Book Review: Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State
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REVIEWED BY PETE WARZEL
I have been working on a second book of essays, having abandoned the first to publishing individual pieces in magazines and literary journals, the concept of “book” depreciated.
And in this second book I feel that the voice, tone, rhythm of detail is right. The book is sound. Then I pick up Rick Bass, any Rick Bass writing, and realize how much work I have yet to do.
Bass is a widely published, numerous awards-winning writer, naturalist, environmental activist, writing mostly essay and short fiction. The Lives of Rocks: Stories (2006) is stunning short fiction. Fortunate Son, here, is a collection of essays that in his own words is a “…journalist’s Texas scrapbook”, the premise being Bass exploring the roots, memories, and the connections, now an exile in Montana, to his birth and youth and family history in Texas. The setting maybe Texas, the writing is universal.
His former profession was petroleum geologist, and that, along with his upbringing by a family invigorated by the outdoors, generates the awe he has for nature, as well as the detail of process that fills his work with wonder. He is akin to John McPhee, the great creative non-fiction writer who lived at The New Yorker and taught, still, I believe, at Princeton. They both take on eclectic subjects in search for understanding a bit of the world around them. McPhee is eastern and has, at least, roots in academia. Bass is nothing but west.
The first piece of the collection, Into the Fire is a tour de force, a night out in Houston with the author’s childhood friend as Fire Chief, learning about the emotions and mind set, the intricacies of those who put their life on the line to stop property from turning to ash, lives from being incinerated. Bass’s nature writing is at the core of this work as he interprets the fire as “…that seemingly rarest of things, the real thing – and you can see what a living thing, what an awful animal, the fire is.” The animal imagery is a theme of this piece, even to the people who fight it. As Bass notes the anomaly of the deviant firefighter who starts fires he describes how the rest of the tribe senses the sin. “It is elemental, the way they find out. It is the way animals communicate – the way animals, who have been here in the world so much longer than we, communicate. They are never wrong.” It becomes mystical in the detail as fire is everywhere, waiting to burst through. This is nature writing in an urban landscape, wild and beautiful in its destructive energy. This is fierce writing.
Moon Story is a non-linear reflection on his youth in Texas, the lure of NASA in Houston and its moon shots, and the primal experience of watching the great solar eclipse of 2018 at his home in the Yaak Valley, Montana. It is an abstraction that fascinates. Tying the universality of the pull of the moon regardless of place, Bass taps nature once again for the proof. “On full moons, zooplankton rise to the surface as if in the Rapture; oysters spread wider their limestone lips; deer, bedded down, rise as if in a trance no matter what the hour of day is when the moon (which is always full, we must remember) is either directly overhead or, curiously, on the other side of the earth, directly underfoot.” Those details place his narrative in a much bigger world.
The Farm is idyllic. A visit to his father’s farm with his two young girls, his mother off stage having passed away. It is a wonderful recollection, but also a brilliant reproduction of a natural setting on the page. Bass has a proclivity to translate the west succinctly. “Finally it was true dark.” We all know that timing of light here, as light hangs in the sky, lingering, and then extinguished.
And so go the fourteen essays collected in this book. Captivating, well-wrought, universal. The University of New Mexico Press has done well in bringing Rick Bass to their pages.
Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State
By Rick Bass
University of New Mexico Press
216 pages
Paperback