conversation is an engine

Angling Life is a long conversation

[Full disclosure: Captain Dan Keating is my cousin. He asked me to review his story, which I am happy to do.]

Angling Life is a long conversation. The kind you have spending hours in a boat waiting for fish to bite. The kind that ranges from food to the stupid stuff you did as a kid to watching your own kids grow–that is, everything. But Angling Life is also a journey book: one man’s quest for the perfect fish—or at least the perfect fishing conditions. As such, this conversation stretches across the globe and occasionally strikes at realities swimming deep inside any man. It’s this search for the best fishing that organizes Captain Dan’s reflections.

For years Captain Dan has run a charter fishing business on Lake Michigan. He is a fisherman who has made a business of fishing, writing about fishing in books and regular columns as well as holding fishing seminars. Most summer mornings he’s up early with groups eager to get out on the big lake to catch whatever is running. Sometimes the groups know what they are doing. Often they don’t. Captain Dan runs interference on his well-equipped boat so his clients have a great time and catch fish. He has always had a sixth sense about where fish are and how to catch them. Electronics help, but his fishing instinct may exert even more pull. Angling Life tells stories of the failures and successes where this instinct has led—and how the instinct has changed as well over time.

Captain Dan’s personal journey stretches across the globe over the course of this conversation. Each story takes the reader to a different, often far-flung setting, where a fishing story frames Captain Dan’s own questions. There’s fishing in Iowa and Minnesota, fishing in the Rockies, the Atlantic and Pacific, off Cabos San Lucas and Bali and, of course, Lake Michigan. Bait, depth, boats, waves—honestly, I’m not much of a fisher-person but there is much to commend Angling Life because Danny tells details which fill out each story. Details about being a charter boat captain and the business that surrounds that position. Details about storms at sea, and storms inside, about looking for a sure footing everywhere, except for the foundational places he heard about growing up. Which is the place he eventually returned. Captain Dan’s prodigal story is the central story. Like many prodigal stories, it is the inevitable decline that prods him to make life changes. Captain Dan’s journey points to God and the Christ of God—but not in any churchy way you’ve ever heard before. The conversation between writer and reader ultimately invites relation with God, but like two deckhands talking about work-a-day tools of everyday life.

The chapters stand as individual stories, which is a strength. But I might have hoped to see the chapters fit together into a longer learning-narrative with a cohesive story line running the length of the book. Because I know Dan, I found myself itching to hear even more details about the internal storms: to name names. To confess sins. To point out the cause and effect that motivated his seeking and eventual finding of the biggest fish.

###