Diamonds in the Marsh: A Natural History of the Diamondback Terrapin Book

For years Rick Bass has been one of my go-to naturalist authors, and one of my longstanding favorites. This collection of his, though, I honestly wish I hadn't stumbled into. There are far too many (wholly unnecessary) sentences and misogyny* within it that made me lose respect for Bass as both a writer and a human.

It's one of his earliest books, published in 1987 when Bass was 29, but more than a cohesive collection, it's a shoddy patchwork quilt of 13 essays that read, at worst, like personal journal entries that should have stayed in his journals, and at best, like mediocre blog posts that might have been intriguing to a handful of readers who knew Bass personally and wouldn't think twice about him talking about skinny-dipping with "slim girls," changing where he's from inside each essay, or perpetually whining about "having" to live and work in Mississippi (for oil companies) instead of getting paid to disappear in the mountains.

*Like: "I felt like an Indian, and was glad and grateful for everything, and cannot explain why," which is the exact moment I said to hell with this book. (But don't worry, there are plenty more where that came from. Sentences like "Winn calls the waitress 'dear' again," and page after page of Bass diminishing and condescending to 99.9% of the women in the book as if they're decorative and delicate caricatures.)

There's something to be said for a writer learning who they are through storytelling, becoming naturally better and wiser and more connected to their specific sense of place as they go. I don't mean to devalue that experience for Bass, or to assert he wasn't allowed to grow up in between 1987 and some of his later (and far better) writing. I'm just altogether confused as to why someone saw fit to publish this particular collection when so often it reads like half-formed ramblings of a young man with an inflated sense of self and heaps of white privilege trying to assert he's "from the West," when in reality he was born and raised in Texas and didn't move to Montana until the year this book was published.

I'm not saying there weren't moments of backcountry goodness'shimmers and glimmers of the acerbic, wisened, conservationist Bass I would come to love in later years. (They were there, peppered sparingly throughout a text that otherwise seemed altogether sluggish, immature, and unfinished.) I'm just saying that for me it wasn't worth the slog and effort it took to get to those rare shimmers and glimmers.

My advice: Skip this book and read The Book of Yaak instead.

[Two halfhearted stars for the two sentences that made me laugh.]

English Nerdery P.S. Goodreads doesn't technically have the version Matt and I read: 174 pages, published in 1987 by W.W. Norton & Company.