The Big Rock Candy Mountain (5*)

I knew Wallace Stegner's name but hadn't read any of the Pulitzer Prize winner's work.  A recent appreciation in the New York Times steered me toward The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a grueling family saga set west of the Mississippi at the turn of the 20th century. Initially, Stegner's lush descriptions of life on the prairie and the hopeful pursuit of romantic love and material success in simpler times felt like balm.

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.

Then actual history, resonant and chilling, intervenes.  The Spanish Flu afflicts a tiny town despite social distancing and mask wearing. Three members of the Mason family get it--and are isolated along with other cases in an old schoolhouse-- but survive only to face even greater hardships.

"Funny," Elsa said.  "Once it comes right into your own house you're not scared any more.  It's just like any sickness, and it doesn't paralyze you the way it did at first."

Stegner's stream-of-consciousness account of a graduation ceremony vividly captures the promise of a life eventually cut short by forces beyond a young character's control.

That was the cream of the assembly [earning a letter sweater at graduation] as far as Chet was concerned, but there were a lot of other awards, pins for publications and opera and glee club and student offices.  Chet was up twice more, for opera and glee club, and there once again with the glee club when it sang.  Then the speakers, the valedictorian and the salutatorian and the Superintendent of Schools and the Commencement speaker, and the long queues forming for the passing out of the diplomas, and that was the end of that.  
That was the end of school, of stinking chem labs, of physics classes where you experimented with the laws of the pendulum, swinging plumb-bobs on strings down the stairwell from the third floor to the basement so that girls going into the door of the girls' gym could be bopped with them.  Now was the end of practices after school, of showers in the steamy old locker room and towel fights between the lockers, of snake dances through the streets to celebrate victories, of operas in the old Salt Lake Theater where you sang tenor leads in Mademoiselle Modiste or The Red Mill.  This was the end of lunches on the lawns while the gulls flew over crying, of butts snitched behind the corner of Mad Maisie's, of hot dogs and mustard and root beer over her messy counter, of toting a gun in ROTC drills and marching on hot spring days up through the Lucerne toward the mountains, a whole battalion breaking ranks sometimes and tearing through the alfalfa when a racer snake slid from under the file-closer's feet, all of them chasing the shift snake while the student officers yelled their heads off and howled commands that nobody minded and tossed around demerits that nobody listened to, and the commandant started back from Company A to see what was the matter.

Now was the end of a lot of things.

Stegner's casual racism--writing from the perspective of the father, Bo Mason, a bootlegger built like a brick shit house, he slurs Blacks, Native Americans and Jews--probably wouldn't have raised an eyebrow when the novel was published in 1943 but today it argues against his deep understanding of the human condition.  Two passages reflect the thirty-something author's struggle to find his place in a world of modest white privilege long before it was recognized as such.

Well, where is home? he said.  It isn't where your family comes from, and it isn't where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life.  Home is the place where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat.)  Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight.  Is home that, or is it the place where you want to be buried yourself.  Or is it the place where you come in your last desperation to shoot yourself, choosing the garage or the barn or the woodshed in order not to mess up the house, but coming back anyway to the last sanctuary where you can kill yourself in peace.

* * * 

Perhaps that was what it [family history] meant, all of it.  It was good to have been along and to have shared it.  There were things he had learned that could not be taken away from him.  Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother's gentleness and resilience, his father's enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.

A superbly written, if limited dissection of the American dream at the precise moment when a young man could no longer just "go West" to achieve it!