Ruin: A Novel of Flyfishing and Bankruptcy
By Leigh Seippel
City Point Press 2022

Readers can be forgiven a certain convulsion of dread if they glance at Leigh Seippel’s author bio on the dust jacket of his new novel, Ruin: A Novel of Flyfishing and Bankruptcy, since it mentions that “fly fishing has taken him across five continents.” He’s an ardent fan of fishing; he’s written a novel about fishing (it’s even got a dead fish on the cover); all signs point to one of those lamentably common books where fishing – luring a fish to impale its mouth on a metal barb so you can get a good workout by torturing it as it fights to live – is treated as some kind of mystical experience, a pathway to a man’s (never a woman’s) inner peace and enlightenment. Such books have flooded bookstores since 1653, when Izaak Walton published his treatise of treacle, The Compleat Angler. At one point in Ruin, readers are solemnly told “the common trait of all fishermen is liking surprise,” but the one thing these books never are is surprising.

Ruin is the story of 30-something brainy hedge fund financier Frank Campbell and his artist wife Francy, who are abruptly bankrupted by the implosion of a New York private equity partnership and forced to flee the city for the hinterlands of the far Hudson Valley, to Time Farm, a goat-infested derelict property left to Francy by an uncle. As their entirely inappropriate luxury car (ironically one of the only possessions not claimed by the banks) approaches its destination and they come to an ornate old bridge, readers get an initial taste of the off-kilter, lovely but oddly starchy prose Seippel has in store for them:

We walk out along the bridge between waist-high railings designed by somebody with Art Deco in mind and 1925 money in hand. Talk about a clash. This bridge’s 100-foot-long idea disdains all its surround under and across. The far bankside ridgeline glowers shadow toward the span’s inner-lit chartreuse. An entire forest plainly disapproves of this bridge. Myriads of branches face it, crossed like reproving arms. And that’s fair because this Roaring Twenties chameleon cheer does look obviously tipsy. Flushed cheerful like Scott Fitzgerald after his Paris afternoon absinthe tipples now followed by his Manhattan martinis.

See the odd little loops and curls, the “surround” instead of “surroundings,” the “glowers” suddenly becoming a transitive verb, that strange but undeniably effective “chameleon cheer.” One character later on in the book refreshingly mentions “Walton is so poetic it makes me gag,” but even so, Seippel risks poetry in his own prose, and it more often works than doesn’t.

The couple begin adapting, but they also begin drifting apart – Frank to creating a startup artisanal beer distillery with a new friend (“Good Dog” and “Good Goat” brands), and Francy, eventually, to rekindling her stalled passion for art under the watchful encouragement of a new friend of her own. The two leerily join the local Anamorphosis Flyfishing Club and get to know its cast of self-consciously eccentric members, including the one who, inevitably, urges Frank to embrace fly fishing as, you guessed it, a pathway to inner peace and enlightenment. That convulsion of dread is never more than a page away at any point in Ruin. 

It’s mostly kept at bay, thankfully, by the combination of Seippel’s risk-takingly baroque prose and his reversion, often, to the fact that Frank and Francy are at heart tragic figures. When Frank contemplates hawking his beers as far as “the dense constellation that from other solar system planets is called New York City,” for instance, he ultimately can’t shake his exile’s shame:

I decided not. There is too great a chance of running into somebody who lost big money on us. Or somebody among the functionary hundreds who processed our grim farce of legal Armageddon. Or even some mediocre acquaintance who could enjoy a comment sneering at New York’s latest Icarus crashed over 400 years of crashes. Far greater chance of new pain in those clubs than running into a real friend. And I am, as Francy put it of herself, now radioactive around life’s big winners.

So, barely, Ruin manages to avoid being entirely about Rebirth Through Fishing and instead aspires convincingly to be about marriage and trust and even, on deeply pleasing levels, shame. It’s an ambitiously different novel, and in a slurping sea of MFA clones, that’s no small distinction.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.