Fishing the Jumps
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 revealing--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 tales of memory and camaraderie as the past and present meld to reveal that what happens in the past rarely stays there.
Lyrical and poetic, 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.
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Lamar Herrin, professor emeritus at Cornell University, is the author of seven novels, including The Lies Boys Tell, House of the Deaf, Fractures, and a memoir, Romancing Spain. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Epoch, and Paris Review, which awarded him its Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. He is also the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and winner of the Associated Writing Program's Award for the Novel.
"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 largemouth 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: A Novel
""Herrin's lyrical style paints a vivid picture of his characters' surroundings as he describes a lonely loon calling out over the lank, the crescent moon's sliver of light glinting off the water or a neighbor's nightly 5 o'clock cello concert from a nearby dock. Readers almost hear the lap of the water and feel as though they've been invited to pull up a chair, listen in on the conversation and savor every moment."" -- Penny Woods, Kentucky Living, October 2019
""Lamar Herrin may be the best writer of whom you have never heard... there's no denying that Fishing the Jumps is a work of genius... Herrin's narrative style is seamless, his emotional intelligence expert.... [A] bildungsroman, a mystery, and a prose poem, too, in its lush, layered honesty, verbal ingenuity, and elegant humanity."" -- Linda Elisabeth LaPinta, Kentucky Humanities
