NONFICTION - March 3, 1991

ON THE SPINE OF TIME: An Angler’s Love of the Smokies by Harry Middleton (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 223 pp.). Here’s the latest installment in that huge cottage industry of forty-something men writing about the redemptive power of nature. When Harry Middleton finds himself sinking under the weight of life’s burdens, he heads off to the Great Smoky Mountains of Alabama, where life is charged with an invigorating “economy and urgency.” Fishing is less a form of relaxation than a type of meditation for Middleton: The pressure on his fishing rod represents “the full weight of things--the weight of mountain and river laced into flesh and bone by a rising trout.” This kind of encomiastic prose can seem overwrought in book length, but Middleton leavens it with hearty comic asides about himself and river towns such as the “cosmic crossroads” of Fyffe, Ala., which reported seeing Elvis Presley emerging from a craft resembling an immense red-and-blue baler with wings. After singing “Don’t Be Cruel,” the King jumped back into his souped-up baler and sailed back into the starry Alabama night.