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I read that story in The Drake. Great article.

The Drake is actually a pretty nifty fly fishing magazine, for that matter.

I have my trepidations about the movies. Mostly because I can't stand movies that get made about good books, especially ones that I really like.

The only movie I ever saw that was better than the book was Forrest Gump, and that's mostly because I thought the book was pretty lame, and the movie has only the barest resemblance to it.

That said, I have to admit: A River Runs Through It was pretty faithful to the printed work, maybe as good a job as I've ever seen done by a film based on an already well-written story. But if you were paying attention, you realize that ARRTI was only incidentally about fly fishing for trout.

A movie based on The River Why, on the other hand...that's fraught with peril. Too much could go wrong. I practically feel like filing an injunction, just on general principles...because the more I think about it, the more I realize what a superb job Duncan did of weaving some really sublime themes together in that book.

And movies- or even "films"- don't do "sublime" all that well, in my experience. Sordid, that they do well. Blood-spattered murder mysteries. The demimonde. Pulp fiction. Subject matter roughly a trillion light-years from the thematic interplay of Romantic Pantheism with Creation Spirituality that, for me, comprises the principal appeal of The River Why. Subject material that I fully expect to find warped into unrecognizability, if it's included at all.

And I don't even want to think about how the Love Interest angle is liable to get handled, in either of those movies. Duncan did a superb job of crafting characters and a storyline that come as dangerously close to being the male analogue of romance-novel "chick lit" as a novelist could ever get, without having it be a piece of hackwork that collapses into a treacly morass of unrequited het-guy fantasyland. That's part of what makes the book work, it's het guylit...maybe the only het guylit I've ever read (unless you count porn, of course), with the girl, Jerry, emblematic of the Idealized Feminine of Courtly Love, right out of the pages of Chretien de Troyes, or maybe Robert Hunter...a high-wire act that somehow manages to be both sensual and chaste. Although it isn't it's only accomplisment, The River Why is the only modern novel I've ever read that has strong overtones of being a romance novel for dudes, that actually works. (Lolita? Cleverly crafted exploitation. The Fountainhead? A 2-D comic book. Cyrano de Bergerac? Haven't read it. [edit] All The King's Men. Okay- there's another one.)

Wisely, Duncan closes out the book just after the young couple becomes newlyweds, knowing that as far as delivering the Romance, it will never get any better than that.

The moveez, on the other hand, will probably focus on whatizname's opening encounter with the Dame Geraldine Berners Godiva or whoever, nubility personified, angling as she is skyclad in her sumptuous birthday suit, by lingering on every glorious visual detail to a degree that will leave only enough to the imagination to retain an "R" rating. Also knowing that it will never get any better than that. As far as delivering the eye candy, anyway.

What the two separate "film treatments" will do before and after that scene in order to justify the films' existence in terms of doing justice to Duncan's book, I can't begin to imagine.

Zac, that was an outstanding interview. It helps that you asked some really good questions, and showed familiarity with Duncan's work. He's obviously someone who's capable of providing very eloquent replies when he's on topics that he's passionate about. Makes for the best kind of interview- a few sincerely interested questions and follow-ups, and the rest takes care of itself.

One thing that really got to me was when Duncan pointed out that the natural world of coastal Oregon temperate rain forest that provided the setting for The River Why is, 25 years later...gone. Clear-cut to the bank.