By: Clara Whitmore
When Leigh Seippel began thinking about Ruin: A Novel of Flyfishing in Bankruptcy, the seed of the story was already close to home. The earliest ideas came from a real couple he knew, friends of his parents’ generation, whose financial catastrophe forms the opening shock of the novel. From there, the book moves into imagined territory, reshaping real events into something broader and more searching. What emerges is not a cautionary tale about money but a study of what happens after status, certainty, and belonging disappear.
Seippel’s background in finance gave him a front row seat to failure long before he became a novelist. In that world, dramatic collapses are not rare. Entrepreneurial risk can deliver remarkable success, but it can also erase reputations and marriages in a single stroke. What interested him was not the mechanics of bankruptcy but its emotional residue. In Ruin, Frank Campbell is not reckless or foolish. He is competent, intelligent, and deeply convinced of his place in the world. When that world rejects him, the damage is not just financial. It is social, marital, and existential.
Frank’s humiliation becomes a form of exile. He is cut off from the environment that once affirmed him, forced to confront a version of himself he does not recognize. Seippel frames this fall in terms that echo classic literature. The disgraced or defeated hero searching for redemption is an old story, but Ruin brings it into a contemporary setting where identity is often tied to money, performance, and public standing. Frank is not simply trying to recover his wealth. He is trying to understand who he is without it.
The emotional core of the novel lies in Frank’s marriage to Francy. Seippel was drawn to the moral tension of a man who has deeply harmed someone he loves, not through malice but through negligence and ego. Frank’s business risk did not just fail him. It ruined Francy’s life circumstances as well. That guilt sits heavily between them. The novel explores what it means to live beside someone you have betrayed in a way that cannot be undone.
At thirty-three, Frank and Francy are too young to retreat quietly from life. Yet they cannot return to the ease and confidence of their earlier years. Their relationship exists in a suspended state, filled with unspoken anger, longing, and fear. Seippel captures this through moments of silence and late-night drinking, where conversation circles what cannot quite be said. The question is never simply whether they will stay together, but whether they can become new people without destroying what remains between them.
Fly fishing enters the novel as both refuge and revelation. For Seippel, the sport represents a deliberate step away from complexity. To fish is to enter a smaller, more immediate world governed by water, weather, patience, and chance. For Frank, this shift is lifesaving. Fishing offers him a space where his past does not matter, where skill must be learned again from the beginning. It pulls him out of despair not through abstraction but through action.
Fishing in Ruin is never just calming or pastoral. It is unpredictable and often humbling. Success arrives unevenly, sometimes through surprise rather than mastery. As Frank reinvents himself as a fisherman, he also relearns how to pay attention, how to fail without collapse, and how to find meaning outside dominance and control. The river does not care who he used to be.
The Hudson Valley setting deepens this transformation. Seippel wrote from long familiarity with the landscape, describing a place he lived in for decades. The valley is not romanticized as a simple escape from urban life. It is demanding, isolated, and often unforgiving. Yet it offers a different measure of value. Land, seasons, and labor replace prestige and leverage. For Frank and Francy, the move from Manhattan to inherited farmland is both grounding and disorienting. The place reflects their stripped-down reality.
Art weaves quietly through the story as another form of response to loss. Francy’s painting and Frank’s near philosophical engagement with fishing mirror each other. Both are attempts to work with imperfection rather than deny it. Seippel’s reference to Leonard Cohen’s line about cracks letting in light captures the spirit of the novel. Creation emerges not despite damage but because of it.
Ruin does not offer easy recovery or clean redemption. Instead, it stays with the aftermath, the long stretch where people must live with what they have done and what they have lost. Seippel’s novel suggests that reinvention is not a dramatic reinvention of identity, but a gradual willingness to inhabit a smaller, truer life. In the quiet after the fall, something unexpected may still take root.
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