Rick Bass is arguably our foremost nature writer, but what makes him so remarkable is that he doesn’t wear his passion for the outdoors on his sleeve but rather somewhere inside, a place that is private but also available to his readers over 22 books. Nature, it seems, is not a badge for Bass to wear, but a way of life. Although in his less successful stories he becomes strident and political, making predictable points against those who want to bulldoze forests and destroy Alaska wildlife, most of the stories in his new collection, “The Lives of Rocks,” are stories in which nature exists as a part of characters rather than removed from them.
And, thankfully, he’s not hierarchical, echoing Emerson in his famous essay “Nature,” who wrote, “A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway.” For this reason, these are stories that will interest the most committed urbanite as well as the naturalist. Like all good writers, Bass doesn’t create barriers, but extends across them.
Bass’ prose can be tough and realistic because he doesn’t take the romantic view of nature as being exclusively benign. But he can also rise to lyricism, as in this passage from “The Canoeists,” a story of young lovers adrift in the world: “And what invisible braid or fabric is formed of such connections, transitory and sprawling across time, across generations? Do they last, invisible, to form a kind of fiber or residue in the world, or are they all eventually washed away as if cleansed and made nothing again by a summer rainstorm’s passage?”
Bass generally places his characters in rural settings, usually in Montana but also in Texas and the Gulf Coast. And he is as interested in relationships, familial as well as romantic, as he is in rocks and fauna.
In the masterful title story of this collection, for example, he writes movingly of a woman living alone while going through chemotherapy. Weakened by the treatments, Jyl’s life is enlivened by visits from two children from a neighboring farm whose parents are evangelicals. One asks Jyl if she’s a Christian and she replies, “I guess I find God more in the out-of-doors and in the way we treat one another, than in any church. I’ve never cared to sit inside for anything unless I absolutely had to.”
Over the pages of the story, the three nurture and amaze each other with their narratives. Jyl, whose father was a well-known geologist, tells the kids about fossils, and tectonic plates, understanding that some of what she says will no doubt be in contrast to what they’ve heard about the world from their parents or in church.
But she persists, remarking that, “No rock is ever finished, all stones are continually being remade, until they vanish from the face of the earth. And yet, even then, once reduced to windblown dust, they are reforming.”
The metaphor is clear. What happens to rock may be seen as a hopeful message for humans as well, and hope is necessary in a life of pain and forbearance such as Jyl’s has become. But it is typical of Bass’ artistry that he never feels the need to pound his point home – readers will see it or not – and so the story and the characters co-exist in a fragile beauty until they too are separated, as one feels they must finally be.
Having said all this in praise of Bass, it’s only fair to point out that his characters do sometimes appear to be taken from central casting. Too many drive old pickups and cut their own wood, so much so that one begins to feel this is a value, as if evil and greed can’t exist as easily in rural settings as in the suburbs. Would that this were so, but the truth is that hunting and fishing, like anything else, can become a fetish, a kind of fictional shorthand for all that’s right and good in the world. It’s a lazy kind of characterization and Bass is too fine a writer to indulge in it. Reading through these stories, I found myself wishing for at least one character who drove a hybrid and drank skinny lattes.
But that’s a minor quibble. At least seven of these stories are as fine as anything published this year, and “The Lives of Rocks” is a small masterpiece. Reading Rick Bass is a revelatory experience, detailing truths about the outdoors as one might expect with this writer, but breaking ground in its study of human nature as well.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
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The Lives of Rocks
By Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin, $23
