We know our way around Raymond Carver’s blue-collar cityscapes and Updike’s urban angst and despair. Rick Bass opens a window onto a wilder America — the far reaches of Montana, Alabama, Texas, Missouri… But to say his stories are about rural life would be like saying Moby-Dick is about whaling.
Lauded by American critics and freighted with prizes, Bass is scarcely known in Britain. Praise to Pushkin Press for introducing us to an astonishing literary voice. Life in Bass’s world is often challenging: his people live close to the land; they fish, shoot birds, hunt elk, moose and deer to stock the larder. But while forests, prairies, rivers and lakes form the settings, the vagaries of the human heart ignore boundaries. Beneath the big skies men and women endure loneliness and loss; there are unspoken loves; a simple man yearns for grace. With a poet’s eye, Bass encompasses tender domestic felicity and moments of high farce.
In ‘The Watch’, a 77-year-old man escapes from his controlling son for a delirious last hurrah, a taste of freedom in the bayou, finding renewed virility and happiness, grappling with giant catfish and alligators, swinging Tarzan-like through the trees, geriatric king of a commune of women fleeing from abusive men.
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