The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

Book Overview

Rick Bass's new collection contains a broad range of characters and settings: the title story concerns a woman recovering from cancer; "Pagans" tells, at forty years' distance, of a girl and two boys... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618596747
• ISBN13: 9780618596744
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 211 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Odd mixture of concerns

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.

In Pace with the Land

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~]

Bass just gets better

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.

Great reading but a little dark

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.

Friends we wished we had

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.