Review: 'For a Little While: New and Selected Stories,' by Rick Bass

Toward the end of "The Watch," a story from Rick Bass' first collection, a young man named Jesse reclaims his love for cycling. A "serious" wind nudges him from bed. "Moths fell down off the porch light's bulb, brushed his shoulders, landed on the pages of his book, spun, and flew off, leaving traces of magic."

Although these stories are firmly rooted with lush descriptions of the natural world — from the Black Warrior Basin of Alabama to the kaleidoscopic pollution of Houston's skies — landscapes unfurl like mythical kingdoms. Bass' characters traverse these kingdoms with equal parts destruction and wonder.

Wildness is feared and negotiated. Characters often disappoint themselves, yearning for breaks from relational and environmental responsibility. In "The Fireman," one of Bass' more well-known stories, the narrator says, "It would seem like a fairy-tale story: a happy marriage, one that turned around its deadly familiar course of the mundane and the boring early on, that day six years ago when he signed up to be a volunteer for the fire department."

Like Adam and Eve in the garden (biblical allusions abound here), the weight is sometimes too much to bear, and wildness uncorks. Two boys discover an abandoned crane and diving bell and dump junk cars into a polluted river. A drunk woman dances with a fish's discarded skin. Two friends attempt to wrestle down an old lifeguard tower on a beach in Galveston.

Lyrical, ruminative, sometimes wry and genuinely moving, this collection showcases Bass in his best form. Old classics, new favorites: There's much to savor here.

Josh Cook's writing has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, the Millions and elsewhere. He lives in St. Paul.