I like to eat fish. That’s about the extent of my relationship with them. Before I married, I had a boyfriend who loved fishing and took me with him once; I couldn’t understand what he thought was so great about it. Before our children came along, my ex-husband had several large fish tanks where he bred African cichlids, which he sold to a pet store to support his aquarium habit.
But I’ve never been much interested in fish beyond what they taste like. So, when I first saw Andrew Reeves’s book, Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW, 2019) I wasn’t immediately drawn to it. I received it as a gift one Christmas after deciding to pursue this project to read and review all the books to come out of the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing.
Overrun sat on my shelf for a year or three before I cracked the spine. And then, as happened with Karen Stiller’s The Minister’s Wife—another book I would not have chosen but thoroughly enjoyed—I found myself utterly absorbed. As author Maude Barlow reflects in her advance praise for the book, “A riveting, ‘can’t put it down’ book about fish? You bet!”
Reeves opens the story where the crisis began, close to the mouth of the Mississippi where, in the 1950s, an enterprising judge bought some land, created a lake, and stocked it with fish to be caught for a fee. When aquatic grass threatened to choke out the fish, the judge’s son, now in charge of the business, looked for a way to deal with it.
With the publication of books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s, environmental awareness was growing. Importing Asian carp, which eat aquatic grasses like nobody’s business, seemed a better choice than trying to control it with chemicals.
That was before the environmental community began to appreciate the threat posed by invasive species—species deliberately or accidentally imported, many of which have caused untold damage to ecosystems because they didn’t evolve there, have no natural predators to keep them in check, and therefore threaten to choke out species native to an area. (As an avid gardener, plant species like dandelions, morning glory, and English ivy spring to my mind.)
Reeves follows the carp as it moves north, taking over lakes and rivers, leaving devastation in its wake. Incorporating research that must have seen him crawling through archives for weeks and conducting interviews that took him on land and water journeys south along the Mississippi and north to Illinois, he builds tension, eases off, builds more tension, and eases off again as he moves toward the climax like the author of a great mystery novel.
Reeves’s skill as a writer goes well beyond finding a compelling way to shape a CNF story and deep into descriptions of people and landscapes that hold readers’ attention between peaks in the narrative. Here’s a sample:
I had one last stop before leaving Arkansas. Ninety-two of the White River’s 720 miles flow through the White River National Wildlife Refuge, a 160,000-acre boomerang of land eight miles north of where the White River meets the Mississippi. Three hundred oxbow lakes are the dominant feature in the refuge. Here, the Mississippi shows signs of its constant movement: as the river erodes its banks, u-shaped meanders form that grow deeper with time. As the horseshoe becomes more pronounced, the neck of land between bends in the river grows narrower until it finally caves. Cut off from the river, the once-vibrant meanders sit dormant waiting, like lost children, for the river to come collect them.
I generally start my day by drinking coffee and reading for about an hour. While devouring Overrun, I had a hard time cutting myself off after two or three hours. At 330 pages, it’s a hefty book chock full of deep and thorough research crafted into a compelling narrative by a masterful storyteller.
As I work my way through this project I’ve created, I’m learning not to judge a book by its cover (which in this case is quite creative) or its subject matter, but to keep my mind open to whatever comes my way. What came my way this time was a completely unexpected but very welcome treasure that I can’t recommend too highly.
Books on environmental issues:
On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake, by Gregor Craigie.
Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, by Virginia Heffernan.
The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest, by Helena Moncrieff.
Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, by Jenn Thornhill Verma.
Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.
