The Big Rock Candy Mountain Group Read

I am ready for Mr. Stegner. The last one I read by him was Crossing to Safety and that was a couple years ago. I wasn't planning on starting this until the 15th or so, but I wanted to get the thread up and running.

"The novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner follows the life of the Mason family (Bo and Elsa with their sons Chester and Bruce) during the early 20th Century in the United States and Canada. It spans a wide variety of settings. The book is structured in ten sections."

Mark, thanks for setting this up. I've owned this book seemingly for forever. I'm hoping to get to my other GR book for the month first, then move on to this one.

I started reading this last week and so far so good. I am only about 50 pages into it but it is very interesting. I have not read anything by Stegner, but my real time book discussion group has Crossing to Safety on tap for later in the year. I was familiar with Stegner but thought of him only as a conservation writer because of all the work he did for the Sierra Club. I will be happy to be reading something by him and hope to learn more about him and his life.

I'm planning to join in too, but like Mark I won't get to this for a little while yet.

I hope to join in with the group as well. I had planned on reading Crossing to Safety first, but I have this one on the shelf, too, so why not? :)

I started this book last night but didn't get very far into it. Too soon to offer any opinions on it but I hope to read a bit every night.

Is anyone else reading it right now?

Linda- Looks like many of us, are taking our time getting started. I am finishing up a story collection first but I might try dipping into it tomorrow. We will see.

Laura & Joanne- I hope you both decide to join us on this one. I think it will be a worthy read.

I have been reading on it from time-to-time. I am about 125 pages into the book. Very good so far. I think he has described the high plains as well as Kent Haruf. This is really a book about the West at the turn-of-the-century. (1900) I am surprised at the towns he talks about. For instance, the part I am reading now is about the town of Richmond, WA. I was just in Seattle and Richmond is a suburb of Seattle. In this book they were separate and it took a whole day to travel between them. It seems really strange to think of the two cities that way.

I had known that Stegner was a western writer, but I didn't realize how much. He might be the same kind of writer about the West in the same way that Ivan Doig is. But since I haven't read Doig, I really can't say.

>9 benitastrnad: Stegner is considered "The Dean of Western Writers". He and Ivan Doig were friends.

Here is a link to a short bio from wallacestegner.org if anyone's interested.

Well, I'll finally be cracking this baby today. Yah! It's a bigger book, than I first thought. My edition is over 550 pages and the print is small. I can't believe this was first published in '43. Wow. My mother was three years old at the time. My last Stegner was Crossing to safety and that came out in '87. What a career!

Benita- I want to read more Doig. I have a couple more of his on the shelf.

Joanne- Thanks for the Stegner link. I'll check it out later. I am sure it's excellent.

I'm not sure I'll get to this book in March. I committed to several 400-500 page books and there's no way I'll get to them all. Right now I have two long books on the go, plus a short story collection, and I'm managing but there's no way I can start another. I'm really a monogamous reader LOL. I've also had less reading time both because of busy work and family commitments. So I may end up pushing a few of my planned March reads into April. It's a good thing these threads don't expire!

I haven't been reading much lately but hope to get back into this. It's doubtful that I'll finish it this month. Not very far into it but I am liking it.

My copy is also about 500 very yellow and brittle pages with small print. I am now on page 140 or thereabouts.

I have read the 1st, 30 pages. I was hoping to read another 20 but I think this will be a book to savor. There is a vivid quality to his narrative. And some of the early dialogue reminds me of Steinbeck.

Laura- I wish you could join us! We have a small crew going here, but of course, I completely understand.

Mark, I have done about the same amount of reading in TBRCM as you. I'm ready to be monogamous with this book for awhile. I like the characters of both Bo Mason and Elsa so far; I'm just not sure they're right for each other. We'll see.

Donna,

I'm ready to be monogamous with this book for awhile.

I'd be much further along if I could just remain faithful!

It works, Joanne. I was a faithful reader this week end and have read through Chapter 7. I won't say too much about it because I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but I love this book! It's pretty dated (1943 is even before my time!); however good writing never goes out of date. So far I've followed the Mason family from North Dakota to Washington state to Canada to Montana to Utah. I may have forgotten a few locations. It truly is a moving story!

From what I have heard this novel is a fictionalized autobiography of the author's family. Does anybody know if that is true. I am on page 170 and am back in Minnesota. I agree with you the quality of the writing is wonderful. And I love all the descriptions of the life that this family has lived. I just read the part where Else knows that she loves Bo but realizes that he will never be able to settle down. What a conundrum.

I am 20 pages into Chapter 4, which is 200 pages in my edition. And like everyone else, I am really enjoying it. You do get lulled into thinking everything is going to work out, but you always have that nagging feeling, that something bad is going to happen.

Benita- I have heard that to about Stegner. I need to do more research.

I've just started Ch.3 so I'm (way) behind you guys. I'm not sure I want Bo's point of view..

>19 benitastrnad: I had read too, that Big Rock is autobiographical, Bruce being Stegner. Bo cuts quite a father figure.

I was curious about Elsa and how close that character is to his mother and had to do some digging to find a Paris Review interview where, when asked if the women in his fiction seemed stronger than the men, in part Stegner replied, "I think Elsa in Big Rock Candy Mountain, who has a good many qualities in common with my mother, is a strong character, stronger than her husband who is a lot more active and in some ways more imaginative."

I find that discovering a little background on this book adds a whole new level of interest for me.

I have not read any of Ivan Doig so can't compare Stegner with him, but I do think that Stegner's descriptions of the land and the farming, small town life, and such is very much like Kent Haruf. I think to accurately describe those small plains towns you have to have lived there and both Stegner and Haruf nail them with their descriptions.

Benita, Ivan Doig also writes well about the west. He describes shepherding and shearing so well in his English Creek trilogy that I think I could manage to shear a sheep if I had to!

I read The Big Rock Candy Mountain two years ago while taking a class on Wallace Stegner and thought I'd re-post what I wrote about the class discussion we had on the autobiographical nature of the book.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain was published in 1943, when Stegner was in his early 30s, and was his first important novel and mostly autobiographical. As Stegner was quoted in the Philip Fradkin biography (Wallace Stegner and the American West), he wrote this book “more out of my life than out of imagination.” He was looking at the “old problem of the dominant father who I think wore on me all of my life. . . . what he did to my self-confidence was disastrous for a long time.”

The autobiographical elements of the book are the main characters (Stegner--i.e., Bruce Mason, his parents and his brother), the arc of the story (it starts with the meeting of his parents and ends with their deaths), Stegner’s feelings about his parents (he revered his mother and hated his father), and the geographic movements/dates when things happened/ages of characters (these mirror what happened with Stegner’s family).

The book ends when the Stegner/Bruce Mason character is in his mid-20s and an angry young man after growing up with a violent and unreliable father. Fradkin quotes Stegner talking about BRCM: “I wrote it because it happened to me. . . . A lot of myself is invested in that book. As I wrote some pages of it, I couldn’t see the typewriter for tears.”

The teacher pointed out, however, that it isn’t all true. She read us some portions of letters Stegner wrote about BRCM. “Bruce Mason is what, for the grace of God, Wallace Stegner might have been.” “Bruce Mason is a possibility from that background but only one possibility” (not necessarily reality). In another letter about BRCM, Stegner said he didn’t know where non-fiction ended and fiction began in the book.

If you're interested, there is more discussion about my Stegner class on my second thread for 2011 (here, with the BRCM discussion starting at message 73). You might want to wait until you finish the book because I believe there are some spoilers that weren't necessarily marked. The class was also about Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety so those discussions are on the thread too and may contain spoilers that aren't marked. Our teacher highly recommended the Philip Fradkin biography of Stegner, Wallace Stegner and the American West, as the most objective one out there.

>24 phebj:: Pat, it was your experience with the course that made me grab BRCM and Crossing to Safety in a used book sale. Now I just need to read them!

I think you'll love both books Laura and they're a good window into Stegner's life. Crossing to Safety is about a real life friendship he and his wife had with another couple that lasted something like forty years. It's my favorite book by Stegner.

I thought a discussion of Stegner was on one of your threads, Pat. Thank you for supplying the link and additional information!

Pat- Thank you so much for the great information! That had to have been a fantastic class. I'll have to come back and read more about BRCM, after I am finished. Stegner is such an interesting figure. I would like to read the Fradkin bio too!
Have you read Stegner's Powell bio? That one looks great.

Mark, I have the Powell biography (Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West) and started it. I think I got to page 38 before I put it aside. It was a struggle for me to stay with it and seemed very dry. I'll try it again some day but it was not a book that grabbed me, to say the least.

I have wanted to read something about John Wesley Powell for a long time. I'll have to give this one a try at some point. I also have The Spectator Bird in the stacks. I will be making my way through all his books, eventually.

There has been a recent surge of interest in John Wesley Powell in literature so I am sure you will find something interesting to read about him.

I took a look at the postings Phebj mentioned and I will say that this must have been a very interesting class to take.

I grew up in a small town in Kansas. (pop. 150 when I was growing up - much less than that now) and will retire there when my time here in Alabama is done. I think that Stegner got his descriptions of the live of a farmer/homesteader about right. It was a tough life. I am 200 pages into the book and find it beautifully written. The descriptions of Bruce's life on the farm in Canada are wonderful. It reminds me of something my father said at my Uncle's funeral. He said that he and his brothers had the best growing up years possible. They had that huge farm to explore and wander around on and it seemed endless and limitless. It was complete freedom for a child. He said that he would like to think of this as exclusive to just him and his brothers, but he knows that it wasn't and isn't. That today there are kids growing up around Munden who will get to experience the same things that he and his brothers did and he assured parents in the audience that they were giving their children the best growing up possible. They should not regret their decision to stay in the rural community and raise their children there.

I also sense that Bruce does not like his father. He particularly hates his unpredictability and the fact that seemingly innocuous things trigger him and set him off on a course of violence or verbal abuse. This seems like a true emotion. His regard for his mother is different. It is more reverence than anything. In that sense it seems false to me.

I also wonder if the author is trying to make excuses for everybody. Mother, father, grandfather, and even the two boys?

Last night I read another passage in the book, and noticed that at times Bruce calls Bo, the father, and at other times he calls him his father. I get the sense that when the author wants us to sense the distance between Bruce and Bo that he uses the first phrase and when they are closer he uses the second phrase.

That brought me to wondering if Bruce really does hate his father? I don't think he does. I think what is going on here is a classic father/son domination/testosterone contest. They are both males and one has to prevail. Right now Bo is the Big Dog and Bruce resents it.

Woo Hoo! I finished the book. But now I miss it. My review is on the book's main page. I could have easily given it 5 stars but I hated it when Stegner drifted into the second person narrative.

I too wondered about the love-hate relationship between Bo and Bruce. One of my favorite parts of the book was Bruce's probe of what made his father tick - it started on Page 436 in my edition.

I am still reading and just passed page 300. Anybody else still reading?

>34 benitastrnad: I'm still reading and I'm on page 308. I love it but it's so bleak.

I haven't read it in a day or so...the incident with the horses and dogs...it's a tough part for me to get through. Anyone want to tell me that everything works out fine...? :)

YAY Donna!

I finished a few days ago. Hang in there, guys. I think it is a very worthy read. Stegner is a master.

Joanne- My lips are sealed.

I'm probably the furthest behind of anyone - page 360/541...

I love it but -

>36 msf59: Well, Mark, that part - where they were leaving town, past the dump...that had to have been the saddest thing I have ever read. I think I am scarred for life. (And I read Blindness!)

>37 Copperskye:: I'm probably the furthest behind of anyone
No you're not! I had good intentions of reading along with you all, but other commitments caused this one to slip into April.

I finally knocked out my review of BRCM. You can read it here: http://www.librarything.com/work/18196/reviews/94953231

It was a wonderful read. It dragged a bit in the last 100 pages but not bad. I can't believe the tension that Stegner created in these pages. I was on the edge of my seat many times and I was also impressed how creative Stegner with this narrative.
The scene when the family is going on the picnic is a perfect example of the contrasts in this story. The joy, fear, apprehension and exhilaration, all bundled in one.

Joanne- That was a gut-wrenching moment, I agree. Although I don't think it was as harrowing as Blindness. OMG!

I am now on about page 315. I didn't get as much read over the break as I thought I would. Probably because I was sick for two days out of the week and didn't feel like reading anything. The thing with the colt was very sad. I am now reading about the bootlegging chase.

I think that what Stegner is doing so well is creating the setting and the atmosphere of these little towns out West. It is sort of the same kind of thing that Kent Haruf did so well in Plainsong and what friends of mine say that Ole Rolvaag did in Giants in the Earth. The Plains are big and vast and just plain huge. And, even today, very empty. I think that all creates a certain kind of person. Bo Mason is very independent and resourceful. I get the feeling that Stegner is trying to get us to feel and understand that kind of emptiness and how it hardens those who live there while contrasting it with the desire to create community, which is what Elsa wants to do. Is that a masculine and feminine thing? Is he trying to make us believe that men and women are essentially different in that regard?

>38 lauralkeet: - It's April! I love it more and more as the story goes on - I hope you get to start it soon!

I'm at the point where Bo is taking Ole back to Whitemud with him. I had to put the book down for awhile, I find that man quite aggravating. How does Elsa stick with him?

I have asked myself the same question. But she loves him, and love is blind. Today we would say that she should leave him, but I suspect that her upbringing wouldn't allow her to do that so easily. I think when she moved back to Minnesota after living in Seattle and took Bo back into her life she made some sort of permanent decision to stay with him. Sort of crossing the Rubicon for her.

Tammy- It's great seeing you joining along! " How does Elsa stick with him?" I think that is the big question in the novel.

Hi Tammy, I echo Mark's sentiments. Hey, Bo was doing something good!

It got harder and harder for me to see Bo and Elsa together, but Elsa loves Bo. She knows he's flawed, but she's thrown in her lot with him, and that's that. And I guess, considering the times, how would she have supported herself and her sons? Not that Bo was much better than nothing, but he was something. She really wanted respectability and although Bo didn't give her that, a woman alone may have been worse. I don't know...The orphanage didn't really work out.

I finished and found that I hated to put it down - I read during my lunch at work this week and was teary eyed in the afternoons.

I'll repost what I wrote about it on my thread:

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

I ordered a biography of Stegner which I see is the same one that Pat referenced above in post #24. It sounds like I picked a good one. In post #10 I linked to some biographical information on Stegner. There is a tab on that link which I think is "Stegner in Salt Lake City" and it's very interesting concerning the biographical elements in BRCM. Don't read it before you finish the book though!!

eta = And thank you Mark, for setting this up and giving me the nudge I needed to read this wonderful book!!

I have trouble finding Elsa to be the as good as I think the author wants us to think. She sees the good in Bo as well as the bad. I am reading the part about the cross country camping trip and they have just slid off the road. Elsa describes Bo like this "Put him in a tight spot, she thought, let him get into a place where something serious might happen, and he didn't waste time swearing. An intense and terrible concentration came on him. He was driven, furious, violent, but his violence got things done." These are really heroic qualities. in anybody else under these circumstances we would think him a hero. The same goes for Bo's behavior in the blizzard with the homesteader. I wonder why this does not redeem him in the reader's eyes? Are we picking up on the author's subconscious dislike of him? Or are we making our own decisions about Bo?

I keep thinking that we are being fed a story about a man who tries hard and doesn't succeed by a resentful little snot who projects his disappointment in his childhood onto Bo because he finds it necessary to blame someone for his own unhappiness.

In that same passage I found myself admiring Elsa's sense of humor when after all they have been through she asks Bruce if he still likes touring.

I have about 100 pages to go in this book and I am getting tired of the constant sense of shame that most of the characters express about the fact that Bo makes a living bootlegging. I keep wanting to shout to them "oh get over it already! So what? It's just bootlegging. It's what made Joe Kennedy all his money and got Honey Fitz into the mayors office." It puts food on the table and a roof over their heads. What do they want Bo to do? I don't see any of the family refusing to eat or to stay in the house, until Chet leaves.

Perhaps I am too pragmatic of a person. Bo took his money and invested it. He is trying to make money honestly. I think that Elsa also see him pragmatically and understands. At one point she says that he was too cautious to make a good crook and yet had too much desire for all the things that money could buy to become a common laborer.

The most interesting part of the story has been the conflict between Chet and Bo. I see it as the classic conflict between the old bull of the herd and the young buck. I see this in so many families even today and find it interesting that Stegner wrote about it with such a fine tuned eye back in the 1940's.

I finally finished this book and I don't know what to say. 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. A friend of mine read Angle of Repose by Stegner and loved it. Another friend read Crossing to Safety and loved that one. Stegner has quite a reputation as a writer so I am not going to go so far as to say that he is a poor author. Perhaps this is just not one of his best books? Somebody earlier on this thread said that this was his first novel to be published and that he was an angry young man when he wrote it. I agree. If this was the only thing by and about Stegner I had read I would not read another book by him, but at this point, given what other people say about him, I will probably give him another shot and read another book by him. However, he is going to be really on trial next time.

Better late than never, I finally read this book! I also enjoyed re-reading everyone's impressions.

I really liked the book, but it took over my emotions and my mood. I carried around feelings of both anger and sadness for several days. Mostly I was angry at what Bo did to his family, how he jerked them around. But the final pages, where Bruce is in the chapel, were very very moving to me. This may have more to do with my own aging parents, and sort of looking back on things and wishing for what might have been, but I still thought Stegner was a masterful storyteller.