Rick Bass – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Mon, 04 Jan 2016 19:14:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.3 ALL THE LAND TO HOLD US by Rick Bass /2013/all-the-land-to-hold-us-by-rick-bass/ /2013/all-the-land-to-hold-us-by-rick-bass/#respond Mon, 23 Dec 2013 13:10:11 +0000 /?p=24015 Book Quote:

“He was not the first seeker of treasure upon the landscape, was instead but one more in the continuum of a story begun long ago by far greater desires than his own.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (DEC 23, 2013)

All The Land To Hold Us is an apt title whose protagonist is the land – and it is a strange and powerful land. The harsh desert environment of West Texas is extremely arid, bitter and bleak. This environment shapes much of the novel’s character and the characters’ characters. The area receives much less rainfall than the rest of Texas and the temperature has been known to hit 120ºF in the summer. “An easterner, after making the stage trip and experiencing the danger of Horsehead and the Trans-Pecos country, wrote to friends back home that he now knew where hell was.” The setting also includes Castle Gap and Juan Cordoba Lake, an inland salt lake.

This is also a tale of those who live on the desert’s edge, where riches — oil, water, precious artifacts & love — can all be found and lost again in an instant. It is a sweeping saga of old Texas oil fields, salt mines, small town morality, and love.

The characters in All the World to Hold Us span three generations. Richard is a young and talented geologist who works for a Midland oil company. He is driven by his need to hunt for oil and fossils beneath the earth’s surface and by his love for his girlfriend Clarissa. Clarissa, a beautiful girl from Odessa, dreams of fleeing the broiling sun of the Permian Basin and moving to Hollywood, where she hopes her great beauty will make her a model or a movie star. She slathers on sun screen many times each day to protect her skin so that the harsh sunlight will not mar her beauty. She hunts for fossils, with Richard, in the burning desert. Richard keeps what he collects, but Clarissa sells her million-year-old fossils to museums. As there is no dialogue here and little character development, I really have no idea who Richard and Clarissa are.

Herbert Mix is an elderly one-legged museum owner. He is greedy for gold and anything one might find while looking for it: bones, animal fossils, arrowheads, knife blades, clay pots, wagon wheels, coins, and human skulls, which he values most of all and refuses to sell.

A Depression-era couple Max and Marie Omo, and their two sons, live in another time on this bone-strewn land. Max and his sons make their living by trapping, harvesting, and selling Juan Cordona Lake’s salt. The entire family, Marie, Max’s lonely wife, and their sons, are transformed by their surroundings. The lake water they drink is brackish. The food, not much better. And for Marie, the loneliness of the place is devastating. Marie, like Clarissa, wants out of the harsh life in their desert salt pan home.

“WHENEVER THE SALTCUTTER, Max Omo, encountered bounty in that land of deprivation—be it salt or the heat, almost igneous in nature, that wrung all but the last of the water from his body and sent it in sheets down his chest and back—he fell even harder in love with the salt, without even realizing that was what it was, falling into the clefts between the bounty of one thing and the deprivation of another, falling through an incandescent pluming kaleidoscope of colors that belied completely the physical constraints of his salt-colored life and his methodical movements above.”

Oddly, in passing, a runaway circus elephant, makes his appearance, as does his Indian trainer. Bizarre – but this incident brings some humor and a bit of sadness to the novel.

Rick Bass paints a vivid portrait of a fierce place and the inimitable characters who populate it….who survive it. They possess the capacity to adapt to and also despoil it the land. The author’s prose is lyrical and lush, at times poetic. Mr. Bass brings much of his geologist background to the novel; he is the son of a geologist, and he studied petroleum geology at Utah State University.

Bass has won many literary awards.  He won the 1995 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for his novel Where the Sea Used to Be. He was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2006 for his short story collection The Lives of Rocks.  And he was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (autobiography) for Why I Came West. He was also awarded the General Electric Younger Writers Award, a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction.

I previously read  The Ninemile Wolves and The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness by this same author and I really enjoyed them and respect Mr. Bass as the talented, award-winning writer he is. However, I do not think he is up to par in his latest offering. When I reached page 84 in Book One, (the novel is made up of 3 Books), I found that I was plodding along – simply bored with the characters and storyline. This first third of Bass’ novel is a dense and difficult read. It is all narrative, no dialogue. The point of view is that of an omniscient observer.

When I reached the infamous page 84, an image came to mind. I was in an art gallery, or an art museum, and viewing the work of a famous, much lauded artist. “Objectively,” I recognized the paintings for their worth. I believed that the critics’ and other viewers’ praise was on the money.   “Subjectively,” the work left me cold. It didn’t touch me personally. I thought of an artist, perhaps someone like Jackson Pollack, and know many art lovers who think his paintings are the work of genius…and they might be. While recognizing the greatness of Mr. Pollack’s work, I am untouched by his paintings. So it is with  All The Land To Hold Us. I  appreciate the excellence of the author’s prose and the novelty of the story he tells…but I am not moved by any of this. I have now finished reading the novel and understand, objectively, why so many people would praise it well. However, I am left feeling that the novel has added little to my life, except for the knowledge I acquired reading about the “Land.” I did complete the novel as it improved in Books 2 and 3.

While this one is not a favorite of mine, I do recognize that many people might feel otherwise. And, as I just wrote, the authors writing is outstanding – subjectively and objectively….just a bit dense and slow paced at times.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 12 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 13, 2013)
REVIEWER: Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Rick Bass
EXTRAS: Daily Beast interview with Rick Bass
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

And another big Texas novel:

Bibliography:

Non-fiction:

]]> /2013/all-the-land-to-hold-us-by-rick-bass/feed/ 0 NASHVILLE CHROME by Rick Bass /2010/nashville-chrome-by-rick-bass/ /2010/nashville-chrome-by-rick-bass/#respond Thu, 16 Sep 2010 21:42:25 +0000 /?p=12187 Book Quote:

“Never in the history of music has any group had as many Top Ten hits over a two-year period.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (SEP 16, 2010)

I’ve often thought that being famous must be a horrible burden. There would be the fun bits, of course, but there’s a definite downside: the psycho fans, the paparazzi, and the fact that every little thing you do could potentially end up on the cover of National Enquirer. But perhaps what’s even worse than being famous is tasting fame and then fading into complete obscurity.

Rick Bass’s novel Nashville Chrome is a fictionalized account of the Browns: Maxine. Jim Ed, and Bonnie. At the height of their fame, this singing trio was second only to Elvis, and even the Beatles shared a few jam sessions with their idols. Have you ever heard of the Browns? I hadn’t, and I’ll admit that I was some way into the novel before it dawned on me that this is a story of very real and very forgotten people. The Browns’ story is so incredible that it could so easily be fiction; when it comes to hits, they weren’t just big they were huge! Born and raised in the swamps of south-central Arkansas, the Brown children (there were five altogether) knew horrific poverty and tragedy. Their father, Floyd, a lumberjack by trade, lost a leg in an accident and then he and his wife, Birdie subsequently operated a series of humble family run restaurants–I say a series of restaurants because three burned to the ground. Elvis showed up at one of these doomed restaurants. He was just a boy with a guitar at this point, and he becomes an honorary Brown, dating Bonnie until finally the relationship is irreversibly corroded by separation and the seductive, intoxicating pull of fame.

The focus of Nashville Chrome is Maxine, the eldest sibling, and the novel goes back and forth in time sweeping over her childhood in Poplar Creek, the tough years on the road singing and recording, to a decrepit old age living on social security when a trip to Piggly Wiggly represents a major expedition. Maxine is the driving force behind the trio–the one who takes their singing career so much more seriously, but perhaps that’s because for her, the stakes are so much higher:

“Some people seem destined for the safe middle, while others appear to be wedded to the extremities of high and low. On their own, Jim Ed and Bonnie were pretty safely in the middle, but once they joined in with Maxine, she took them straight to the upper reaches every time, and then right back down to the bottom, every time. As if their lives had to follow the range of their voices, when they were together.”

Through the story of The Browns, Nashville Chrome (the name given to the sound these three siblings make) offers a view of the Country Music industry. The Browns, too naive to know better, are signed by the exploitive Fabor and join his “stable of slaves for life.” Fabor’s contracts leave The Browns with a sliver of what they should be earning. They endure exhaustive tours on a threadbare budget and often camp outdoors from gig-to-gig. This is a story we’ve all heard before, of course, the artists (the ones with the talent) receive little for their efforts while feeding an industry that works its “products” to exhaustion. In the case of The Browns, however, the highs and the lows the trio experienced, both personally and professionally, make this story so phenomenal.

Nashville Chrome examines the ephemeral nature of fame and whether or not fame is worth the cost. All three of the Browns find themselves making tremendous personal sacrifices, but while a bitter personal life keeps Maxine on the road, her siblings have options. One of the points the novel makes is that life on the road is quite different for men than for women. This was the 50s, of course, and while Elvis and Jim Ed cash in the groupies, Maxine and Bonnie are frequently holed up in a miserable room waiting to move on. This examination of fame leads to the question of identity. How many “stars” eventually become consumed by their own image? Here’s Elvis:

“Elvis was starting to pull away. All three Browns had watched his trajectory with only pride—success for any one of them was success for all. And though they each had different reactions to his ascent—Maxine was excited by and approving of it, Jim Ed found it amusing, and Bonnie was discomfited by it—something different was happening now. It wasn’t so much that Elvis had risen above them, but that instead he was being carried away from them, no longer just some distance above them but drifting laterally. He has lost his anchor, his connection to them. He was lost in himself, and then—just one small false step, but so easy to make amid all that clamor and energy—he got lost in who his audience wanted him to be. This was not the same thing the world wanted him to be, and for that, he was doomed.”

Bass’s style underscores the mythic qualities of the tale, for while the Browns’ story is true, at times it almost seems too fantastic to be anything less than fiction. Fate repeatedly seems to intervene in lives marked by the highs and lows of incredibly bad luck and amazing strokes of good fortune. For those interested, Maxine Brown wrote an autobiography, Looking Back to See.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 25 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (September 14, 2010)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Rick Bass
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another by this author:

More on the music industry:

Bibliography:

Non-fiction:

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