SOURCE: Mort, John. Review of Platte River, by Rick Bass. Booklist 90, no. 11 (1 February 1994): 993.

In the following review of Platte River, Mort comments that Bass writes beautifully, but that the three novellas included in this volume are spare and thematically unrelated.

The Montana environmentalist (The Ninemile Wolves [1992]) here [in The Platte River] offers three spare, unrelated stories. “Platte River,” the weakest, is about an ex-football player who journeys from Montana to speak at a small college in northern Michigan. It effectively evokes the sadness of a life in which dreams were realized early, and then nothing else happened; it might make a good reading for men's consciousness meetings. “Mahatma Joe,” about a Canadian evangelist who is near death, and who manages one last convert in an embittered young woman trying to find herself in a wilderness valley, has a lilting, seductive charm about it, however, and an understated humor...