Review by Tabitha Thompson

If you are looking to Howell Raines’ The One That Got Away: A Memoir for the juicy details of the “Jayson Blair affair,” for which Raines was fired as executive editor of The New York Times, you may be disappointed. You may, because “the twit,” as Raines refers to Blair, doesn’t appear until the last 25 pages. You may not, because as much of this memoir is spent discussing the Times as on other fish stories.

Even if journalism was my second love [to fishing], I had felt from the start an unfeigned passion for newspapering and an almost religious sense of mission about the Times as an institution. Whatever its flaws, the Times best embodies the kind of journalism that is essential to the future of the American nation. Helping the paper make the changes necessary to assuring its own future was a worthy life’s work.... (36)

The narrative jerks at first: chapters jump topics and time without real connection—from a snapshot of 1946 to Raines’ 1993 rising at NYT to a short history of Alabama—then settles into several chapters about the primal moment of hooking a marlin off Christmas Island and wrestling with it for several hours. With some chapters wedged in on ruminations of childhood, the marlin story prevails to the middle of the book, whereupon Raines leaves the story unfinished—effectively hooking the reader.

Meanwhile, Raines’ writing style sometimes requires the reader to be as patient with him as he was with that marlin.

An astonishing blue-and-silver creation came out of the top of a Pacific wave that loomed above our puny boat like a hillock of cerulean jelly. (95) Dear hearts, I wish to tell you that this lordly fish swung toward the fly as inexorably as doom’s pendulum, not hastening in the least until the last instant.... (81) Yet hear this, brothers and sisters of the angle. In this supreme moment, with the fatal fist of doom and desire clutched tight around my throat, I did not fuck up. (100)

But Raines’ wordly Southern drawl grows on you. A great guide, Raines takes us to exotic fishing locations where he opines on journalism, politics, and writing, sharing his extensive experience and insights. He claims that “the one that got away” is always more memorable, more palpable, more real than the easy “ones”—true no matter to what noun “one” refers. Likewise, even if Raines gets away from you a bit, he’s worth the effort.