LITERATURE: Confrontation No. 88/89 – The End of Fishing

This winner of the 2004 Sarah Tucker Fiction Award is well-written by Nan Frydland as to storyline, structure, plot and voice.  Some of the imagery is exceptional:

Mornings I listen to the birds for a while from bed, listen to them call each other in the early silver light.  The air is so warm, and by noon it’ll be sweet and yellow as melted butter. (p. 173)

This is the first person narrator relating the summers of her youth, spent with her grandparents and her aunt somewhere down south (Alabama?) (she lives up north with her mother) and where her father, whom she describes as a flim-flam man attempts to be a father for a day during brief visits. 

There’s some great characterization here, of the narrator and particularly of her grandparents, and a special memory of the three of them going fishing.  Frydland then brings in a closer look at the father-daughter relationship, and it becomes obvious that he doesn’t really care about her as much as his wheelin-dealin’ when he sets her up with a boy who rapes her viciously on a first date, then demands that she keep silent.

In my copy of this book, though I suspect in all, there appears to be some missing pages though the numbering is correct as the closing of this story comes out of nowhere, following a page that ends "Seems that" with no further thought or punctuation.  Then it jumps to the fishing hole being poisoned, and the grandfather’s pronouncement that "that’s the way of the new world.  I’ve seen lots of unnatural things done by men–you get what I’m saying?"  This, I suppose, is indication that while the grandfather believes what has happened is wrong, we’re helpless to fight against change, even the bad.