The Mountain Lion

Jean Stafford is primarily known today (if at all) for her marriages to Robert Lowell and A. J. Liebling and for her short stories, most of which were originally published in The New Yorker and gathered in an anthology that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. But she also wrote three novels, including "The Mountain Lion" (1947), which is considered by many critics and writers to be her best. Tracing the lives of a brother and sister after they had been incapacitated by scarlet fever, the novel's underlying heartbreak creeps up on you. Because of their infirmity (and frequent nosebleeds that excuse them from school), the children are outcasts among their playmates, and they find refuge in each other's company. These early pages exhibit a comic warmth that is, it turns out, illusory. Two events--the sudden death of their grandfather (an episode somehow both macabre and offbeat) and an extended stay at an uncle's ranch in Colorado--alter their lives and, eventually, their shared bond. Molly revels in her role as a misfit ("I know I'm ugly. I know everyone hates me. I wish I were dead."), and she finds refuge in her books, while Ralph thrives in the outdoors and on the ranch, and he becomes his uncle's constant companion and good-natured rival in their hunt for a local mountain lion they'd spotted in the hills. But Ralph's entry into adolescence makes him "wild with all sorts of angers and with an anxiety he could not name." "Sometimes he loathed his physical being for the alterations that were taking place in it." This is all standard stuff for a coming-of-age novel, but what sets "The Mountain Lion" above the rest are the intricacy of Stafford's prose and her subtle depiction of the deterioration of the attachment between these two siblings. The perspective alternates between them as the chasm--both physical and emotional--widens, until an imprudent and suggestive comment by Ralph to his sister sits awkwardly between them. Still, their rivalry and spats and embarrassments and discomfiture are not much worse than those endured by most brothers and sisters--but an unexpected and shocking incident makes reconciliation between them impossible. While a tragedy, the novel is both charming and funny in turns; stylistically, the novel recalls Carson McCullers' better work or even the more subdued grotesqueries of Eudora Welty's "The Ponder Heart." What Joyce Carol Oates has called Stafford's "Olympian detachment" suggests "painful intimacy" while avoiding sentimentality; it's a novel that will haunt the reader long after its abrupt finale.

This novel is about the coming of age of a brother, Ralph, and a sister, Molly. Even though Molly is a bright, young female who aspires to be a writer, she considers herself a long wooden box with a mind inside. While Molly and Ralph visit their Uncle Claude and grandfather, their mother takes their two older sisters around the world in preparation for marrialge. Molly spends the summer imitating Ralph because she does not have anyone else to act as her mentor. When Ralph asks her what dirty words she knows, his name, too, is added to the list of "unforgivables." Molly's presence inhibits Ralph's male maturation. Therefore, the hunt for the mountain lion translates into a form of salvation for future Molly's as well as for Ralph. This novel is rich with symbolism. An appropriate novel for the secondary classroom that highlights such subjects as feminism, anorexia, and dysfunction in the family.