Customer Reviews

The Lives of Rocks

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I've read most of what Rick Bass has written and look forward to anything new that comes out about the Yaak Valley. This collection of stories, mostly short but one long, covers Montana, Texas and maybe a couple other states too. All are worthwhile.

What struck me though was that for the first time I found a common thread of love lost/life lost that I had not noticed before. Maybe it was there in the earlier writings, but I hadn't seen it. This time, in Lives of Rocks, there are some truly heartbreaking scenes, especially in the title story, where what could have been is rather forcefully struck down and replaced by a future that looks to be much more prosaic than the wonderful interactions between the characters that have taken place.

A friend of mine is a full-out supporter of the "bleak is beautiful" concept in novels, to the extent that he is reading Bleak House now and loving it. I have difficulty enjoying bleak novels, and this collection of stories is not bleak, but perhaps somewhat tragic, and as one of the Greek writers I was exposed to in high school said, tragedy allows us to experience emotions that we might not otherwise feel.


This, then, is a collection of stories that is good for you, even though many are sad.

Classic Rick Bass. Now of course I read them in South Texas instead of Alaska so stories like "Pagans" really hit me where I live. Always in the Bass stories, I find people I wished I had known and events that I wouldn't have missed. The best characters since "Platte River" are here.

If you liked Rick Bass' earlier writing, this collection will ratchet your appreciation even higher. Along with McGuane, Ivan Doig and the other "Stegner School" of writers, Bass creates a human condition and a sense of place with prose that touches your heart. And with this writing, place moves out of the west with no loss of impact. Sentences garb you and make you reread them just for the sheer pleasue of their compact, lyrical beauty. I just finished it and will reread it for no other reason than to experience it once again.

Rick Bass is a unique individual, a unique writer, and this is a unique book even for him. He lives in the Yaak Valley of Montana, part of which is protected from development but not enough to keep the area from being ravaged by exploitation. Rick has helped lead a defense based on gaining wilderness designation for a sufficient amount to ensure retaining the natural values of this remote corner of the United States. That effort has been successful to the extent of avoiding further loss of the environment, but has so far failed in gaining the overall objective. The immediate threat to the Yaak is only moderate, and the opposition to wilderness designation has been primarily generic, but it has failed to get enough interest in Washington DC to receive the necessary legislative action. Rick has written articles about the cause, has addressed it in books, and has at times expressed considerable frustration in the lack of achieving a permanent solution.

This book is a collection of stories. The closest to non-fiction is "Fiber" which ends with a plea that someone help save the Yaak. A common denominator in the stories is some form of nature, and it is usually under attack. As other reviewers have said, the stories are "dark," some almost desperately so. Intended, or not, I see this as a metaphor of Rick Bass' frustration with the effort to protect the Yaak.

Another common denominator is that every story involves a study of an everyday human emotion. Several involve interaction between lovers, family members, or close friends. "The Lives of Rocks" is a compelling study of interaction across generational and religious lines. After reading the book jointly with another individual, I found that we spent more time discussing each story than it took us to read it. This would be an interesting book to share in the right type of book club.

Rick Bass is a skilled writer of character-driven drama, and his works are defined by how his characters develop via their connections, or lack thereof, with the natural bounty around them. Bass can make this work in surprising ways, particularly via the eccentric personalities and ravaged outdoor environments encountered in "Yazoo" and "Goats." The winning story here is "The Lives of Rocks" in which a hardy woman must admit that she needs help living off the land when she becomes terminally ill, and must work with neighbors who have a different outlook towards nature. One weakness in Bass' writing is that his developments in plot and characterizations are very verbose and languorous, which is a feasible way to illustrate communion with nature, but which some readers might find sluggish and unsatisfying. This weakness all but wrecks "Pagans" and "The Canoeists," in which the plots go nowhere while the characters ponder themselves. And this collection is damaged by the hugely disappointing "Fiber." The disappointment is due to the fact that the story starts very strongly, with an environmental vigilante atoning for past excesses, only to shift abruptly to a non-fiction tirade from Bass in which he blasts certain environmental organizations for not paying more attention to his (adopted) home area in Montana. Bass has a very unique outlook on the human condition and his stories pack a very subtle yet insistent punch. But this collection has a few weaknesses that hold it back from true greatness. [~doomsdayer520~]

My first Bass book, The Lives of Rocks is at times woeful, ponderous, solemn, and bleak, but always striking. The fiction, presented here in 10 short stories, doesn't just touch on, or poetically present, topics such as familial relationships, love, nature, death, regret, beauty, plunder, and exasperation it gut-punches you with them. Bass's style can get a bit cumbersome for my taste - his loves long, complex sentences and piles on the adjectives, but his prose is nonetheless beautiful and effective. His stories rely less on traditional structure, plot and characterization and more on mood. His style is unique (from the perspective of a recent addition to the host of "lovers of fiction") and despite the downbeat mood that pervades this collection, by the end of the book I could consider myself a Rick Bass fan.

Rick Bass is a marvelous writer with a true gift for the language and a conservationist's heart. That said, I was put off by his references to hunting. For this Buddhist oriented reader, even though the circumstances of the hunting seemed mostly justified, the concept rankles. The idea isn't off-putting enough, however, to keep me from reading more by Rick Bass.

Rick Bass and Terry Tempest Williams gave a presentation together at our Book Festival this year. The short stories in this book have been my first experience reading his works. I found them to be creative, intense and well written. There was a feeling of despair about the present human condition and state of our world through out the book, though not overwhelming. That said, these stories are well worth reading and probably should be read and their underlying message pondered.

Bass is a fascinating writer and I plan to read more of his work.