SOURCE: Walker, Sam. “Author's Tall-Tale Novellas Push Envelope of the Plausible.” Christian Science Monitor (8 March 1994): 13.

In the following review, Walker declares that the stories in Platte River stretch the boundaries of realist fiction and resemble myth, fable, and the tall-tale.

Imagine a man so muscular he can lift up a car, throw a discus 300 feet, and carry a cow on his shoulders. A character in Rick Bass's new book Platte River accomplishes these feats.

But in his seventh work of fiction, the author—who some consider one of America's most promising—has undertaken a task no less Herculean: gripping contemporary fiction by the trunk and shaking its branches.

Bass bends the code of realism to which most of his colleagues adhere. The three novellas collected here are full of events that push the envelope of the plausible, and his mythical narrative style harks back to a time when...