Writers alternately understand themselves to be engaged in a futile, irrelevant dalliance, or they understand themselves to be engaged in the most vital and necessary of human activities: the articulation, formation and preservation of the human spirit.

That's if they think about themselves at all—which probably shouldn't be so very often.

If the first political act of the writer is mastery of the self, the discipline that applies buttocks to chair, then the second act is to convince someone—anyone—that this stuff is worth reading. It's easy to get readers if one resorts to emotional blackmail, a political act most of us learn at our mother's knee. All sorts of generous critics can be shanghaied into reading a writer's work. Like water from the rock struck by Moses, praise can gush forth from parents, siblings, teachers, pastors. But that kind of ego-nurturing doesn't last long for the neurotically compulsive artist, for whom wide-spread praise and oxygen are equivalent necessities.

For the writer who requires a wider audience, the third political act, the one that in most of our minds separates the amateur from the professional, is to attain publication. A Xerox machine will do (hence the appeal of university writing programs). Better than photocopy is a chapbook. Better than a chapbook is a magazine. Better than a magazine is a book.

But there are magazines, and then there are magazines. Books and books. Appearance and circulation have a lot to do with the placement of a publishing medium in the hierarchical rankings. You might wistfully hope that attaining publication is exclusively a matter of quality. Every editor swears this to be true, especially for his journal/press/house. Most readers, if they think about it at all, just assume editors publish what they believe to be best. Veteran writers know such a fairy tale is for tyros. Novices nurture their ambitions with faith in a pure system, the faith that allows them to write and write again in the face of frequent rejection. However, the first awful moment a writer believes that the cause of rejection is not inadequacy in the work itself but a system that jealously guards entry, that moment marks the writer's departure from Art. The gradual suspicion that no amount of revision, self-flagellation, course enrollment or perseverance is as effective as a little schmoozing eats away at the pursuit of quality. The effects of this knowledge on dozens and dozens of writers accounts for the tide of mediocrity that rises on the swell of intrigue and networking.

The jaded reader of this column will smile and ask just why I expect writing to be any different from any other social endeavor. Well, Art ought to be purer than everything else. Good Art should be rewarded amply, but for being good Art.

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Rick Bass's fiction has won a number of awards, and this collection is his first. Seen all at once, Bass's book gives us an insight into the development of a young writer. Bass acknowledges “helpful advice” from Carol Houck Smith, Tom Jenks, Rust Hills and Gordon Lish, as well as James Linville and the staff of The Paris Review. The collection contains Houston stories, Mississippi stories and Utah/Montana stories. Not surprisingly, Rick Bass has lived in all of these places, but though many of these stories share locales and characters, they are separated from each other in the book. This seems less a collection than an aggregation of Bass's early work. Reading The Watch, we witness a young writer wrestling with his material, trying to order his experience, searching for his voice, and discovering what works and what does not.

When Bass's fiction works well, it works very well indeed—but a few of these stories seem generated by a young writer's desire to write well, rather than a young writer who urgently needs to tell a story. The former isn't a bad point of generation, of course, but when unaccompanied by the latter, the consequent fiction falls flat. Reading Bass's first book is like watching a newborn thorough-bred learn to stand; you smile at the awkwardness, hoping that at some future date you'll see the awesome power and speed of a champion.

One has to hope Bass will resist any who'd urge him to publish too much too soon, to capitalize on the moment. They will necessarily move on to next season's discovery, discarding last year's writer like a pet rock or a hula hoop. It's possible to publish too early.

Take “Mexico,” for example, the first story in the collection. It is over-worked, coy in its resolution and use of imagery. The same is true of “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses,” which from the title down puts a reader on notice to prepare for work that will be profound and cute all at once, a regular tour de force, so you'd better sit up and pay attention. It's a student's work, a very good student, but still a student. Too much attention to craft overwhelms whatever story lurks behind the prose, and characters over-trimmed for the sake of linguistic dexterity and some trendy idea of art eventually are reduced to stereotypical caricatures. In “Cats and Students,” we read,

I guess the most weight I've ever lifted is the back end of Slater's car. Robby and Slater and I took it up to Oxford to look at Faulkner's old house out in the country one Sunday. We got sort of lost and sort of stuck in the mud. We had a couple of dozen watermelons and a keg of beer in the back, and it was a hot Mississippi summer, and we were going to have a picnic, and the jack sank down in the mud and got lost, but I lifted the back end up anyway …

Familiar stuff. Good ol' boys on a muddy road, a six-pack of beer, watermelons, ingenuous language. The reference to Faulkner, of course, is supposed to make us know that the characters are a cut above the ordinary red-neck. Too many of Bass's southern grotesques or executives in the “awl bizness” are simply clichéd characters whose obsessions fill us with neither delight nor insight, but leave us wondering why we're reading about people habitually feeble-minded. And there isn't a single female character who serves as anything other than an ideal object for the males in the book.

In too many of the stories, Bass relies on the newest typographical boost to profundity, the isolated paragraph. Designed to make each paragraph seem chiseled and finely honed, a work of art in and of itself, the page design rivets our eyes to each block of narrative, and only incidentally fills a book with white space.

It's an illusion.

Seeing such paragraphs, we believe we are reading short fiction dedicated to compression. We can only pray such mannerisms soon go the way of dialogue introduced with dashes, poetry typed without employing the shift key. Trendy writing looks smart but says nothing special.

Bass constructs whole stories whose point is to equate a character with an animal, the hunter's mentality. We acquire the qualities of that which we stalk, capture, or kill. Wear the fetish, be the creature. Eat its heart. Beside each other, stories such as “The Government Bears,” “Red-fish,” and “Wild Horses,” become obvious as soon as we read their titles, though separately they read well, even brilliantly, especially “Red-fish.”

Once he gets out of his own way, Bass writes wonderfully lucidly, able to tell a sensitive, well-observed, moving tale that has at its core a mystery. “Juggernaut” is such a story. The middle-aged, slope-shouldered Mr. Odom, a high school teacher whose seeming only claim to fame is a forest green Corvette, is discovered to be Larry Loop, the “goon” for a Texas ice hockey team, the Juggernauts. “You could tell he was not from the north. You could tell he had not grown up with the game, but had discovered it, late in life. He was big, and the oldest man on the ice, grey-headed, tufts of it sticking out from behind his savage, painted goalie's mask—though he was not a goalie—and more often than not when he bumped into people, they went over.” When the narrator and his friend see one of their high school classmates, Laura, waiting after a game in a parking lot for Mr. Odom, the rhapsodic Conrad-esque ending is completely earned.

… in two months she would be graduating, and what she was doing would be okay then, … and for the first time we saw the thing, in its immensity, and it was like coming around a bend or trail in the woods and seeing the hugeness and emptiness of a great plowed pasture or field, when all one's life up to that point has been spent close to but never seeing a field of that size … it was very clear to us that the whole rest of our lives would be spent in a field like that, and the look Laura gave us was sweet and kind, but also wise, and was like an old familiar welcome.

No gimmicks here. No elaborate gyrations to draw a simple equation between character and animal, just a story that is plainly felt and honestly told. As Rick Bass grows as a writer, and he clearly will, he will develop the authority that comes with trusting his material and his reader. Who knows? Maybe he'll stop taking so much advice from New York mandarins and listen more intently to his own very fine muse.