I picture Rick Bass huddled in front of his wood stove in the Yaak Valley of Montana, writing with gloves on in the dead chill of winter. Maybe he's just back from the Dirty Shame Saloon, headquarters to the Valley's thirty residents and the home of Dirty Burgers and Shameful Fries. An expatriate of sorts, Bass lived in Utah, Arkansas, and Mississippi before giving up on malls and subdivisions and settling on the isolation of the Yaak. It is a story of restlessness and discovery which sweeps like a chinook wind through the three novellas in his fine new book, Platte River.

While place dominates his nonfiction, most recently in Winter and The Ninemile Wolves, people come to the fore in these stories. They are loners, even when surrounded by friends and comforted by lovers, cast adrift from the past, running to something they can see but can't quite define. It is a loneliness that matches the desolation of the landscape Bass selects for his settings, unpeopled places capable of turning characters inward to wanderlust or despair, and in some instances, capable of healing them as well.

The pairings of characters are quirky; often the couples are seeming incompatibles who need each other to stave off the loneliness but aren't certain the relationship can truly fill their needs. Despite it all, there is hope, the sense that somewhere there is a place and a person that will fit if they just keep looking.

“Mahatma Joe” is the story of a failed evangelist who has left an Eskimo village in Alaska and come to the remote Grass Valley of northwestern Montana. Mahatma Joe has brought Lily, previously his housekeeper and now his wife. His soul-saving days over, Joe turns his attention to securing his own salvation by sending canned goods and preserves to starving Africans. Leena appears in Grass Valley from somewhere in the South, having gone through three men in six years, and desperate for escape. She works at the local mercantile and sleeps in a tent by the river where she bathes and swims in the icy water. Lily and Leena are pushed toward radical departures from the straight-and-narrow by Joe's dream to plant one last garden that will attract God's attention. Bass takes us into the hearts of all three characters, and we learn that they have connected, not to exchange love or emotion, but to find a place where they can belong. The outcome is tenuous, perhaps temporary, but each character finds a degree of satisfaction.

“Field Events” features the surreal A. D., discovered and informally adopted by the discus-throwing Irons brothers as he swims naked upstream in the Sacandaga River of northeastern New York, towing a loaded canoe. Like Mahatma Joe and Leena, A. D. has moved away from a painful past and finds a glimmer of a future in his acceptance by John and Jerry, whose late night pastimes include lugging their Volkswagen beetle around the block. Larger even than the muscle-bound brothers, A. D. is too massive to fit in the VW and must ride on the back bumper. His hobbies include pirouetting across fields with adult cows across his shoulders and bear-hugging statues in the town square which he brings home to deposit in John and Jerry's back yard. The brothers' parents, Heck and Louella, and sister Lindsay accept A. D. as one of their own, in a way that goes beyond courtesy or kindness. When Louella first saw A. D.:

She stopped drying dishes and was alarmed at the size of him, standing there among her children, shaking hands, moving in their midst. She had had one miscarriage, nearly twenty years ago. This man could have been that comeback soul.

By the end, A. D.'s prowess with the discus, which he tosses three hundred feet despite uneven form (the current world record is 234 feet), takes a back seat to the love he finds with Lory, John and Jerry's diminutive sister, an unhappy teacher, 34, still living at home and painfully self-conscious about the dimensions of her overly large breasts.

The title story is a fitting finish, as characters tumble together in an overlapping cycle of escape, loss, depression, and hope. Ex-professional football player Harley finds that Shaw, the woman he loves, may leave him for good this time. Meanwhile, Harley is invited to speak at a school in northern Michigan where his former college teammate, Willis the Wolverine, teaches English. He stays only one night, but this brief time spent fishing for steelhead on the Platte River with Willis' buddies and conversing with their wives, while not erasing his pain, brings Harley to an understanding of the complexity, uneasiness, and perpetual search for place that afflicts us all:

And he had the feeling, as the men walked in silence ahead of him, that each of them knew, somehow intuitively, what Harley was going through, the tremble and terror of Shaw's packing, one box at a time, leaving … He had the feeling that not only was his secret being read, but these men had gone through the very same thing—had chased their wives before, lost them, caught them, let them go, chased them, found them—and that the reason no one was saying anything as they walked, with the stars scattered bright around them, was that they were all the same. There was no need to speak.

Rick Bass' imagery is consistently fresh, the voice passionate and unpretentious. Platte River merely adds to his reputation as one of the finest American writers going today.