The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass ed. by. O. Alan Weltzien (review)

4 6 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 5 The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass. Ed. O. Alan Weltzien. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001. 318 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Scott Herring University of California, Davis My own experience as a reader of Montana writer Rick Bass has been a pained one. I mention it here, at the outset, because I suspect I am not the only one who feels this way. I have written on Bass and consider his nonfic­ tion, especially The Lost Grizzlies (1995), to be some of the best writing on the environment anyone has produced since Edward Abbey died. At the same time, I have found myself put off by the shrieking, hectoring tone by which that nonfiction was increasingly dominated in the 1990s. I had been giving Bass a long break, one that looked like it might become permanent, when The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass came into my hands. The book is a collection of sixteen essays, most by literary scholars, and one interview with Bass; it is the first book of formal academic essays on his work. Writing the first collection of this sort, the essayists are engaged in inventing the wheel and sometimes do not get the wheel quite round. Jim Dwyer provides a remarkably thoughtful appraisal of elements of “magic” in Bass’s fiction but uses that appraisal to call that fiction “magic realism,” which is not quite the right term. Possibly the right term has not been invented yet. Thomas Bailey submits a similarly thoughtful reading of Bass’s book Winter (1991), written in elegant prose, as many of these essays are. His reading, however, serves to prove that Bass is a “psalmist,” or at least is like a psalmist, which is also not quite the right term, even as an analogy. We find in Bass an eccentric kind of modem nature mysticism with a tinge of the New Age about it, a mysticism that would be unrecognizable to an ancient Israelite. And so on. Nearly every essay in the collection can in some way be disputed, and the problem normally results from the author trying to fit Bass into categories of formal literary study to which he does not quite belong. The pigeon does not fit the hole, usually because Bass is no pigeon. And this problem really arises because, again, the essayists are breaking new ground (quite a few of the works cited are newspaper stories, blurbs, and information from the Internet, because there is not much scholarship to cite). They all have a firm sense of what tasks they need to perform. The essayists try to make some sense of Bass’s concepts of “magic,” “mystery,” and “won­ der” and the relationship of those concepts to his advocacy of “wildness” in humans—not easy concepts to discuss—which leads the authors to employ imperfect analogies. The essays explore Bass’s approach toward the bears and especially wolves that are the most powerful and compelling presences in his books. They devote much attention to the Yaak Valley that has so thoroughly seized Bass’s imagination; they also, as the title suggests, consider how art and politics mix and clash in his work. B o o k R e v ie w s 4 6 9 The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass makes it clear how diverse Bass’s career has been and how many times he has transformed himself. It made me decide that the wounded-animal rage that nearly took over Bass’s work may be temporary, to be succeeded by something new and unforeseen. I find myself looking forward to Bass’s next book, a happier outcome than I would usually expect after reading a collection of academic essays. Lazy B : Qroiving Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. By Sandra Day O’Connor and H. Alan Day. New York: Random House, 2002. 318 pages, $24-95/$13.95. Reviewed by Barbara “Barney” Nelson Sul Ross State...