BACKCAST

In the wake of divorce, Ureneck (Journalism/Boston Univ.) tries to reconcile with his college-bound son and his own past during a ten-day fishing trip in the Alaska wilderness.

The author and son Adam glided down the salmon-rich Kanektok River aboard a rented rubber raft in late August 2000, but most of this thoughtful, engaging memoir actually unfolds in central New Jersey and Maine. Ureneck recalls a lonely nomadic childhood in sleepy Garden State towns like Spotswood and New Brunswick, raised by his fiercely loving Greek mother and disappointed by two different fathers, both ruined by drink. His second father, a hard-living merchant-marine sailor named John Kababick, helped foster his love of fishing but also did things like lose four months’ pay in one day at Monmouth Racetrack. Kababick eventually disappeared just as the author’s biological father had. When Ureneck’s own marriage began to dissolve years later in the Maine woods, he hoped to minimize Adam’s anger and resentment by taking a long-promised fishing trip to Alaska. The strategy proved only marginally successful. His sullen, precocious son clearly resented the breakup of the family, and if Ureneck ever attempted to explain his reasons to Adam, he doesn’t provide that crucial conversation here. Nor do we ever get the boy’s reaction to Dad’s new girlfriend, a New York Times reporter he met while on sabbatical from his job as a Maine newspaper editor. When not dwelling too obsessively on his unraveled marriage, however, Ureneck generally proves an intelligent tour guide, offering lovely descriptions of the morning mist shrouding a wilderness river, or the glare of a mother bear when she and a cub are startled by an approaching river raft.

More memoir and less Alaska adventure than the subtitle suggests, but still an enjoyable, heartfelt narrative.