Returning from a Rick Bass story reminds me of waking from a dream, with its tendrils still wrapped around you as though “a thing like grace has passed through.”
His characters are indelible, surprising, and somehow familiar. A father strives to sever his bond with his son by retreating to a marsh, marred by deadly mosquitoes and alligators; black women begin to appear from town, seeking refuge. “At night they would sit around the fire and eat the dripping juicy alligators, roasted; fat from the tails, sweet, glistened on their hands, their faces, running down to their elbows.”
In “The Legend of Pig-Eye,” a once famous fighter trains a young boxer by chasing him through the woods and across a lake on his black stallion, Killer, while cracking a bullwhip. A giant swims upstream, pulling a canoe behind him, laden with cast-iron statues in “Field Events.” “The big man leapt free of the water with each sweep of his arms, arching into the air like a fish and crashing back down into the rapids, lunging his way up the river …”
“Swans” is a poignant story about a man succumbing to dementia, “as the coils and loops and convolutions of his brain smoothed out and erased themselves.”
Those readers familiar with Bass’s fiction will find old friends here, alongside the new ones. “The Hermit,” for example – a marvelous story of two people and their dogs, who survive a blizzard by walking for days beneath a frozen lake. “… Shards of moon-ice would be glittering and spinning like diamond-motes … and they pushed on, still lost, but so alive.”
Each story points to fundamental things. What endures; what doesn’t. Bass has lived so closely to the natural world that his tales pulse with that proximity.
Kirkus Revews called For a Little While “a benchmark collection of stories by one of the most capable practitioners of the form at work today.”
“A rich collection of stories by a major American writer,” opines Annie Proulx.
I call it a celebration of one of Montana’s – indeed, America’s – finest writers, and his incandescent imagination.
– Kristi Niemeyer