This Too Shall Pass
Small revelations in an endless landscape.
THE LIVES OF ROCKS
Stories
By Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin. 211 pp. $23
Writing out of some vast objectivity, Rick Bass gives us 10 new stories in which creatures often serve as protagonists and where something of the land is usually more crucial to the tale than anyone living on it. Bass's people, when he gets to them, are a very decent sort; in fact, it is hard to think of another writer more kindly disposed to his characters. There's not an ass among them -- with the possible exception of a vindictive fat woman -- but these people are viewed somewhat distantly as neither more nor less important than anything else in the landscape, including, for instance, the rocks. The rocks in Bass's stories, along with his rivers, mud, elk and trees, are given voice and speak in their strange, frequently beautiful cadences. In one story, for instance, a young woman comes upon a herd of elk: "But they were only grazing, wandering around now, still mewing and clucking and barking and coughing, and feeding on the same sweet-scented grass that she was hiding in."
In the title story, the longest and most affecting of the pieces, a woman awaiting death by cancer finds instead the friendship of two children from a fundamentalist family living just over the mountain. The children, at first merely useful, become even more dear than the health their kindness somehow restores to her. The woman, however, is left shivering in the final scene, alone in a dark cabin that had only recently been her angels' home. The same story provides a text within a text, an ad hoc geology lesson at that, which the woman reads to the children one winter afternoon. "No rock," it says, "is ever finished, all stones are continuously being remade, until they vanish from the face of the earth. And yet, even then, once reduced to windblown dust, they are reforming." Don't look for resolutions here, but listen for the whistle of that wind-blown dust with its this-too-shall-pass reassurance.
"Pagans" is an elegy recalling the summer three Houston teens made a playground of the fouled Sabine River and of how their pleasure in the place began to fall apart with the discovery of a poisoned egret for which they built a shrine of industrial flotsam. When, rather as an afterthought, these teens fall in and out of love, and their youth passes, it seems a turning of no great moment. The narrator, like most of Bass's characters, is a spectator at his own life, with a seat in the nosebleed section.
The triumphs that occur in these stories are evanescent, the result of someone having stumbled into the right place at the right time and having the good sense to know it. Such redemption as Bass offers always comes pouring in through the senses. Perhaps the whole point of "The Canoeists" is to provide that moment when "fireflies would line the banks, illuminating the route they should take -- the fireflies would not venture over water, so the darkness of their absence was a winding lane." A younger version of the ill woman in the title story harvests a bull elk, patriarch of the herd, almost by mistake and somewhat illicitly. The animal has grown to elemental proportions on the sanctuary of a ranch owned by two old bachelor brothers, reasonable gentlemen who instantly forgive her and butcher the beast they will all be eating for the next year.
The kind of meat that interests Bass doesn't come on a Styrofoam tray, wrapped in cellophane. Bass will not participate in the modern misconception that humanity has its existence apart from the "natural" world. Thus, a soon-to-be father in the "The Windy Day" becomes intoxicated by the strange, green light and wind and flying pine that precede a forest fire. Two independent cowmen, Houston teens again, experience their own green moment while hauling a very lively bullock in the back of a station wagon. A man remembers coming of age with his wilder, older brother as they traveled together uninvited to every fire in town, intent on feeling as much heat as possible.
In "Titan," a haunting finale down along the Alabama shore, fish sacrifice themselves by the thousands in the moonlight, and a young man on vacation considers the democratic gluttony as fellow guests at a hotel consume the feast. Bass is at his best like this: graphic, unrestrained, thrilled at a beauty even chaos can't diminish. His best is rarely out of sight in this collection.
The book's one serious misstep occurs in "Fiber," which begins with the interesting premise that the author is producing an autobiography of sorts from some point in the near future. No longer a fiction writer, he looks back without any regrets about leaving storytelling behind. There's a whiff of prophecy here that is upsetting, especially as the story deteriorates into polemic. Bass is a capable polemicist, and he campaigns provocatively, informatively, but it is as a pure storyteller that he mines the deeper, richer vein. ·
Matt Pavelich is the author of the novel "Our Savage."
