How We Hook Ourselves
I wanted to be an actor, not a writer, although I had been “wandering lonely as a cloud” and writing poetic thoughts if not poetry (and if only in my head) from early in my boyhood. But for a while my mother had had a song and dance troupe, so I’d also been up on a stage singing and tap-dancing and had known at an early age the thrill of an enthusiastic response from an audience. Then—when Montgomery Clift and James Dean came on the scene—I did want to become an actor and began to perform in school plays. But I also played baseball, as my father had, and continued to so do up through my college days at the University of Kentucky. After my sophomore year, I took time off from my university studies, went to L.A. at a time when almost all tv shows and movies were being shot out there and work was plentiful. I landed a number of small parts and then an eight week stint on Irwin Allen’s first big disaster movie, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I probably had a total of ten lines in that movie, but as the sonar operator in a submarine I was required to be on the set almost every day. We, the bit players, played poker a lot (with both Peter Lorrie and Frankie Avalon), and some of us spent time in front of mirrors practicing our fast draws. But the tedium of moviemaking can be exhausting and eventually I found myself off in a corner of the sound stage reading. A number of authors, including Thomas Wolfe and then, feeling my way, most of William Faulkner.
That was when the balance shifted. Shortly after production on that movie ended I was back in Kentucky, no longer a theater arts major but an English major (although still a baseball player) and thinking of myself as a future novelist. My first novel, The Rio Loja Ringmaster, was a long time in coming, but when it did it was about a baseball player who bolted from the big leagues and ended up in Mexico. But by that time, exhausted by the sixties, I had gone to Europe, married a Spaniard, fathered a son, and come back to the US. My second novel, American Baroque, was about those exhausting sixties, and my third, The Unwritten Chronicles of Robert E. Lee, came out of a course in Southern fiction I had begun to teach at Cornell University, where I’d taken a job in 1977. I published stories in some good places, The New Yorker and Harper’s, among others, and was lucky enough to win some awards, a NEA, an AWP award for the novel (The Lies Boys Tell) and the Aga Kahn fiction prize from The Paris Review. A remarkable independent publishing house, Unbridled Books, brought out House of the Deaf, a novel in part about Basque terrorism in Spain (in addition to Romancing Spain, a memoir about my love affair with Spain, the bright side of Spain, and the woman I met and married there). I then published Fractures (St. Martin’s, 2013), set in the Ithaca, New York area, dealing in part with the hydrofracking controversy, followed by Father Figure, which took me back down south into the life of a smalltown four-letter man and his fate in the Battle of the Bulge.
Fishing the Jumps, this last book, I suppose brings it all home. It is being published by my alma mater, the University of Kentucky, and although not set specifically in my boyhood state it is very much about living a life away from home and coming home and dealing with what seem to be the devastating changes that have taken place. But, of course, a novel is about many things, there are many currents running through it, and when those currents come together no one, not even the currents’ creator, can be said to be in control. Thomas Wolfe, who beguiled me away from an acting career in a sound stage in 20th Century Fox, is credited with saying, “You can’t go home again.” But his whole career makes clear you can never stop trying either. Fishing the Jumps—which is about fishing only in the sense that all books need a point of departure—is ultimately about home and family and the stories we tell to keep the illusion alive. It is the bait we can never stop biting at. It is how we hook ourselves.
"Lamar Herrin’s novel is deliberate and gorgeous, with a mastery of description and a searing command of American culture. Fishing the Jumps is quiet, thoughtfully told, but with a thrashing undercurrent, like the turmoil of some large-mouthed bass about to break into a feeding frenzy — 'the jumps.' This is literally the tension of the story, its powerful force. What seems almost a low-key dialogue on a placid lake is actually a turbulent family history that refuses to sink to the bottom of memory. This makes an elegant structure for a fish story that plumbs the nature of storytelling itself. It is a thrilling, intense novel to read. I was hooked."
—Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Patchwork and The Girl in the Blue Beret
“Herrin's writing is vivid, lyrical, and intense. But the glory of this novel is Herrin's gift for recreating a particular time and place, the decades after WWII, the exuberance of summers by the mountain lake, the brilliance of Little Howie Whalen building a textile empire. These characters, and this time, come alive in a way that haunts the reader.”
— Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek
“This is a wonderful novel! Herrin's writing is beautifully expressed, perceptive, emotionally subtle, and at times cunningly enigmatic. Every time I read him, I am struck anew that, purely as a writer—an artist using words—he’s one of the very best we have.”
— Brian Hall, author of I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark
“Lamar Herrin's Fishing the Jumps is surely unique as a novel. Told mostly in the vividly reminiscent voice of Jim Pritchard, it flows outward, inward and round about as it chronicles the stories of the Pritchards and Whalens, the Coggins and even the toad, Oldham. Seemingly leisurely, the narrative is insistent, ruefully ironic, and utterly absorbing. When I finished reading, I felt a little lonesome; the story and I had become close friends.”
—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina and author of A Way of Happening: Observations of Contemporary Poetry
—Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Patchwork and The Girl in the Blue Beret
“Herrin's writing is vivid, lyrical, and intense. But the glory of this novel is Herrin's gift for recreating a particular time and place, the decades after WWII, the exuberance of summers by the mountain lake, the brilliance of Little Howie Whalen building a textile empire. These characters, and this time, come alive in a way that haunts the reader.”
— Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek
“This is a wonderful novel! Herrin's writing is beautifully expressed, perceptive, emotionally subtle, and at times cunningly enigmatic. Every time I read him, I am struck anew that, purely as a writer—an artist using words—he’s one of the very best we have.”
— Brian Hall, author of I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark
“Lamar Herrin's Fishing the Jumps is surely unique as a novel. Told mostly in the vividly reminiscent voice of Jim Pritchard, it flows outward, inward and round about as it chronicles the stories of the Pritchards and Whalens, the Coggins and even the toad, Oldham. Seemingly leisurely, the narrative is insistent, ruefully ironic, and utterly absorbing. When I finished reading, I felt a little lonesome; the story and I had become close friends.”
—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina and author of A Way of Happening: Observations of Contemporary Poetry
