up his own farm. But when Fen meets him again, it's all gone: the banks boosted interest to 200% and repossessed all his farm equipment. This gives Fen a terrible headache. Why no trickle-down? How can private banks be villains?

This sort of dissonance runs through the book, making it an interesting read in spite of itself. It's morbidly fascinating, and occasionally hilarious, to watch poor Fen struggle to impose his received ideas, the typical baggage of a conservative American journalist, on the mess he finds in Russia.

Fen's simple ideologically-driven categories extend even to body-types. Like most successful Americans, he's slim, and he expects to find slim, successful people and fat failures in his travels. This bodytyping works pretty well in America, where the rich are thin and the poor are fat (and thus doubly damned)--but it begins to fail Fen in Russia, where many of his favorite entrepreneurs are a bit on the chubby side. This is where his training as a mainstream journalist saves him. Mainstream jounalists can't introduce a single person without the obligatory two adjectives. So, having classified all the bad communists as simply "fat," he begins to define his free-market Russian heroes as "burly," "stocky," and "powerful." In other words, "fat but ideologically sound."

In the end, even this squirming won't make the Russia he saw fit Fen's very simple categories; and to his credit, he admits this, confessing at the end of the book that he had no epiphanies in Russia but only reinforced his original prejudices in his time there. There is some honor in this admission, and I'm happy to give it to him: he may not be a very bright man, but in a dull way he probably is a decent one. Probably a nice guy if you got to know him. They always are. That's their nastiest trick.