On the Spine of Time: An Angler's Love of the Smokies

Standing atop the Great Smoky Mountains with a creel full of joy and heartbreak, the author of The Earth Is Enough casts a Thoreau-like eye at love, flyfishing, geology, the character of mountain folk and trout. Middleton wants readers to experience his Smoky Mountain fishing trips as he does: as metaphors for transcendental faith in nature. A naturalist-romantic, he celebrates the wild mountain trout with a congregation of eccentric highlanders and fishing companions who give colorful witness in clipped Faulknerian speech. Middleton's own style, however, is fluid--his prose occasionally as lithe as Annie Dillard's--carrying forward his tribute while his angst about the future floats overhead like a buzzard on a high thermal. (Mar.)