The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1938)

Long afterward, Bruce looked back on the life of his family with half-amused wonder at its rootlessness. The people who lived a lifetime in one place, cutting down the overgrown lilac hedge and substituting barberry, changing the shape of the lily pool from square to round, digging out old bulbs and putting in new, watching their trees grow from saplings to giants that shaded the house, by contrast seemed to walk a dubious line between contentment and boredom. What they had must be comfortable, pleasant, worn smooth by long use; they did not feel the edge of change. (p. 374)

The Big Rock Candy Mountain tells the story of the Mason family, who lived in the western United States in the first half of the 20th century. It opens with Elsa leaving her home in Minnesota after her widowed father marries her best friend. Elsa meets and marries Harry "Bo" Mason, a restless idealist with a continuous stream of ideas for making big money. Whenever Bo lost interest in his current business venture, they pulled up stakes and moved on to the next opportunity, the "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." As you might imagine, things never panned out as expected, and their life was a hard one filled with dashed hopes and unrealized expectations. Bo and Elsa had two sons, Chet and Bruce, who experienced not only Bo's whims, but also his strict parenting style and volatile temper. By the end of the story, the boys have grown up and the family is deeply scarred.

It sounds like a real downer, doesn't it? Well, yes, it is. For several days nagging, low-grade feelings of anger and sadness infiltrated my heart and mind. I was angry at the way Bo jerked them around, and the ways he emotionally manipulated his wife and children. But Stegner was a very skilful storyteller. Each time Bo lit on a new scheme, I hoped it would work out for them. I celebrated small victories, and mourned losses. When the influenza epidemic hit their rural town, I felt both desperation and hope. As Bruce comes of age he plays a larger part in the story, and I was right there with him as he tried to make sense of the man he has become:
"I suppose," he wrote, "that the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. he runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?" (p. 436)

In the novel's last pages, the adult Bruce reflects on life with his father, how the experience shaped him and what it means for his future. It was a very moving scene that I won't soon forget.

Readers should be ready to feel uncomfortable, sad, and angry. But it's worth it for the reading experience. ( )

I finally finished this book. I did not like it. There was too much testosterone. The author has really weird ideas about masculinity and what being a man is. I didn't like any of the characters except for Elsa and am flabbergasted that Bruce has the audacity, at the end of the book, for blaming her for his problems. The writing was good. Stegner really describes the psyche of the people who live in the American West and, in my opinion, has it nailed. What stands out to me in this regard is that he makes the case that the land makes the people. He also does a great job of describing the land. That essay written about Bruce's travel from Minnesota to Salt Lake City is a beautiful description of the land. I loved that section and it was sections like it that kept me reading this book, otherwise I would have thrown it against the wall in exasperation long before it was read. ( )

Great read. I do like a good multi-generational family saga, and this is very well written.

The characters were all brilliantly drawn. While it's semi-autobiographical, Stegner manages to get inside the actions and motivations of all the key family members, their relationships, and how they affect each other. He makes it easy to understand and care about them, even at their worst moments. Even though it's pretty clear from the outset (or reading the blurb) that Bo's many schemes are doomed, I still wanted him to succeed and never entirely lost sympathy with him.

There's some really interesting settings and set pieces in this; the family moves around a lot. I found their time in Canada and the impact of the post-WWI flu epidemic particularly fascinating. ( )

The story of Bo Mason, a man “haunted by the dream of quick wealth and isn’t quite unscrupulous enough to make his dream come true…he is a gambler who isn’t quite gambler enough, who has a streak of penuriousness in him, a kind of dull Dutch caution, so that he gambles with one hand and holds back a stake with the other”. His wife Elsa, and their two sons, Chet and Bruce, live an itinerant life of poverty as Bo chases schemes and dreams of a big score. The word hardscrabble would hardly describe their life.

In many ways it reminded me of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. It is a grand and glorious family saga full of dreams and heartache and Bruce’s search for family and home.

“He has a notion where home would turn out to be, for himself as for his father – over the next range, on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, that place of impossible loveliness that had pulled the whole nation westward, the place where the fat land sweated up wealth and the heavens dropped lemonade…”.

The story also has autobiographical aspects – many of the situations and tragedies were Stegner’s own - which add an additional layer to the story.

5 big enthusiastic stars ( )

“the reflection of ecstasy and the shadow of tears.”

This is the story of the Mason family. Bo, Elsa and their two sons, Chet and Bruce. We follow them over thirty years, from Minnesota, North Dakota, Canada, Montana, Utah and a few other places in between. Bo is a restless, hot-tempered man, always searching for the “next best thing”, even if that includes breaking the law and continuously putting his family in danger. His sons grow to fear and hate him. Elsa tries to tolerate and support her husband but is slowly ground down, by his excessive and reckless pursuit.
This sweeping narrative, is filled with breath-taking descriptions of the West. Timber camps, Klondike mines, bootlegging, farming and running several “blind pigs”, (speakeasies). It is also filled with tension and apprehension, as this hapless family follows Bo, through one misadventure after another.
Stegner is a masterful storyteller and has quickly become one of my favorite writers.

“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.” ( )