The Big Rock Candy Mountain

I read Wallace Stegner's "Angle of Repose" and liked it very much, so I decided to try this one, his first major novel. I enjoyed this book even more than the later, Pulitzer Prize winning work. "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" is a more straightforward narrative than "Angle of Repose." It is obviously a memoir of Stegner's own childhood, along with extensive material based loosely on his parents' lives. Stegner's descriptions of life in the upper western plains during the first two decades of the twentieth century read with an amazing freshness and clarity. The scenes of childhood and family life around the time of the First World War leave unforgettable impressions. The details are lively and crystal clear. Stegner structures his novel with a sure knack for keeping the reader's interest. He has an instinct for creating tension within discrete episodes, which are well paced throughout the book. You live through blizzards, droughts, an epidemic, and even a car chase with bootleggers. There are also beautiful descriptions of the west and plenty of psychological and ethical dilemmas to ponder. In some ways this book reminded me of the Nebraska novels of Willa Cather and the works of John Steinbeck. However, the characters in "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" don't always show the nobility of Cather's pioneers; nor are they primarily victims of natural and economic disasters like the Joad family in "The Grapes of Wrath." The people in Stegner's novel make decisions, often tragic ones, and live out the their responsibilities for those decisions not only as they affect themselves, but also as they impact on those around them. As is widely acknowledged, this novel is about the American Dream - the drive for status, wealth, and easy money -- the golden opportunity just beyond the rainbow. Looking at shows like "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" or "The Apprentice," it is easy to see that these beliefs are still alive and well in our popular culture. Stegnar is unambiguous in his condemnation of this mentality. Yet, he expresses his views with compassion and understanding. Stegner describes forces that are integral parts of our heritage and tradition, and he does so in a way that even today should appeal to readers of any political persuasion.

"On the Big Rock Candy Mountain Where the cops have wooden legs, And the handouts grow on bushes, And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs, Where the bulldogs all have rubber teeth And the cinder dicks are blind I am a gonna go Where there ain't no snow Where the rain don't fall And the wind don't blow On the Big Rock Candy Mountain" Wallace Stegner is such a great storyteller and I love his writing so much that before the year has ended I will have most all of his book in my library. Mr. Stegner delves so deeply into the characters of this book, enabling us to feel their inner wounds and emotions as well as their determination to fight all challenges for the betterment of their nomadic life. We become close to Bo Mason who is the chief character along with his wife Elsa, Bruce and Chet. Stegner shows the length a husband will go to acquire comfort and food for his family.  The way a man would go so close to death's door all for his family's sake. There is a lot of love shown in this story , but there also is a lot of bitterness, self pity, ruthlessness, anger and illness. It is all about the human condition and what we yearn for that is sometime so hard to come by and so far away. Stegner fans will not be disappointed by this book. Reviewed by Heather Marshall Negahdar (SUGAR-CANE 28/06/04)

I had never heard of Wallace Stegner, but the title, Big Rock Candy Mountain, caught my eye. I'm glad it did. This book is absolutely unforgettable. From the opening scene as young, innocent Elsa fights nausea and goes valiantly westward to escape her joyless father to the last closing moments that you read slowly because you don't want the book to end. This is a book that stays with you. The writing is clean and beautiful and brutally honest. The bleak story is as unforgiving as the dry earth the Mason family wanders fruitlessly. The story of the Mason family is the story of America -- hopes destroyed and riches denied. More than the saga of their lives, I was touched by Stegner's deep understanding that, "man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum... He runs through his ancestors." At the end of the book, Bruce, the youngest son (and the voice of the author), takes up the psychic mantle of his ancestor's mistakes. As a tribute to his final insights, I paraphrase, "It was a good book to have been along with. It was good to have shared it. Perhaps that was what it meant, all of it."

Reading fiction does not get better than reading Wallace Stegner (1909-1993). His Pulitzer Prize winner, ANGLE OF REPOSE (1971) is my favorite novel, and the earlier BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN (1943) (hereafter "BRCM") is an equally moving book.There is no one-sentence way to summarize Stegner's somewhat autobiographical BRCM. It is as much a novel about family as it is about transience, rootlessness, and a nation that has been "footloose too long" (460). The Masons are a family troubled with tensions. They move frequently throughout the American West in the early 1900s--from North Dakota to Seattle, Salt Lake City to Reno--always in chase of their dreams.As in his other books, Stegner's characters resist description inasmuch as they are often subject to contradiction by their own characteristics. In BRCM, the Masons are no different. Bo Mason is the book's most dominant character, later eclipsed by his son, Bruce. Bo is a bootlegger, haunted all his life "by dreams of quick wealth" (p. 437). As a husband and father, he is miserly, impatient, "easily irritated" and abusive, yet not without "occasional spells of intense good spirits" (p. 437). Feminist readers may have a problem with his wife, Elsa Mason. "Misused" (p. 439) by her husband, Elsa is a "self-sacrificing" and "kindly-wise" wife and mother (p. 442). Despite her husband's faults--and the list is long--Elsa is unceasingly loyal to Bo. Even after "a dozen years of living among bootleggers and pimps and bellhops and all the little scummy riffraff on the edge of the criminal class," Elsa remains untouched by that way of life. "She only gives up her wishes," her son, Bruce notes, "never herself" (p. 447).BRCM is also a father-son story. Stegner shows his reader Bruce's dark and tormented childhood, the hatred he feels toward his father, and Bruce's lifelong attempt to come to terms with his troubled family. "If a man could understand himself and his own family," Bruce reflects, "he'd have a good start toward understanding everything he'd ever need to know" (p. 436). Bo's domination of his son even after his death, and the "incurable damage" done to Bruce become the subjects of Stegner's sequel to BRCM, RECAPITULATION (1979).BRCM is also about finding one's home, establishing roots, and living life authentically in a nation otherwise obsessed with finding "the Big Rock Candy Mountain," where "the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs" (p. 461), a land of futile dreams. We find Bruce questioning, "so when . . .do we get enough sense to quit looking for something for nothing?"Although it moves with powerful feelings, BRCM is by no means a "feel-good" novel. Rather, it is a "feel-real" novel full of conflict. Stegner's writing here is honest, rich with human experience, and marked with many memorable moments.G. Merritt

Wallace Stegner is different than most famous American writers, eschewing colorful literary activities like drug use, wife-swapping, and gross public displays of antisocial behavior. After a most difficult childhood, which is essentially chronicled in The Big Rock Candy Mountain, he married and stayed married, and received appointments to the faculties of prestigious universities. Yet Stegner's childhood, on the harsh plains of Saskatchewan, in the timber camps of the Northwest, and as the son of a bootlegger, marked Stegner as the survivor of a headlong and foolhardy quest after the American dream. That dream, and the belief that it could easily be found in the Plains and mountains of the North American West is abstracted in the mind of Bo Mason, the literary doppelganger for Stegner's father, as the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Much of Stegner's work focused on the choices we make in life, and the effect those choices have on our loved ones. In many ways, his urge towards moderation in personal affairs mirrored his burgeoning interest in conservation, and both were born of his childhood, where he saw precious commodities like love and timber misused and wasted. The Big Rock Candy Mountain captures the drive, much lost in recent years, towards the frontiers of our existence. The frontier myth--and after reading Stegner's work you'll realize it is to a certain extent a myth--is perhaps the single defining attribute of what it means to be American. Stegner realizes this, and he realizes what can happen to our reality when the quest for a dream is taken too far.