The trouble with nature writing, a majestic genre, is that its peaks are sometimes purple. Nature cries out for naming, and soon $10 words encrust the page. Nature cries out for understanding, and so spiritualism blows through, inflating sentences. A character of Annie Proulx’s leans out of a plane to observe the “great brown and red curves, scooped cirques, rived canyons” of Wyoming. Annie Dillard, walking near Tinker Creek, perceives that “the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor.”

Such writing is not necessarily bad, but it smells of the lamp. Writers who speak for nature ought to have a fresher voice. If they go to nature to write, shouldn’t their writing benefit?

In “Why I Came West: A Memoir” (Houghton Mifflin, 238 pages, $24), the acclaimed short-story author Rick Bass asks a version of this question: What have 20 years of secluded living in northwestern Montana done to him as a writer? He meditates on cause and effect, wondering if he could possibly have been drawn to the Yaak Valley by some deep destiny, and whether the valley has “sculpted” him in various ways. But though he talks about how the woods and especially the hunt stimulate the imagination, and about how his work as an activist saps his inspiration, he skirts the more fundamental question of literary quality.

After a childhood in Houston and a brief career working as a geologist for oil companies in Mississippi, Mr. Bass brought his wife West. On first sighting the Yaak Valley in 1987, he responded immediately: “I just knew that I loved it: that a harmony, and a desire for fit — a deep, biological desire — was struck, in that first sighting, first odor, first touch.” Mr. Bass is most comfortable at this level of abstraction — talking about fits and deep desires, and referring easily to “touch,” without giving us much that is tangible.

In a similar passage, describing possibly the same moment — it is hard to tell — he remembers looking at “the ivory crests of the ice-capped peaks, and at the slender ribbons of gray thread rising from the chimneys of the few cabins nudged close to the winding river below, and we fell in love with that landscape, as they say, at first sight.” But these descriptions are made more of phrases than of memories. Mr. Bass, a lover of palpable-sounding imagery, claims that language is “like a lever and fulcrum” and that “it can move almost anything.” But what work does a redundancy such as “the ivory crests of the ice-capped peaks” do? It does not move mountains.

“Why I Came West” is not, to be fair, the unified, composed statement of faith advertised by its cover. Rather, it is patched together from often similar articles, some of them published in catalogs. Labeled a memoir, the book only gives itself away through its egregious repetitions and through the fine print on the copyright page, which tells us that, for instance, portions of a chapter that laid heavy emphasis on a Robert Redford movie, “Jeremiah Johnson,” turn out to have been published in the Sundance newsletter.

Still, Mr. Bass has interesting things to say about writing and the wilderness. The Yaak Valley is a part of the Rockies and a part of the Pacific Northwest rainforests, and Mr. Bass believes the “duality” of his chosen home to be uniquely inspiring. It is in the space between two different things that narrative is born — and he convincingly reapplies this concept to the hunt, the space between predator and prey. This is “narrative tension,” all right.

Equally convincing is his upright defense of hunting, and of the necessity of occasionally using oil and wood products, even as an environmental activist. “To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one’s life,” he writes in connection with hunting. I only wish that he did not condescend to his urban readers. Mr. Bass writes of giving lectures to “people who have known only pavement now for a very long time,” but surely the ins and outs of his sustainable lifestyle, including especially the carving of an elk, would interest any number of people on the subway.

It was soon after he settled in the Yaak that Mr. Bass became an ardent conservationist, and in many nonfiction accounts he has outlined a struggle that reflects both courage and principle. He worries that this struggle has smothered his art — “I used to be a fiction writer,” he laments.

This New Yorker wonders if nature itself has not smothered Mr. Bass’s art, if he doesn’t miss the sharp mutual scrutiny of city life. He champions “the language of generosity,” as against “the language of treachery and greed,” that of the clear-cutters. But generosity is not a fundamental editorial principle, and, in compiling this book, Mr. Bass has gone too easy on himself.

blytal@nysun.com