"But in fishing the jumps there comes a moment when an insatiable hunger rises up in you and everything turns wild."
The term "fishing the jumps" speaks to a method of catching fish while they're in the midst of a wild, frenzied state. And just like the undercurrents that exist in the lakes on which this tale is based, some relationships have a way of hiding--and exposing--turmoil just beneath the surface.
In his latest novel, award-winning writer Lamar Herrin highlights the art of storytelling and the value of friendship with a lush, outdoor landscape serving as a backdrop. Set over the course of a weekend spent fishing on an Adirondack lake, two middle-aged friends--Jim McManus and Walter Kidman--sip Jim Beam on the rocks and share stories of memory and camaraderie as the past and present meld to reveal that what happens in the past rarely stays there.
With a particular knack for recreating both a sense of time and place, Herrin explores the kaleidoscopic effect of memory while examining the rise and fall of life in the South. Presented is a story about a displaced southerner who tells the account of a family whose fortune was made in the post-World War II apparel industry, but it is the extended family that claims the narrator's attention and sympathy, the grandparents, the aunts and uncles and cousins, and the stories told and retold about those family members until they reach the status of myth. It is a novel of two lakes--the small glacial one where Jim and Walter fish and exchange stories, and the southern one, created when a dam was built and numerous mountain settlements were flooded. It is a novel chronicling the aftermath of World War II, who won what, and when the time comes, who stands to lose.
Lyrical and poetic yet playful and entertaining, Fishing the Jumps is more than just fishing tales. It is a seamless and haunting novel that is ultimately a story of the deep and necessary relationship between two men and the binding and nourishing effect of family--not only of an extended family, but of a whole community, and in fact, a whole region.