BOOKS: THE WILDERNESS WITHIN

Rick Bass drew good reviews in 1992 with The Ninemile Wolves, a moody nonfiction report of a Canadian wolf pack that crossed the U.S. border a few years ago and colonized one of the western states. But Bass’s fiction (The Book of Yaak, In the Loyal Mountains) seems to get categorized as good-with-an-asterisk. He’s regional. (So was Wallace Stegner, of course, until he became a national monument.) Bass may reach monument or even wilderness-area status in time, but for the moment he gathers honorable obscurity, and blackflies, on the shelf reserved for nature writers.

The view here is, forget that asterisk. With the publication of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (Houghton Mifflin; 190 pages; $23), a collection of novellas about men and women in nature, there should be no more avoiding plain truth: Rick Bass is a very good writer of fiction. What’s more, he’s good at a kind of writing that is often done with irritating self-consciousness. Bringing the natural world into a story as something more than scenery invites a rich array of overdelicate word-painting and drum-roll weather effects, with turning seasons or the death and birth of creatures pointing solemn metaphorical lessons. Bass is better than this.

Two of these stories wander across the line of gritty fantasy. But categories kill, and so to say “Oh, yeah, magic realism” is to veer off several degrees from true north. The narrations are what they are, which is true of only the strongest kind of imagining. The Myths of Bears is a fine, loony love story. A brilliant, probably mad trapper, somewhere in the West, sometime about a century ago, drives his woman away with bizarre behavior, perhaps caused by something like epilepsy. She is bigger, a better runner, a forest dweller, who can sense his approach across continental divides. He tracks her for months across the distance of seasons; she flees, easily able to stay ahead, despairing, besotted. He follows, implacable, daft with love. It’s not easy to make something like this catch fire and burn to the end, but Bass does it.

His second fantasy, Where the Sea Used to Be, sketches a young man, a rough-and-tumble oil geologist and aviator, who is obsessed with oil–not the money it can bring but the ancient, hidden stuff itself. He can sometimes see, almost clearly, the shape and shadows of a deep-buried oil deposit that once was an inland sea. He meets a beautiful young woman, takes her, literally, in his airplane while scouting for oil, and sorrows that he doesn’t have the knack of falling in love with her. The journey of the tale is his effort to teach himself, like a man learning Norwegian, to do this.

The title story, less obviously a fantasy and more difficult to bring off for lack of stage effects, traces the years of watching and listening that tie a woman to a large, rundown ranch in Texas. The point of the long, brooding account is simply for narrator and reader to understand these profound ties, the connectedness of memory, time’s flow, seed’s uncurling, and “the spider’s silk lines of chance.” Writing of this quality creates a stillness in the mind.

–By John Skow