<p>‘For A Little While’ brings together writer Rick Bass’s short fiction in a weighty collection. Dwight Garner reviews the writings that are like a breath of fresh air </p>.<p>If you came of age as a magazine reader in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, you became accustomed to finding Rick Bass’ short stories in the better localities: The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, GQ, The Paris Review.<br /><br />His stories felt like injections of cool mountain air, even when they were set in Texas (where he was born and raised) or Mississippi (where he worked as a petroleum geologist) rather than in the Yaak Valley of Montana, where he has lived for almost three decades.<br />They cleared a kind of space. You flipped to a Rick Bass story and found calm craftsmanship, muted epiphanies, working men and women acting out the oldest struggles (for love, self-respect, firewood, venison, rent money) in rural and often beautiful settings. Sometimes these people drove down to the river, like characters in a Springsteen song, and into the river they dived.<br /><br />Even when Bass’s stories were not particularly good, you felt you could probably learn something from them: how to field dress an elk, in case you happened to blast one, or track a Gila monster or fight a fire or fry up the rabbit you just shot in your garden.<br />Humour was not a big part of his appeal. Sometimes it flashed anyway, like dimples on the cheek of an earnest rancher. In a story called “Goats,” collected now in For a Little While: New and Selected Stories, two young men decide it’s a sane idea to drive home with a young goat in the back of their station wagon.<br /><br />The results, if predictable, are fun to read about. Hooves clack on the interior; the roof is dented from within. Goat squeals become goat roars. The animal flings itself into the front seat. Finally and horribly, “the calf in his fright began emitting fountains of greenish diarrhoea, spraying it mid-whirl as if from a hose, so that we were yelling and ducking, and soon the interior of the car was nearly coated with dripping green slime.” <br /><br />The older narratives in For a Little While have been culled from Bass’s five books of short stories, and they remind you of his strengths as a writer. He is a keen and relentless observer of woods and prairies and beasts of every variety, so much so that many of these stories could be dropped intact into The Best American Science and Nature Writing and no one would blink. He writes with special feeling about loneliness.<br /><br />In one story a man has been isolated for so long that “his imagination was turning in on itself and growing, like the most uncontrollable kind of cancer, with nowhere to go.” His best stories — “Elk,” about a hunting trip gone wrong, is probably his masterpiece — bring life and death within a hair’s breadth of each other.<br /><br />Yet I’d be lying if I didn’t say that reading For a Little While mostly made me wish I’d left my fond memories of Bass’s work alone. Read in bulk, his stories begin to seem soft and similar and frequently shapeless. They drain the life from each other rather than striking sparks.<br /><br />The homilies in Bass’s writing are wearing. “There was too much gluttony, and not enough humility,” one character comments. There is a surprising amount of greeting card sentiment on the level of this notion: “For every mysterious curve of the land, there is a similar shape in the human heart; and because of this, no one ever needed to feel he was alone.”<br /><br />Respect for nature spills over into cloying reverence. The men and women in Bass’s stories can rarely walk more than a few feet without being struck dumb by some flare of natural beauty. We know what the author thinks about the fineness of a character’s moral weave by how excited he gets over a raven sighting.<br /><br />A few of these stories have some hoodoo out of a Cormac McCarthy or a Harry Crews tale — warped men living out in the woods killing alligators; giant pigs under houses; people chained to porches — but the grotesqueries aren’t persuasive or profound.<br /><br />If many of the stories in For a Little While are short on torque and seem to be set on medium boil, every once in a while Bass finds himself in a deep, vital groove.</p>.<p><br />For a Little While<br />Rick Bass<br />Little Brown<br />2016, pp 480, Rs. 421<br /><br />The New York Times<br /></p>
<p>‘For A Little While’ brings together writer Rick Bass’s short fiction in a weighty collection. Dwight Garner reviews the writings that are like a breath of fresh air </p>.<p>If you came of age as a magazine reader in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, you became accustomed to finding Rick Bass’ short stories in the better localities: The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, GQ, The Paris Review.<br /><br />His stories felt like injections of cool mountain air, even when they were set in Texas (where he was born and raised) or Mississippi (where he worked as a petroleum geologist) rather than in the Yaak Valley of Montana, where he has lived for almost three decades.<br />They cleared a kind of space. You flipped to a Rick Bass story and found calm craftsmanship, muted epiphanies, working men and women acting out the oldest struggles (for love, self-respect, firewood, venison, rent money) in rural and often beautiful settings. Sometimes these people drove down to the river, like characters in a Springsteen song, and into the river they dived.<br /><br />Even when Bass’s stories were not particularly good, you felt you could probably learn something from them: how to field dress an elk, in case you happened to blast one, or track a Gila monster or fight a fire or fry up the rabbit you just shot in your garden.<br />Humour was not a big part of his appeal. Sometimes it flashed anyway, like dimples on the cheek of an earnest rancher. In a story called “Goats,” collected now in For a Little While: New and Selected Stories, two young men decide it’s a sane idea to drive home with a young goat in the back of their station wagon.<br /><br />The results, if predictable, are fun to read about. Hooves clack on the interior; the roof is dented from within. Goat squeals become goat roars. The animal flings itself into the front seat. Finally and horribly, “the calf in his fright began emitting fountains of greenish diarrhoea, spraying it mid-whirl as if from a hose, so that we were yelling and ducking, and soon the interior of the car was nearly coated with dripping green slime.” <br /><br />The older narratives in For a Little While have been culled from Bass’s five books of short stories, and they remind you of his strengths as a writer. He is a keen and relentless observer of woods and prairies and beasts of every variety, so much so that many of these stories could be dropped intact into The Best American Science and Nature Writing and no one would blink. He writes with special feeling about loneliness.<br /><br />In one story a man has been isolated for so long that “his imagination was turning in on itself and growing, like the most uncontrollable kind of cancer, with nowhere to go.” His best stories — “Elk,” about a hunting trip gone wrong, is probably his masterpiece — bring life and death within a hair’s breadth of each other.<br /><br />Yet I’d be lying if I didn’t say that reading For a Little While mostly made me wish I’d left my fond memories of Bass’s work alone. Read in bulk, his stories begin to seem soft and similar and frequently shapeless. They drain the life from each other rather than striking sparks.<br /><br />The homilies in Bass’s writing are wearing. “There was too much gluttony, and not enough humility,” one character comments. There is a surprising amount of greeting card sentiment on the level of this notion: “For every mysterious curve of the land, there is a similar shape in the human heart; and because of this, no one ever needed to feel he was alone.”<br /><br />Respect for nature spills over into cloying reverence. The men and women in Bass’s stories can rarely walk more than a few feet without being struck dumb by some flare of natural beauty. We know what the author thinks about the fineness of a character’s moral weave by how excited he gets over a raven sighting.<br /><br />A few of these stories have some hoodoo out of a Cormac McCarthy or a Harry Crews tale — warped men living out in the woods killing alligators; giant pigs under houses; people chained to porches — but the grotesqueries aren’t persuasive or profound.<br /><br />If many of the stories in For a Little While are short on torque and seem to be set on medium boil, every once in a while Bass finds himself in a deep, vital groove.</p>.<p><br />For a Little While<br />Rick Bass<br />Little Brown<br />2016, pp 480, Rs. 421<br /><br />The New York Times<br /></p>