Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fine, Jim--build the damned ship, sink the damned ship. But in the 90 or so minutes before the iceberg slices open the starboard side, some compelling romantic fiction is in order. Here the film fails utterly. It imagines an affair between free-spirited artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) in steerage and Philadelphia blueblood Rose Bukater (Kate Winslet), unhappily engaged to wealthy Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). DiCaprio has a smooth, winsome beauty, and Winslet, who at first seems bulky beside him, comes to look ravishingly ravaged by the climax. Everyone else is a caricature of class, designed only to illustrate...
Tarantino was just coming off directing and promoting Pulp Fiction, one of the most successful films of the decade. Grier was just coming off a cameo in Posse, a modestly successful black western. Grier gave Tarantino a look and said, "Please." Not "pleeeese," meaning, yes, give it to me, thank you very much. But "puhhhhlease," meaning there's not a snowball's chance this joker is actually gonna come through with a script...
Rick Bass drew good reviews in 1992 with The Ninemile Wolves, a moody nonfiction report of a Canadian wolf pack that crossed the U.S. border a few years ago and colonized one of the western states. But Bass's fiction (The Book of Yaak, In the Loyal Mountains) seems to get categorized as good-with-an-asterisk. He's regional. (So was Wallace Stegner, of course, until he became a national monument.) Bass may reach monument or even wilderness-area status in time, but for the moment he gathers honorable obscurity, and blackflies, on the shelf reserved for nature writers...
...view here is, forget that asterisk. With the publication of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (Houghton Mifflin; 190 pages; $23), a collection of novellas about men and women in nature, there should be no more avoiding plain truth: Rick Bass is a very good writer of fiction. What's more, he's good at a kind of writing that is often done with irritating self-consciousness. Bringing the natural world into a story as something more than scenery invites a rich array of overdelicate word-painting and drum-roll weather effects, with turning seasons or the death and birth...
...book's slogans is "Surreality just got funky!"--but that doesn't seem quite the right way to describe it. The key to understanding the "logic" of Schrab's universe is to realize that it's not the same sort of causality that we expect from works of prose fiction--or, in fact, from most comic books...