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Rachelle Hampton: Can I just say I’m so honored to be taking part in my very first DRAB? This was one of the series I was most jealous of before I joined Defector because it seemed so fun. That maybe makes it even funnier that the very first book I suggested (and the one we ended up choosing) is the biggest bummer DRAB has ever seen.
I first came across Young Men And Fire in a McNally Jackson earlier this year; I remember my attention being caught by the promise of an in-depth look at the Smokejumpers, who I’d been sort of lowkey obsessed with since reading Nora Roberts’ Chasing Fire. I’d never heard of the Mann Gulch fire or Norman Maclean really, though I realized after we picked this book that he also wrote A River Runs Through It, which I’ve seen the movie adaptation of. All to say, I was pretty stoked when y’all agreed to read it. What piqued y’alls interest?
David Roth: [Please imagine what follows in the voice of an extremely old man. Not, like, Norman Maclean old, but old enough to have been alive during The Norman Maclean Moment that peaked with the release of A River Runs Through It in 1992, two years after Maclean’s death at the age of 87.] A River Runs Through It hit the culture about as hard as an autobiographical novella about fly fishing and being Presbyterian/haunted by grief could hit, which is to say the book sold a lot of copies and became a movie directed by Robert Redford and led my dad and presumably many other people like him not just to buy a copy of the book but to experiment tragicomically with tying flies and fly-fishing. The pursuit was supposed to be profound and meditative, and as Maclean wrote it I’m sure it was, but my dad found it boring and difficult, and the one time I tried it with him I did, too. But that book was a big enough hit that Young Men And Fire, this unhurried and unfinished and (yes) meditative work of nonfiction about a wildfire tragedy, was reconstructed and published posthumously. I mostly enjoyed it, but it is a strange one—a story of obsession, an investigation told in this extremely unhurried and finally very sad way, and resolving more or less in the way it begins, which is with the unknowable mystery of death.
Maitreyi Anantharaman: I have no appetite for adventure, so I read a lot of this book in terror. But! I do have considerable appetite for writing that’s haunted by particular people or events, and this fit the bill. In a way I found frustrating sometimes but generally successful, Young Men And Fire is such a circular book. Maclean is returning to the same scenes over and over, puzzling through new theories. I’m not sure it really has any momentum, which sounds like a bad thing, but is kind of the point, I think?
Giri Nathan: I was drawn to the narrow scope of this book. Spending 300 pages to piece together an event that played out over less than half an hour, in remote forest, 30 years after the fact? I’m into that. It seemed like it had to also be a story of a writer’s niche obsession, which I tend to enjoy.
Patrick Redford: My way in was thinking about a handful of friends who are or were wildland firefighters, something that as a Californian and someone who has written about wildfires a lot, I have tried to really get a handle on. One tried to be a Smokejumper herself but the process was too intense, so I was super interested in reading the definitive piece of Smokejumper Writing. Ultimately, that frame was not a useful one, as the reverential awe that Maclean has for them as both a class and as individuals is incompatible with any sort of casual interest. The obsession, as many of you have noted, is The Thing here.
DR: I feel like the idea of a nonfiction book centering around this obsessive need to know some buried or forgotten truth—in Maclean’s case, a need to know seemingly grounded in a sense of obligation to the 13 young firefighters who lost their lives fighting a wildfire that wound up much bigger and more dangerous than anyone could have predicted at the time—is familiar by now. At some point you need to explain to a reader why it is that you are spending all this time and effort trying to figure something out that most people have either just accepted as a mystery or simply stopped thinking about. In Maclean’s case, he started investigating the Mann Gulch fire in earnest after a long career in academia (and long after a shorter career as a wildfire firefighter). He was born in 1902; he took classes from Robert Frost in college and taught John Paul Stevens as a literature professor at the University of Chicago. The extent to which all of this reaches far back into the past—Maclean’s own, and 20th century America’s, and into the sort of prehistory of firefighting—was fascinating to me. Trying to excavate all this with the help of just two surviving witnesses, some incomplete official reports, and a dwindling number of people who were involved in the fire or the subsequent investigation that maybe sort of tried to cover aspects of it up, builds a kind of surprising and satisfying bit of race-against-time suspense into a book that is, as Maitreyi said, mostly without momentum, and by rights mostly just an old man musing about stuff and walking around forbidding remote terrain on hot days and trying to get a succession of finicky outboard motors to work.
RH: I really love the way Maclean leaned into his own obsession; it’s what I think lends Young Men And Fire the propulsion that Roth described. The last two nonfiction books I read for fun—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing—are both sort of diametric opposites to Young Men And Fire. They’re both very plot-driven and have a sense of forward momentum that I agree is sort of inherently missing from this story. But both of them also obscure the writer at the center of the story while Maclean invites us into his brain. I was really charmed by his use of we and our throughout the book which is a storytelling technique that I feel like has largely gone by the wayside. It felt like going on a hike with an experienced woodsman: yeah, he’s going to ramble a bit but he’s also going to tell you it’s all about the journey. (What’s the overlap between woodsmen and stoners?) I can’t tell how much of that sense of intimacy was down to the fact that the book was technically unfinished; I did wonder whether Maclean would have imposed more distance if he’d had the chance.
GN: I’m curious to what extent you guys found this book a slog and where, if ever, that started to change. As I moved through part one I was struggling for two reasons. One: My pathetic inability to visualize topography when it is described solely in prose, which has been frustrating me since I was reading about fantasy battles in Redwall or Tolkien, and which was especially frustrating while reading the most topographical-ass book I have yet to encounter. Two: A tinge of what we call around these parts the “bourbon bastard” register of writing, though perhaps it’d be more fair to call Maclean a proto-bourbon-bastard. Whenever he spun these grandiose run-on sentences about how these fellas loved to run home from a fire to drink beer and watch a tall girl sway on a barstool—that detail came up, I swear, every other page for huge stretch of the book, which might have less to do with Maclean and more with how his unfinished book was prepared for publication—I was ready to give up. There are some successful, soaring paragraphs in here, but the more Maclean strained to convince us of the cosmic and moral significance of an event I was, at baseline, already extremely interested in, the more I struggled with his prose. Some of the most challenging passages had a tinny Nic Pizzolatto quality. It’s appropriate, then, that I found charm and momentum in part two, when Maclean pivots from a stylized retelling of the fire itself to a buddy-cop tale of investigation.
MA: Also felt a bit spatially challenged—my copy did include a helpful map and some photos. Hooray for books with pictures.
DR: I also had a hard time with some of the topography stuff in the beginning—I have in my notes “if this motherfucker says ‘upgulch’ one more time I swear to god”—and was surprised to find the investigative stuff, which as I mentioned earlier is mostly walking long distances and trying to recreate stuff decades in the past in a fairly unhurried manner, much more involving than the story of the fire itself. Although, again, it might just be that there is more to the investigation than there was to the fire—the investigation is patient, but it advances at its own pace; the fire, on the other hand, was a slaughter. It happened too fast and too decisively to have much drama in it, and I think Maclean tends to gild the lily a bit as a result.
PR: He wrote like 10 percent of this book in the voice Hamilton Nolan uses when he wants to pretend to be a bad writer, which made finishing it a chore. I could not read him list the four elements of the universe as “sky, earth, fire, and young men” or craft an elaborate river metaphor, then look back on the paragraph and write “No trouble at all for stream fishermen to visualize” without wanting to put the book down. I have the training to be able to visualize the topography cleanly, but also I did not always want to when it was written in phrases like “There is something about mountains that hates to be plains.” The thing that did get me to finish the book is that within that cloud of cigar haze, there are some banger sentences, and I actually feel the times when he got a little embarrassing with it reinforced the sense of obsession that drives the book.
RH: This was maybe one of the only books I’ve read where I preferred the audiobook. The bourbon bastard goes down easier when some guy is pronouncing Missouri like it has an e at the end. It also helped some of the more nitty-gritty upgulch/downgulch specifics to wash over me like a mountain stream. But I also think I might have a much higher threshold (and perhaps even love!) for a hokey-ass sentence. Every time I read or heard something like “sky, earth, fire, and young men” I felt like Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Like there Maclean is again, doing his thing. Mountains do hate to be plains.
DR: I think the evidence re: the Mountain/Plain thing is very hard to argue with. I will say that the line between “ponderous slog” and “charming amble” is pretty thin, and pretty subjective, and there were many times when I was charmed by how antique some of the writing was. Someone writing like this full out, in 2024, is showing symptoms of Vincenzo Barney Disease. A septuagenarian retired professor writing like this in the 1970s I am somewhat more willing to grade on a curve. And I agree that the great sentences, and great passages, are great—Hemingwayesque, is I guess the thing you’re supposed to say, but I found them warmer and more appealing than that. However much mountains hate to be plains, there is something about how forbidding and haunted the space to which Maclean and his story repeatedly returns that really resonated with me. However much I struggled to visualize the finer points of it, Maclean writes it well enough that I never failed to feel it, and felt it more deeply as he kept coming back to look through that burnt-over waste for some lost true thing. Now I am doing it.
GN: It is fascinating which details Maclean found worthy of a build-up and dramatic payoff. There’s a passage where the two survivors are trying to locate where their colleague had been burnt nearly to death, and they know there should be a can there, and someone else in the group finds a can, but before looking at the can the survivors pause to describe the two holes that should be in the top of the can so that its salty potato water could have been consumed, and then they finally look at the can and those holes are indeed right there—masterful pacing, as good as nonfiction writing gets, had my heart pounding. When I got to the passage where he tried to do the same sexy slow build-up on…the Pythagorean theorem, I wanted to die. My man is out here hooting and hollering at the length of a hypotenuse.
MA: I try not to read reviews before DRAB-ing—I don’t want my own thoughts overly colored by reception—but I was too curious about this book’s place in the fire science community to resist, and I came across Kathryn Schulz’s 2014 New York Magazine piece on the book, which was both appreciative and a pretty compelling case against the bourbon bastardry of Young Men And Fire. Maclean’s style establishes the Smokejumpers’ cause as a noble one. But Schulz argues that given what we know about the problems with fire suppression, these Smokejumpers died in an essentially pointless war. (From the Schulz piece: “According to Richard Manning, an environmental journalist who reviewed the book in Northern Lights soon after it came out, Bud Moore, the USFS’s chief of fire control and air operations, pushed Maclean to address the broader policy context of the disaster. Maclean declined.”) Maclean obviously wasn’t uninterested in telling a policy story! Lots of the book is about investigations and reforms. So I found her read of it interesting, and instructive, maybe, about the hazards of his history-as-storytelling approach.
DR: Maclean goes to great lengths to kind of disclaim his capacities as an investigator or historian, and takes that storyteller mantle (and the various liberties it affords him) on fully. And while I think some of that made sense to me—he’s not trying to like Get Justice, or do any of the sort of contemporary oaf-mode true-crime stuff I recoil from—I will admit to being a bit foggy on the distinction at times. I think what it amounted to, which was something I found very moving at the end of the book, was basically retaining the right to make this about the sort of bigger literary story—about youth and nature and death and all that—that seemed to compel him more whenever the spirit moved him. The very last section of the book, which is just a dozen or so pages at the end of the lengthy investigation that makes up part two, makes a turn towards a grander consideration of all this, the tragedy and his fixation upon it. And while he courts some of the Mountains Hate To Be Plains stuff in there—this bit especially is very much in the register of what I imagine a mid-century literature professor would sound like at the peak of a lecture, pulling from Shakespeare and the bible and his own experience—I found the writing very forceful for all that. It’s not quite a conclusion, but this isn’t really a finished book.
RH: That makes me want to ask all of you: did any of you get a sense of how this book might’ve changed if Maclean actually finished it? I think I was so struck by how much was already there—arguably too much if the Pythagorean diversion is anything to go by—that I couldn’t quite make the leap to what a more complete version would look like, which is why I’m not an editor.
GN: It was always going to be a circular book, as Maitreyi put it, because he’s revisiting this short-duration incident from lots of different angles. But I wonder if it would have been more concise, if he’d have been choosier about where and when to start each retelling. To Roth’s point, I also found the ending pretty powerful, a justification for approaching the subject matter the way he did, and all those glancing personal touches hit a lot harder for me than when he went up into that more zoomed-out biblical register. I wonder if there would have been more of that, too.
PR: The unfinishedness I think is this book’s essential quality, because the thing he’s trying to grapple with—the finality and inscrutability of death—is ultimately not something that can be squared. It’s an alignment of content and form. Ultimately the closest you get to understanding it is obsessive worship, which I think describes the tone Maclean is working with here.
RH: Okay, we’ve spent a lot of time on Maclean but I really want to know how this book changed everyone’s perspectives on wildland firefighting, if it did at all. I had a pretty romantic notion of the entire field (thanks Nora Roberts) which Maclean suggests is pretty widespread but I kept being struck by just how roughshod of an operation firefighting was in its early days. Rangers were pulling drunk people off of barstools and sending them into active fires! Random sightseers ended up on rescue missions because they were rubbernecking at the right time! One of the only Mann Gulch survivors had lied about his age and was only 17!
PR: This touches back on the Schulz review Maitreyi brought in, but I found Maclean’s position between the pre-WWII fire regime and the scientific turn that followed to be an interesting one, especially since his understanding was rooted in a militaristic understanding of firefighting. I will confess to coming into the book thinking that you could always just run away from a big wall of fire coming at you if you just Locked In, so I appreciate how thoroughly he constructed the blowup.
MA: Would you guys be able to devise the “escape fire” plan if you were in this situation? Are you built like that? Would you at least have followed Dodge?
PR: I would have died as hell. You’d never catch me laying down in some ashes. They would find me like one of the Pompeii skeletons, frozen forever mid-dab.
DR: I probably would be like “ah jeez” and die making some kind of embarrassing face, but if one of you set an escape fire I’d give it a shot and hop down in the ashes with you. Not because I thought it would save me but because it’s fun to hang out.
GN: I would have gotten wrecked. Definitely would have been the guy taking pictures of the fire, awed by its terrible beauty.
RH: I would not be there because I wouldn’t have passed any of the physical fitness tests required to be a Smokejumper.
GN: I will leave you with a fun revelation. One of the last characters introduced in the book is Frank Albini, a scientist who models the behavior of wildfires. I was interested in him. It was this one line, though, that compelled me to look into him more: “The universe, she is a bitch,” he tells Maclean, paraphrasing an old teacher of his. Sort of sounds like something Steve Albini would say, and it is in fact his dad.
[All Hooting]
