Old Ground

By John Skow

Montana author Rick Bass is a magical realist of eerie skill who takes readers deep into the natural world along paths that have no reasonable compass bearing and that don't lead easily back to the comfort of pavement. Drop your trail of breadcrumbs as you venture into The Lost Grizzlies, a long, moody essay, or The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness, a strange, brilliant book of short stories.

Fiction or not, Bass's work is all of a piece, a desperate, eloquent defense of wild places, and it is not surprising to find that his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be (Houghton Mifflin; 464 pages; $25), grows from the same earth. He used the identical title for a short story about a mystical oil geologist who, like the novel's hero, can see oil beneath mountains. The lead female character, a woman strong enough to ski for miles carrying a grown man on her back, could be the daughter of a yeti-like succubus in his story The Myths of Bears. And the novel's wilderness setting is very like the author's home valley in northern Montana, glorified in The Book of Yaak.

But the novel's magic is only intermittent. There are wonderful imaginings: an epic, weeklong elk hunt in deep snow, a coffinmaker who carves his boxes in the shapes of totemic beasts. Bass's theme, however--humanity as a curse on nature--isn't quite realized in the unlikely person of a ruthless oil prospector called Old Dudley. And the author's habit of delivering long, italic nature lectures is windy self-indulgence. The dust jacket should bear a sign: EDITOR NEEDED, APPLY WITHIN.

--By John Skow