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Platte River
Rick Bass is one of the foremost writers of his generation, charging headlong past the hard surface of modern life to illuminate human beings and their relationship to the natural world. Platte River is a collection of three novellas, each a singular exploration of the human heart set against the backdrop of God's creation.
Filled with arresting images—chinook winds flying through a valley, couples skating in the dark on thin ice, tools made from animal bones, a delicate shape frozen in a river—“Mahatma Joe” is about an evangelist who settles in Grass Valley, Montana, and the woman who becomes obsessed with his vision of the world. In “Field Events” a woman falls in love with a man even larger than her discus-tossing brothers. And the title novella, “Platte River,” portrays one man's lyric meditation on loneliness, the nature of peace, and the quest for love.
Filled with arresting images—chinook winds flying through a valley, couples skating in the dark on thin ice, tools made from animal bones, a delicate shape frozen in a river—“Mahatma Joe” is about an evangelist who settles in Grass Valley, Montana, and the woman who becomes obsessed with his vision of the world. In “Field Events” a woman falls in love with a man even larger than her discus-tossing brothers. And the title novella, “Platte River,” portrays one man's lyric meditation on loneliness, the nature of peace, and the quest for love.
148 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1994
18 people are currently reading
427 people want to read
About the author
Rick Bass
117 books482 followersRick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.
Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.
Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
October 24, 2022
I read this whole thing last night. After midnight. Until 3 AM, when I had to be up at 8. There was a thunderstorm, rain on the tin roof with the bed dry and warm. I hope (and I know, you do) everyone has a story that’s this dear a friend, that makes you breathe in a way that’s different and better than the way you were breathing before.
“Field Events,” God damn.
“Field Events,” God damn.
April 25, 2014
Rick Bass is in his own league. It's not so much that he crafts stories any better than anyone else, but he certainly does so differently. This one takes a different approach for sure. Three novellas with little connective tissue aside from them all dealing with relationships and the head emotions of the heart.
For me, perhaps because of the odd length of shorter than novel but longer than short story, I wasn't AS drawn to these when compared to his other collections. Still well worth the time required and they will float along with me for several days. I felt satisfied when I finished and with his other works I was still wanting more.
For me, perhaps because of the odd length of shorter than novel but longer than short story, I wasn't AS drawn to these when compared to his other collections. Still well worth the time required and they will float along with me for several days. I felt satisfied when I finished and with his other works I was still wanting more.
December 21, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Platte River is short book consisting of three “novellas.” Each story is about 50 pages in length, sort of short for novellas in my estimation. The stories are totally unrelated, although they all take place in the northern parts of the northern Midwest states of the USA and include Canada to a lesser degree. Platte River is the title of the last story in this interesting offering from Rick Bass.
I think it is safe to say that Mr. Bass is closely attuned to nature and he also knows the human heart. All three stories deal with relationships. Utterly beautiful prose, unusual and different.
Goodreads 2025 Challenge - Book #119 of 115
Platte River is short book consisting of three “novellas.” Each story is about 50 pages in length, sort of short for novellas in my estimation. The stories are totally unrelated, although they all take place in the northern parts of the northern Midwest states of the USA and include Canada to a lesser degree. Platte River is the title of the last story in this interesting offering from Rick Bass.
I think it is safe to say that Mr. Bass is closely attuned to nature and he also knows the human heart. All three stories deal with relationships. Utterly beautiful prose, unusual and different.
Goodreads 2025 Challenge - Book #119 of 115
September 21, 2021
This was a book club selection, and without that I would have bailed on it long before I reached the end. As it was, exposure to all three novellas only hardened my distaste.
At the very beginning, I thought to myself, Rick Bass can really write, particularly his descriptive nature passages. Then I quickly realized that he doesn't seem to understand how people actually work and how they relate to each other, and so his stories became more and more frustrating.
In the first novella, a fire and brimstone preacher has been living in Montana for years with his common law Inuit wife, and gets it into his head that he will plant a garden by the riverbank -- a project that necessitates that he and his wife skate over the thinning river ice each night and haul water up by bucket to cultivate the crops (the ice skating is particularly unrealistic). Meanwhile, a young woman who has had several failed relationships is living alone with her dog in a tent, and eventually ends up helping the man with his project. There is also a tragedy, which I won't give away, but at no point could I understand what motivated any of these characters.
The second story is what I would call Magical Realism of the Absurd. It focuses on a tight-knit family living in a rural location in upstate New York. The two sons, both big and athletic, one day spot a man who dwarfs them in size, swimming butterfly upstream in the nude as he pulls heavy weights behind him. They decide to teach him their favorite sport, throwing the discus, and he falls in love with their older sister. This is the nub of this tale, and while it was bathed in a positive light, I again could not figure out what was really going on in the heads of any of these characters, and, if they were meant to symbolize certain types, what those types might be.
The titular novella tells a more realistic story of a former football star who lives in an isolated cabin in Canada with his former runway model partner. She is constantly leaving him, after which he plunges into the woods to drag her back (there is a sort of benign misogyny running through all these stories) and I defy you to explain why they can't get along or what either of them want out of life. The football player is invited by a former teammate to speak to his students at a school where he teaches, and that becomes the setting for most of the novella, which revolves around an all-night fishing trip and includes what to me was a truly cringeworthy encounter with a teen clerk at an all night convenience store, along with a completely unrealistic classroom demonstration that the player and teacher carry out.
In sum : I didn't care about these characters. I didn't understand them. And any technical proficiency Bass showed as a wordsmith was overwhelmed but his utter lack of human insight.
At the very beginning, I thought to myself, Rick Bass can really write, particularly his descriptive nature passages. Then I quickly realized that he doesn't seem to understand how people actually work and how they relate to each other, and so his stories became more and more frustrating.
In the first novella, a fire and brimstone preacher has been living in Montana for years with his common law Inuit wife, and gets it into his head that he will plant a garden by the riverbank -- a project that necessitates that he and his wife skate over the thinning river ice each night and haul water up by bucket to cultivate the crops (the ice skating is particularly unrealistic). Meanwhile, a young woman who has had several failed relationships is living alone with her dog in a tent, and eventually ends up helping the man with his project. There is also a tragedy, which I won't give away, but at no point could I understand what motivated any of these characters.
The second story is what I would call Magical Realism of the Absurd. It focuses on a tight-knit family living in a rural location in upstate New York. The two sons, both big and athletic, one day spot a man who dwarfs them in size, swimming butterfly upstream in the nude as he pulls heavy weights behind him. They decide to teach him their favorite sport, throwing the discus, and he falls in love with their older sister. This is the nub of this tale, and while it was bathed in a positive light, I again could not figure out what was really going on in the heads of any of these characters, and, if they were meant to symbolize certain types, what those types might be.
The titular novella tells a more realistic story of a former football star who lives in an isolated cabin in Canada with his former runway model partner. She is constantly leaving him, after which he plunges into the woods to drag her back (there is a sort of benign misogyny running through all these stories) and I defy you to explain why they can't get along or what either of them want out of life. The football player is invited by a former teammate to speak to his students at a school where he teaches, and that becomes the setting for most of the novella, which revolves around an all-night fishing trip and includes what to me was a truly cringeworthy encounter with a teen clerk at an all night convenience store, along with a completely unrealistic classroom demonstration that the player and teacher carry out.
In sum : I didn't care about these characters. I didn't understand them. And any technical proficiency Bass showed as a wordsmith was overwhelmed but his utter lack of human insight.
April 6, 2013
This is the only Rick Bass collection I've sampled, so my experience with his work is obviously limited. These stories have a lyrical quality that appeals on one level and repels on another. There's a dreamy quality when there should be more reality. An artist who tacks her delicate hand painted scarves to the side of an old barn will not have glorious flags waving in the wind. She will have tattered shreds clinging to the wood. A woman who lives in an unheated barn and bathes in a wintry steam then crawls into a likely substandard sleeping bag may not rise in glory the next morning but freeze to death in the night. Ice skating along a river to hoe a garden in the night . . . Magic Realism, perhaps, which I admit doesn't appeal to me. There are also (for me) many, many sentences that sound so pretty yet drop off like a cliff to nowhere. I guess if I didn't already live this kind of rustic existence I would be fascinated by the magic Bass portrays. But I do. And I'm not.
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February 24, 2024liked this
December 30, 2017
Three unlinked short stories let you imagine life as you would think about what happens under the skin of ice on a river. People skate upriver to create a garden, swim upriver to return home and fish in a river to be men.
August 3, 2020
"Rick Bass is one of the foremost writers of his generation, charging headlong past the hard surface of modern life to illuminate human beings and their relationship to the natural world. Platte River is a collection of three novellas, each a singular exploration of the human heart set against the backdrop of God's creation.
Filled with arresting images—chinook winds flying through a valley, couples skating in the dark on thin ice, tools made from animal bones, a delicate shape frozen in a river—'Mahatma Joe'” is about an evangelist who settles in Grass Valley, Montana, and the woman who becomes obsessed with his vision of the world. In 'Field Events' a woman falls in love with a man even larger than her discus-tossing brothers. And the title novella, 'Platte River,' portrays one man's lyric meditation on loneliness, the nature of peace, and the quest for love."
The first two stories were rather ho hum, & seemed to almost be streams of consciousness rather than a story with a plot & a progression. The last story, 'Platte River,' however, is a wonderful, stark symphony of frustrated love, friendship, the separation between all humans, and how a person begins to know who they are. Mesmerizing.
Filled with arresting images—chinook winds flying through a valley, couples skating in the dark on thin ice, tools made from animal bones, a delicate shape frozen in a river—'Mahatma Joe'” is about an evangelist who settles in Grass Valley, Montana, and the woman who becomes obsessed with his vision of the world. In 'Field Events' a woman falls in love with a man even larger than her discus-tossing brothers. And the title novella, 'Platte River,' portrays one man's lyric meditation on loneliness, the nature of peace, and the quest for love."
The first two stories were rather ho hum, & seemed to almost be streams of consciousness rather than a story with a plot & a progression. The last story, 'Platte River,' however, is a wonderful, stark symphony of frustrated love, friendship, the separation between all humans, and how a person begins to know who they are. Mesmerizing.
October 10, 2018
Full disclosure: I only read the first story (which I don’t think is long enough to be a novella, no matter what the promotional materials say) before I ran out of time and had to take the book back to the library. It’s hard for me to rate. The language and descriptions are captivating, but I just didn’t think the story hangs together in the end. Sometimes it seems that slapping a magic realism label on a work absolves the author of all responsibility to make sense, but I think even magic realism needs its own kind of internal logic, and if this story had that, I didn’t see it. Maybe in the future I’ll come back to this and read the other two, but for now this is my verdict.
February 17, 2013
this is very beautiful and lovely and slow and gentle. i had to slow myself down when i was reading it too (am not too great at that) and it took me a while to get in to the rhythm of it.... meaning that i wasn't as sold on the first story, but loved the second and third. To me it felt like a kind of cross between Alice Hoffman and Raymond Carver (sounds good huh?), with a great sense of place and lots of lovely writing about nature and people and how they are. Would love to read some of Bass's non fiction work too.
also, i enjoyed thinking about chuck bass while i read rick bass.
also, i enjoyed thinking about chuck bass while i read rick bass.
November 6, 2012
Based on other Rick Bass stories I've read, this book was a surprise, the story, "Field Events" in particular. There was some magical realism in it, which I don't associate with Bass. Somehow, he kept with the grit of things throughout.
June 21, 2016
Though the settings are decidedly earthbound, there is a dream-like feel to these stories. Some characters possess almost mythological strength while others seem to evaporate, seemingly too good for this world.
I'm left with the desire to put everything Bass has written on my to-read list.
I'm left with the desire to put everything Bass has written on my to-read list.
August 22, 2008
One never tires of beautiful prose, and fascinating stories. Read this book, I'm loving it.
August 1, 2020
I read The Watch back when it first came out, pushed on to me by my college creative writing professor. I was wowed by the extremity that didn't fall into the violence or destitution of Southern Gothic, and I am tempted at some point to get back into that book. I'd seen other stories pop up by Bass here and there, like in Gordon Lish's The Quarterly, as he was evidently one of Lish's darlings, and I had read "Field Events," from this collection, there. But overall I lost track.
So just recently I had a Where Are They Now? moment and decided to look up Bass, and of course I found the question had been turned to Where Were YOU, Dude?, as I saw there was a host of Bass I had simply never bothered finding.
This collection of three extended short stories (novellas?) shows, for two-thirds of it, the style that put Bass so quickly on the map. There is a bombasticism of character, extremity of situation, that borders the speculative but doesn't trip itself into that wide country. In "Field Events," for example, two behemoth brothers who can carry around their Volkswagen Bug when bored come across and even larger behemoth, a man who like to carry cows around on his shoulders. Strange, but seemingly plausible. But also, Bass keeps his characters amazingly positive. Mahatma Joe, the title character of the first story, is a Christian zealot in a small town in Montana but has a true joy about him. The family who takes in the uber-behemoth is a wounded family of sorts, as is their find, and the story works towards healing. So there is a kind of optimism in the face of a wild, chaotic world going on.
But the only thing that kept me from fully embracing these stories was something I didn't catch onto until I'd gotten into the third and title story, which starts off in that style, with a couple who rather violently break up on a regular basis until Harley is bidden to visit a friend of his to speak to his class, and the story takes quite a turn into something a little less stylistic but more immersive. It was then that the previous stories had lacked full visual power for me, that Bass had wowed me with the prospect of people carrying cows on their shoulders, or skating on melting ice, but I hadn't fully been there with him, while in "Platte River" I was SO present on the story's central fishing trip.
Yet, the title story fell completely flat for me at the very end, where it took almost a quirky-independent-film route, jumping off into a future well off the timeline to a resolution that felt exterior to everything. I scooped up some more collections I had clearly overlooked over the years, but I am wondering if Bass ever finds a way to balance these extremes.
So just recently I had a Where Are They Now? moment and decided to look up Bass, and of course I found the question had been turned to Where Were YOU, Dude?, as I saw there was a host of Bass I had simply never bothered finding.
This collection of three extended short stories (novellas?) shows, for two-thirds of it, the style that put Bass so quickly on the map. There is a bombasticism of character, extremity of situation, that borders the speculative but doesn't trip itself into that wide country. In "Field Events," for example, two behemoth brothers who can carry around their Volkswagen Bug when bored come across and even larger behemoth, a man who like to carry cows around on his shoulders. Strange, but seemingly plausible. But also, Bass keeps his characters amazingly positive. Mahatma Joe, the title character of the first story, is a Christian zealot in a small town in Montana but has a true joy about him. The family who takes in the uber-behemoth is a wounded family of sorts, as is their find, and the story works towards healing. So there is a kind of optimism in the face of a wild, chaotic world going on.
But the only thing that kept me from fully embracing these stories was something I didn't catch onto until I'd gotten into the third and title story, which starts off in that style, with a couple who rather violently break up on a regular basis until Harley is bidden to visit a friend of his to speak to his class, and the story takes quite a turn into something a little less stylistic but more immersive. It was then that the previous stories had lacked full visual power for me, that Bass had wowed me with the prospect of people carrying cows on their shoulders, or skating on melting ice, but I hadn't fully been there with him, while in "Platte River" I was SO present on the story's central fishing trip.
Yet, the title story fell completely flat for me at the very end, where it took almost a quirky-independent-film route, jumping off into a future well off the timeline to a resolution that felt exterior to everything. I scooped up some more collections I had clearly overlooked over the years, but I am wondering if Bass ever finds a way to balance these extremes.
January 3, 2020
Saw the author recommended on PaperBird's youtube channel, so I thought I'd give the book a try. I saw some earlier reviews that stated this may not be his best work. I liked both "Platte River" and "Mahatma Joe"...not so much "Field Events."
Lyrical is a nebulous word (for me at least), and I see it thrown out a lot for this work. I didn't really pick up on that. There's definitely an ephemeral feel to the characters and in particular with respect to their relationships with each other as well as the overall landscape. The stories feel like you're reading your memory or a recollection from a semi hazy dream, and I think that made them compelling. The three novellas here are pretty short, and don't require a lot of commitment from the reader. I recommend and look forward to trying some other works from Bass.
As a side note I thought the title referred to the western Platte River, but it actually refers to the one in Michigan.
Lyrical is a nebulous word (for me at least), and I see it thrown out a lot for this work. I didn't really pick up on that. There's definitely an ephemeral feel to the characters and in particular with respect to their relationships with each other as well as the overall landscape. The stories feel like you're reading your memory or a recollection from a semi hazy dream, and I think that made them compelling. The three novellas here are pretty short, and don't require a lot of commitment from the reader. I recommend and look forward to trying some other works from Bass.
As a side note I thought the title referred to the western Platte River, but it actually refers to the one in Michigan.
June 14, 2025
Beautiful collection of short stories. Boy, can Rick Bass write! This was recommended to me by one of my coworkers after we got to talking about where we were from, and where we like to go to vacation. I talked about going to Yellowstone a bunch of times and how much I loved it, and I talked about how I was from Montana. It was a quiet and comfortable conversation, and I think it made me realize how attractive straight boys can be. He recommended that I read something by Rick Bass, and mentioned Platte River specifically later. I really like how these stories portray both change and stagnancy, and how one can be disguised as the other. I also really like how these stories show you that specific, seemingly mundane events can change your life. Like yes, I know it's a trite thing to say, but the most random shit will happen at the most uninteresting times that will alter you forever. It's beautiful.
June 22, 2023
The trio of stories works so well because of the attitude toward language contained, or maybe because of the framing of love. Starting with the latter - simpler: view of beginning, middle, and end, though every moment contains at least reference to beginnings and endings. It wasn't clear during the read, but nature's inherent danger fits here.
The style is straightforward, and spoken language is enclosed to become ridiculous in the first two tales. So for the title novella to drop that technique, to wind its plot around a block of speaking time at that... Some kind of nihilism is reinforced, but the lives like all the others go on.
Bass gives the stories tall-tale coziness; The erotic has a vital off-kilter component.
The style is straightforward, and spoken language is enclosed to become ridiculous in the first two tales. So for the title novella to drop that technique, to wind its plot around a block of speaking time at that... Some kind of nihilism is reinforced, but the lives like all the others go on.
Bass gives the stories tall-tale coziness; The erotic has a vital off-kilter component.
October 26, 2020
There was some strength to the stories by picking interesting character qualities and backgrounds. Bass seems at home writing about sports and former athletes, but that kind of character does not necessarily appeal to me. I would not consider him the master of writing female characters (by a long shot), and injecting the stories with awkward and unnecessary sex scenes (not-explicitly written at all, but mostly glossed over) felt chintzy at best.
I enjoyed the first novella but gradually became more dissatisfied with the successive stories.
I enjoyed the first novella but gradually became more dissatisfied with the successive stories.
May 12, 2021
Um... well.... these stories were different. Descriptive, flowing language but I just feel like the stories were very strange and weren't really resolved. Just pretty odd. I really wish my local library would stop including short stories in their reading challenges, I don't think I've found a collection yet that I like.
February 29, 2024
I am in awe of Rick Bass's short fiction from this time period. It's so readable, but also marked by flashes of brilliance. Rick's characters, who often do uncommon things, and often within the setting of the natural world, epitomize, for me, what it means to live. They sink their teeth into life and howl at the moon, so to speak. I close this book and want to climb a mountain.
July 22, 2019
I read the first of this book's three novellas, "Mahatma Joe." Lyrical but not very interesting. I started the second novella "Field Events" but it was completely fantastical and seemed to be going nowhere -and not in a hurry to get there. Finally gave up half way thru and will not finish.
August 18, 2020
Collection of three novellas. Beautiful, pensive, fantastical, with smart pacing. The title novella is about a place where I myself have worked (Interlochen Arts Academy). Pastoral, of the land, thoughtful, and well-crafted.
August 23, 2023
Platte River is a book of three long stories, “Mahatma Joe,” “Field Events,” and the title story. All the critics single out “Platte River” as being the best in the book, but I found all three stories to be outstanding. This volume makes me want to read more of Rick Bass.
March 30, 2018
Three unconnected stories that had so much rolled into each one. Hard book to put down.
November 15, 2018
One of my favorite stories by a very unique author.
December 13, 2018
The third story was the best, but this is not one to be read for plot. Good descriptive prose.
December 10, 2020
Stories set in a surreal world where improbable events are commonplace. Sometimes the stories have a childlike simplicity. Sometimes the reader sees deeper struggles.
December 17, 2022
3 stories, all dark and depressing.
January 17, 2023
Title story is awesome. Others so-so. Excellent nature writer, the story of the two brothers is a little ridiculous. Not sure if I always believed his characters.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews