Review of the Day: For a Little While by Rick Bass

I find it difficult to review story anthologies because while I can comment on individual stories, I remain mystified when trying to make a judgement about what they mean as a whole. So instead, I prefer to pick just one story and share my thoughts on it. We can use the Greek term SYNECDOCHE which literally means come together and is currently understood as a metaphor where a part of something stands in for the whole. Kenneth Burke pointed out that in a representative democracy elected leaders stand in for their constituents; synecdoche is a form of representation.

The story I chose to represent the book is Lease Hound. It is a story of an unnamed narrator remembering his work more than thirty years earlier as an agent of a drilling company trying to secure petroleum drilling leases. One thing I noticed that Bass’ story did not have was dialogue; I have read quite a few short stories in my life and this is a conspicuous absence.

The narrator grew up in the Mormon faith and occasionally remembers the words and thoughts of his mentor: “In our ward, Brother Janssen had been largely ignored; he was viewed as well-meaning, but a little off the tracks — though by the time I got down in Alabama, I found myself strangely recalling much of what he’d said, things I’d thought I wasn’t paying attention to at the time, but which, due to the intensity of his storytelling, had remained with me” (p. 375).

“It continued to surprise me how many of Brother Janssen’s teachings stayed with me. … When he spoke, his eyes burned like ingots — though, in a cruel irony for one so pure, he resembled, in his whippet-thin visage, a weasel, an unfortunate and unfair likeness. As if the fires within him consumed all fat” (p. 387).

Much of the story is about the narrator trying to acquire the mineral rights of an elderly woman in north Alabama named Velma. Eventually the narrator does manage to convince her to sign the lease; but he is bothered by the process because he knows Velma is near death. “And yet as I ascended those raggedy stairs, I was certain what I was doing was wrong, and it wounded my spirit. Something was seeping out of me, and I did not know how to stop it” (p. 397).

In addition to describing his work challenges, the narrator has a girlfriend in Mississippi he visits several times a week named Genevieve. He says: “So much of it [the relationship] was sex, but there was more” (p. 385). In addition, “Genevieve said material wealth was overrated; that what mattered was the quality of life lived” (p. 376).

To complicate matters, the narrator also has a friend in Alabama, Penny, who processes claims at the courthouse who is a more Platonic friend. “We never so much as shared a meal” (p. 389).

“The girl who clerked in the courthouse, Penny, had been in and out of my mind for some months. …there was something about the way she greeted the day, and her smile — her happiness — that got me every time. … Her happiness seemed to come from some deeper core” (p. 377).

But at one point Penny does invite him to see her garden and the narrator spends two pages describing the scene. Then he says, “I turned away. … I had to decide whether to follow her one step further into the garden, or back out” (p. 390). “Something held me back, and whether it was the last of a purity that was in me then, seeking to protect her, or the first of a corruption, becoming more comfortable with squander, I still cannot say” (p. 391).

In what can be seen as a metaphor of his internal conflict between his two female friends, the narrator finds it difficult to describe to Penny what Mississippi is like:

“What I also didn’t tell her was how far away it always seemed when I was in north Alabama; how the three hours felt half a lifetime away. How the land changed quickly, coming down out of the hills: flat hardwood swamp bottoms, and then out into the dazzle of redclay Delta, cotton. Narrow roads, workers’ sunstruck hoes flashing in semaphore (p. 388).

To sum up, this is a very introspective story an old man tells about his life thirty years earlier. The language and the descriptions are one of the high points of the story.

kindle and librofm audiobook. 480 pgs. 21 August 2025.