All the Land to Hold Us

July 15, 2013
Bass turns the bleak and peculiar landscape of the Texas desert and the oil that lies beneath it into a vivid canvas for a slew of intense, sometimes hallucinatory narratives that always bring his characters back to the land. The author creates a cast of characters linked by their connection to place as well as a careless, unreflective greed: Richard, the love-sodden, fossil hunting oil geologist, Max Omo's salt mining family, and the plundering amateur archeologist Herbert Mix all stake their brief, temporal claims on the hostile, strange territory around Juan Cordona Lake, but the alternately grim and dreamlike pursuit of the lost circus elephant forms the unifying center of the novel. A strong novel that spotlights what humanity does to the land without acknowledging its costs.

July 1, 2013
Texas oil, contaminated water, the scorching sun over an arid landscape, a runaway elephant and a humungous catfish dwarf the human characters in this fever dream of an environmentalist novel. Like a more modern McTeague or a Cormac McCarthy parody, the latest from Bass (The Lives of Rocks, 2006, etc.) falls short of its epic ambitions. It begins in Midland with the relationship of unlikely soul mates: Richard, a geologist compromised by his association with the oil industry, and Clarissa, who finds and sells fossils to subsidize her plan to escape the region. Their relationship may be as doomed as their love is passionate, but "their hands clasped together, it would seem to Clarissa that she and Richard were emotionally in some similar place and time, and that for the time being that might even be how they preferred it--neither east nor west, nor past nor future." In contrast to the novel's prim evocation of "the interior acts of love," it reserves greater rapture for the life force (in the face of mortality) reflected in the landscape, "the thunderous force that drove the world, exceeding even the powers of gravity; as if longing were destiny, as if longing were sacred and sacrament, as if longing were holy, as if longing were as elemental a force of the world as magma or stone, or water or fire or spirit...." And so on. The novel expands to encompass Mexico as well as Texas and to include a woman transformed by an attempt to rescue a circus elephant, a young girl of unknown parents who is perceptive beyond her years, a Mormon schoolteacher, some evil oilmen and a variety of arts-and-crafts folk. It also includes cameos by the high school football team, which seems to have stumbled over from Friday Night Lights and serves as sort of a mute Greek chorus: "All of the players' faces would be limned with saintly agony, each of them pushing himself farther than ever before, entering each morning into a new country...." A touch of humor, even a little more dialogue, might have tempered the thematic self-importance.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 15, 2013
All that distinguishes Bass as a superb fiction writer of rare knowledge, unique sensibility, and profound imagination is present in this incandescent desert saga. Bass states his sonorous theme A strange and powerful landscape summons strange and powerful happeningsand brings us to West Texas, where immense salt flats surround a salt lake, and oil and even more precious water pool beneath the sand sea. As Bass once was, Richard is a geologist working for an oil company and ardently reading the desert like a vast book of time. He is hopelessly in love with elusive Clarissa, and together in an erotic trance, they search for fossils in the dazzling heat and find eerier relics, the remains of wagon trains. Another couple living in another time on this bone-strewn land, a fanatic salt miner and his lonely wife, are abruptly transformed by the surreal arrival of an elephant in desperate need of rescue. Other iconic figures of peril, displacement, and wonder appear as Bass unearths astonishing pieces of forgotten history; tells the stories of an old treasure hunter, a renegade schoolteacher, and a daring artist; and dramatizes the devastation the demand for oil has wrought. Writing with rhapsodic intensity and cosmic attunement, Bass magnificently portrays an elemental place cherished by indomitable individuals seeking the sustaining essence of life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2013

It's not surprising that exemplary nature writer Bass's fourth novel, set in Texas, features salt miners and oil and gas wildcatters. But you'll also meet Baptists, high school football players, a local beauty, a widower, and a lone Mormon schoolteacher. Bass weaves their stories together over three generations, and I'm betting he will create a real panorama, as he did with Where the Sea Used To Be, the stunning work that introduced me to his fiction.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2013

The fourth novel by author and activist Bass (Nashville Chrome) is a beautifully interwoven tale of the generations of residents living in and around the harsh landscape of Midland, TX. At its most basic level, the book is a grouping of life stories, including that of geologist Richard, who works for the oil industry and is in love with Clarissa, a young beauty dreaming big dreams. Then there's Herbert Mix, an obsessed desert treasure hunter; the widowed Marie, a woman seeking peace after years of harsh living out on salt flats; and Ruth, a gifted, isolated Mormon schoolteacher. The author brings to life the desert landscape and the heartbreaking damage wrought by decades of oil drilling in such descriptive detail the reader can almost feel the sun burning and smell the sulfurous ground water. Bass's is the type of writing a reader will linger over, rereading passages and savoring the lovely, lonely language he's constructed. VERDICT Fans of western fiction and environmental/nature writing should especially enjoy this melancholy but moving novel. Readers unfamiliar with Bass should give this one a try. [See Prepub Alert, 1/21/13.]--Shaunna E. Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.