Oil Notes by Rick Bass
1990; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1990.0141
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoReviews 273 live in as land. I had forgotten that we live in the sky and under it; we live on the land. ... I saw clearly that the land, the farm where I was standing, was the bottom of a vast lake. The title refers not only to this relationship between land and sky, but to the lives of those who have lost their connection to the land. Janet tells Ina of the hired man Warren Eldgrim, who came to the Hawns to learn farming and who stayed 14years, until his farm became the bottom of a dam project. “‘Jack is like that farmer with a farm under a lake. Jack is also a man out of context, away from the place where his people are.’” So ishis brother Carl, drunk and alone on the farm, “in the midst of trying on death.” From the Hawns’ run down farm, Janet calls Jack to come home, “to start over.” Like Wright Morris’s The Home Place, Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Douglas Unger’sLeaving the Land, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Martha Bergland writes in fine style and with compassion about the sense of losswhen the home place isabandoned, and the promise ofrenewal if it is reclaimed. Thanks to Graywolf Press this fine first novel comes to us in a beautiful volume. Let’s hope for more good work from both author and press. DIANE DUFVA QUANTIC Wichita State University Oil Notes. ByRick Bass. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1989. 172 pages, $16.95.) There are two ways to write: the way I do, and the way I want to. Sometimes people like what I write. The smartest readers know that I am saying nothing, but like a wild fighter, occasional punches slip through the defense:knockdown. So says developmental geologist, writer, and sometimes philosopher Rick Bass in Oil Notes, a journal kept while developing petroleum holdings at Black Warrior Basin in the Mississippi Delta. Along the way he manages to tell the reader about his current romance, the disappearance of “classic” Coke, and learning to pitch a baseball from the school bully. I agree with the author’s assessment of his own writing. Although elements of the book approach banal ity, sometimes I do like what he writes. Just when I’m ready to dismiss the book as trite, Bass sneaks in an observation, an image, a quick jab or a combination that may not be a knockout punch, but one that snaps my head back and gets my attention. My primary complaint with Oil Notes is that Bass’s spare writing often seems simplistic. About his girlfriend he says, “Elizabeth is my age, twentyseven , and has long brown hair. She is an artist and plays tennis pretty well. She likes chocolate ice cream, and is pretty.” At times the simplicity of Oil 274 Western American Literature Notes seems contrived to convince the reader that this really is a journal. In a three-page span the author manages to talk about how it feels to know oil is beneath the ground, a winter in Utah, and the global oil crisis. He then con tinues with, “. . . soft-shell crab. Key lime pie. Tomatoes.” “Girls with big chests. . . . Calves that have been to aerobic class.” “Shish kebob. Mediterran ean beef. Melon balls.” It’s the sort of non-sequitur nonsense that one might have heard in a San Francisco coffee house during the late ’50s. Nonetheless, there are manyelements, and I suspect these are not the lucky punches of a “wild fighter,” to commend the book. For starters, anyone under thirty who sits on his porch in the morning and listens to a John Prine album can’t be all bad. Also, as Bass tells the reader, “I know how to find oil.” And in the process of relating this knowledge of “reverse history,” he tells us many fascinating things about his craft. The history of oil exploration in Black Warrior Basin is brief and interesting. The discussion of geological mapping and drilling new holes is well wrought. In addition, there are many fresh and delightful images that make Oil Notes worthwhile. Bass reflects on the slowness of changes, saying...
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