'Rocks' solidly depicts natural world

The Lives of Rocks
By Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin, 224 pp., $23

There has always been desperation in the voice of Rick Bass, a plea for the ethical and ecological reverence of nature, with humanity's fate resting in an embrace of what he considers a divine yet desecrated landscape.

That plea persists in "The Lives of Rocks," Bass's 22d book in nearly as many years. While qualitatively uneven and often oddly allegorical, the short stories explore the elemental as a virtue, a theme of his nonfiction and fiction over the years. They also gloriously depict nature, long a talent of Bass 's .

What is curious, however, is the evolution in Bass's reverence from prior books, evident in the autobiographical story "Fiber" especially. The artistic adoration of nature in his early tales such as "Winter" and "Platte River," and activist defense of it in later ones like "The Lost Grizzlies" and "The Book of Yaak," is now a utilitarian affinity with nature that "feels different -- more permanent" as the narrator of "Fiber" says.

To the extent characters reflect authors, always a dangerous game, Bass is hinting at the limits of art and activism in saving nature, and affirming the utilitarian life. "I am so hungry for something real," says the narrator of "Fiber," who resembles Bass.

Many of the stories are bizarrely allegorical, and as such disappointing. "Pagans" tells of three teenagers who revel in a makeshift bathysphere in a polluted river, the purity of their innocence contrasted with the impurity of the setting. "Titan" tells of a macabre celebration on another river, when summer storms send freshwater downstream, killing huge amounts of saltwater fish and other aquatic life, to tourists' glee .

But other stories are among the most artful Bass has written. In "Her First Elk," a woman accidentally shoots an elk on protected land, and when the landowners find out about it, they help her field dress the animal, teaching her what the elemental act of hunting is about. In "The Lives of Rocks," a woman recovering from cancer befriends two children living nearby, eventually losing touch with them and coming to understand life as an eternal movement through relationships, a hard but true epiphany reflected in the perpetual formation, dissolution, and reformation of rocks.

Few writers evoke nature as well as Bass, who could have done so even more in these stories, for the depictions he offers are resplendent. "She had killed an elk once," the narrator of "Her First Elk" says. "She had been a young woman, just out of college -- her beloved father already three years in the grave -- and had set out early on opening morning, hiking uphill through a forest of huge ponderosa pines, with the stars shining like sparks through their boughs, and owls calling all around her, and her breath rising strong in puffs and clouds as she climbed, and a shimmering at the edge of her vision like the electricity in the night sky that sometimes precedes the arrival of the northern lights, or heat lightning."