Where the Sea Used to Be - Hardcover

Bass, Rick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395770157 ISBN 13: 9780395770153

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1998

Synopsis

The first full-length novel by one of our finest fiction writers, Where the Sea Used to Be tells the story of a struggle between a father and his daughter for the souls of two men - his proteges, her lovers. Old Dudley is a Texan whose religion is oil, and in his fifty years of searching for it he has destroyed a dozen good geologists, "crushing them to dust by manipulating their own desires against them." His most recent victim is Matthew, his daughter Mel's sometime lover, who grew up in Swan Valley in Montana, where Mel has been living and studying wolves for twenty years. The valley is Old Dudley's albatross. He and Matthew have drilled nineteen dry holes there, and sensing that Matthew is burning out, Dudley sends in a new geologist, Wallis. Seduced by the valley and by Mel, Wallis discovers the dark mystery of Dudley's life, yet he cannot escape the old man's grip. As in all Rick Bass's fiction, both the land and the characters are unforgettable. Swan Valley, connected to the out

About this title

About the Author

Rick Bass is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including Winter, Oil Notes, Platte River, In the Loyal Mountains, The Lost Grizzlies, Book of Yaak, and The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness. His short stories have appeared in a wide range of periodicals and anthologies. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a gran from the National Endowment for the Arts and a PEN/Nelson Algren citation for his 1988 book, The Watch. He lives with his family on a remote ranch in Montana's Yaak Valley.

Reviews

Sometimes, reading this book, I wished I could step into its pages and physically inhabit the world Rick Bass creates. At its best, Where the Sea Used to Be is that powerful, that seductive.

An ambitious and often captivatingly beautiful story, both Bass's 13th book (In the Loyal Mountains, 1995, etc.) and his first full-length novel. In sensuous descriptive prose whose incantatory rhythms invite comparison with both Lawrence and Faulkner, Bass tells a tale of familial, sexual, and, in a way, fraternal conflict among four uneasily related characters who are, simultaneously, denizens, preservers, and destroyers of Montana's north country near the Canadian border. Old Dudley is a veteran oil driller who sends Wallis, a young geologist in his employ, to that wilderness to seek oil. It's an expression of Dudley's power, as is well known by his 40ish daughter Mel, a schoolteacher and naturalist who ``follows'' the lives of wolves, and by Wallis's predecessor (and Mel's former lover) Matthewand as will be learned by Wallis, a young Texan still mourning the deaths of his loved ones. Though the wary relationship of Wallis and Mel (his host, and mentor in this strange new world) is delineated with great skill, and though the story of their slowly developing closeness is punctuated by vividly rendered episodes (digging a limousine out of the snow, observing a summer drought and an ensuing forest fire), the story is essentially an extended meditation on the prickly, necessary interrelationship of man and the natural world. Variety is provided by a handful of lively townspeople (reminiscent of TV's Northern Exposure) and by lengthy excerpts from old Dudley's notebooks (as Wallis reads them), which comprise an almost mystical interpretation of how the earth's physical features were formed (``It's kind of like the Bible,'' Dudley explains). But one reads this novel for such descriptive passages as this: ``Flaming trees and burning snags and limbs . . . falling like swords with whiffs of sound like the cutting of paper with sharp scissors. The storys drama builds not through action per se, but from the intensity of its characters' observations of themselves and of the exterior world that nurtures, tests, and reshapes them. Read it slowly, and it won't let go of you. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Astonishingly, Bass?the author of 11 noteworthy titles?is only now debuting his first novel, the story of an oil-hungry magnate and his contentious daughter.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395770157
• ISBN 13: 9780395770153
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 445