Hook, Line and Thinker

By Lev Grossman

On April 1, 1865, Confederate General George Edward Pickett slipped away from his post at a vital crossroads in Virginia because a fellow officer had caught several shad for lunch. Thus was the Battle of Five Forks lost, and the course of the Civil War irrevocably altered. If The Founding Fish (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 358 pages) is any indication, had John McPhee been in command at Five Forks, he might have behaved likewise.

The Founding Fish is a worthy addition to the newly popular genre of the one-fish book (joining Mark Kurlansky's best-selling Cod, among others). Its subject, the relatively unsung American shad, is a large and feisty fish found mostly in rivers in the northeastern U.S. It is the shad's misfortune to be excessively tasty--its scientific name is Alosa sapidissima, the latter word meaning "most savory." It is also notoriously bony: a Native American legend has the shad being created from a porcupine turned inside out.

McPhee, the Pulitzer-prizewinning author of Annals of the Former World, performs a series of virtuosic variations on the theme of shad, including its role in history, its heroic migratory habits--a single shad can travel 10,000 miles in its lifetime--and the author's sometimes excruciating attempts to catch the fish. "There is a God," he writes, gazing wistfully at his shadless line, "a God who knows what He is looking at and enjoys making decisions." (The emotion you're feeling right now is shad-enfreude.)

McPhee may not be the consummate angler, but he has a gimlet eye for the mot juste, as when he describes the "Cretaceous" look of a backhoe. If the book occasionally strays into arcane areas of fish biology more interesting to hardened pescophiles than general readers, the latter should just pick out those portions, like the bones of the shad itself. They'll still get a well-balanced and decidedly savory meal. --By Lev Grossman