Rick Bass' new novel manages to overcome frustrating structural issues
with its elegantly clotted language and a strong sense of the tragic
dualities of human desire. The narrative is all over the place-- 80
pages of one set of characters, 100 pages of another, then back to the
first set, then combining the two and introducing others to boot-- and
so slow-moving that the first half utterly fails to build momentum. It's
not just the absence of plot: the prose and themes are also repetitive,
beating the reader over the head with "desert as metaphor for the human
condition," and lingering so long on description of the beauty and
deadliness of the milieu that the reader's initial awe gives way to
irritation. But the second half, though still longer than it needs to
be, moves at a more reasonable pace and has more emotional variety, so
that the self-regarding intensity of the language becomes a virtue
rather than a drawback. And even in the rougher patches there are
extraordinary scenes that capture perfectly the way those who build
lives in inhospitable places are but a reflection of the universal urge
toward dangerous yet deeply satisfying experience. Bass writes, "What
was it about a desert landscape, he wondered, that produced such needs
and appetites, such oversized dreamers and flash-in-the-pan pretenders?"
But of course those dreamers and pretenders are no different from the
rest of us, except that the scope of their dreams and pretensions is
greater, and therefore ideal fodder for a gifted novelist's imperfect
yet unforgettable creation.
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