Over the past two years Rick Bass has published short fiction in the Paris Review, Esquire, GQ, and the Quarterly. His work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and New Writing from the South, and his was the opening story in The Pushcart Prize XIII. “The Watch,” the title piece of this first collection, will appear in the upcoming O'Henry Awards volume. All told, as impressive a record as any young writer of the '80s has compiled—and these have been boom years for young writers.

The book is equally impressive. Bass gives us more than well-crafted prose and the glimmerings of a voice; several of the stories are fully achieved, free from all residue of apprenticeship.

The 10 stories in The Watch are set in the heart of the country: Texas, Utah, the woods of Mississippi and the hills of Montana. They are dominated by their male figures, and thus full of fishing and hunting and drinking. But Bass does not glamorize these American male pastimes, he realizes how easy it is to hide behind them, to use them to avoid confronting the more substantial challenges presented to us in living with ourselves and among others.

In “Choteau,” the chief figure is Galena Jim Ontz, a man with “two girlfriends and a key to Canada.” He's one of those fearless, hard-drinking, hard-driving frontiersmen out of America's legendary past, and the nameless first-person narrator follows wherever Galena Jim leads. The narrator understands Jim better than he understands himself, however, as we soon learn:

“[Jim]'s got black hair, an old lined-looking face—he's forty—and light blue eyes, a kid's grin. … He loves to hunt. I do not know how he got the key [to the gate leading to Canada]. Some sort of charm or guile somewhere, I'm sure. People only see that side of him. Though surely Patsy, who has been his girlfriend ever since she left Oklahoma with him, sees the other part. I do, too. He is still a boy, still learning to be a man, this in the fortieth year of his life.”

Jim's nickname harks back to the night he stole a cement-mixer, filled it with the luminous blue ore called galena, then poured the mixture of ore and cement onto the streets and sidewalks and main plaza of his town, creating galena-speckled surfaces: “Your car or truck headlights will pick up sudden, flashing blue-bolt chunks and swatches in the road, blazing like blue eyes, sunk down in the road—the whole road glittering and bouncing with that weird blue galena light, if you are driving fast.” It's the kind of mythic incident Bass' characters seem to exist for. (In “Mexico,” the protagonist is trying to raise the world's largest bass—in his swimming pool.)

But by the end of “Choteau” the myth is shattered, the vulnerability of the legendary figure is revealed. On a hunting trip, Galena Jim tries to ride a moose. He's thrown, the moose comes after him, and he is reduced to “running and scrambling, diving around rocks and rolling under logs, clutching his heart.” Jim has what appears to be a mild stroke, and suddenly the mask falls away: “He didn't have any color, and for a moment, broken and hurt like that, almost helpless, he seemed like my friend rather than a teacher of any sort; and he seemed young, too, like he could have been just anybody, instead of Galena Jim Ontz, who had been thrown by a moose; and we sat there all afternoon, he with his eyes closed, resting, saving up, breathing slowly with cracked ribs.”

There is always, in these stories, a moment when the hero is brought low, when the dream is surrendered and all that's left is the memory of glory. In “Mexico,” the bass in the swimming pool is caught by high-school kids who have snuck into the yard. The rugged, alligator-wrestling Buzbee of “The Watch” ends up chained to the porch of the general store run by his bachelor son, who only wants someone to talk to. Women leave the odd, stubborn, obsessed narrators of “Mississippi” and “In Ruth's Country” for safer, more conventional alternatives.

Yet despite the consistency of theme, the stories sometimes fail to hit their marks because Bass' influences overwhelm him. Barry Hannah is a kind of presiding deity here—a brave choice for a mentor in these days when the goal of many young writers seems to be a muting of voice, but a dangerous one, too.

Two of the stories disappear under Hannah's weight. “Mississippi” and “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses” are too full of the kind of extended nominative groupings he has perfected—“the wild big fairway of pumping and producing oil wells” is an example from “Mississippi.” Other Hannahisms compound the problem, including frequent interjections of commentary on the narrative (“That is what my state is about”; “Another desperate Southerner, done escaped at his first chance”) and a similar narrative pointing used to introduce an episode or a descriptive passage (“This is how we discovered Robby”; “Summers in Mississippi are like this”). Although Bass does Hannah well, he is better when he eases up on the verbal accelerator and moves us along at a pace more in line with the secret yearnings of his characters who, for all of their exploits with cars and trucks and horses, with guns and fishing poles, are less after perfect sporting moments than a little bit of human contact.

We know we are a long way from the manly heroics of a character out of Hemingway when we find that the narrator and his friend Kirby in “Redfish” have gotten what little knowledge they have about fishing from their reading, and even their drinks are new to them. “It was our first time to drink Cuba Libres, and we liked them even better than margaritas. We had never caught redfish before either, but had read about it in a book.” Given the newness of it all to them, there is just the right amount of clumsiness in those sentences—the awkward use of the infinitive in the first, the not quite secure antecedent of the “it” in the second. And the more we learn about the narrator and his friend, the more apt these effects become. (Bass excels at subtly adjusting syntax to aid his characterizations.)

Before long we see what's at stake here, what in essence has been at stake throughout. The narrator and Kirby wander along the beach. It's windy and cold and they haven't caught any fish. When they decide to drag a lifeguard tower back to their camp but can't get it to budge, their hopes for living out even one successful night of mythic American malehood begin to crumble. Kirby admits he misses his wife. “We were a long way from our fire, and it looked a lot smaller, from where we were. … Kirby started crying and said he was going home to Tricia but I told him to buck up and be a man. I didn't know what that meant or even what I meant by saying that, but I knew I did not want him to leave.” The narrator is lonely, and his friend Kirby is lost. The fishing trip—and the whole macho ethos, it seems—is only their excuse to stay close, to comfort each other (they never do catch any fish, though when Bass leaves them, they are still trying).

Throughout The Watch Bass' characters have a yearning for the old achievements. They want to catch the biggest fish, make the fastest time, regain their youth, their lovers, their belief in legends. Yet only when they give up these pursuits, or at least gain some perspective on them, do they achieve something important: intimacy, recovery, wisdom.

At the end of “Wild Horses,” one of the longer, more powerful stories in the book, Bass leaves us with the image of a boy training a horse to pull a sled. “The egrets hopped and danced, following at a slight distance, but neither the boy nor the horse seemed to notice. They kept their heads down, and moved forward.” It's an image of dedication and progress, both in abundant evidence in The Watch.