The Big Rock Candy Mountain

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

Bo Mason is a dreamer. He isn’t lazy, or unskilled, or really even criminal, but he wants everything and he wants it now, and nothing is ever enough. He wears out the people around him, his wife and his children, with his inability to settle down and just live in peace. He flirts with danger and justifies anything he does that he believes will help him hit the big time.

It would be easy to hate Bo Mason, especially when it is show more so easy to respect and love his wife, the beleaguered Elsa. But there is much to admire at the heart of Bo and what you feel along with the disgust and dislike is kind of grudging pity and understanding. He is like a trapped animal and his cruelty rises from a place he cannot control and mostly fails to recognize.

The book poses interesting questions. Are we destined to be a certain kind of person, a person who is seeded in us during childhood? Can a drifter, who yearns for new horizons and new challenges, force himself to settle down? Should a man bury all his dreams once he assumes the responsibility of family? Can we forget being abused in our childhood and overcome our urge to withdraw or retaliate? When we have built a life on running from adversity, can we learn to stay and fight through the bad times? Can we ever, in fact, overcome who we are? And, does love conquer anything, let alone conquer all?

What is your husband a slave to, Mrs. Mason? To himself, Mrs. Webb, to himself. To his notion that he has to make a pile, be a big shot, have a hundred thousand dollars in negotiable securities in his safe deposit box, drive a Cadillac car...He doesn’t know, he wouldn’t know, what to do with money when he has it. Would he ever think of going to the theater, or reading a good book, or taking a trip somewhere just for the trip?

That is the saddest thing about Bo Mason, to me, he is wishing for all the wrong things when all the right things might be right at his elbow. I couldn’t help thinking that I have met far too many men like him in my lifetime, people who think everything can be solved with money. But, money beyond a certain level of need, cannot really purchase happiness; only things.

Love is a strange thing, it will make us hold on to someone when we know we ought to let go. It makes us turn down the respectable and kind suitor, who would adore us, take care of us, and love our children, and opt for the wild, unpredictable, sometimes cruel man, who excites our heart and soul. Love shows itself in different ways, and sometimes even though felt is hard to express. Hate is its mirror, so closely aligned with it that I dare say you can only truly hate someone that you truly love. For is it not love that leaves you vulnerable to the hurts and stings that you would never accept from someone to whom you were indifferent?

If I had any complaint about this novel it would be that it might be shortened without losing its impact. It is autobiographical, I understand, and it is easy to believe, because it feels very personal in places. There are no black and white characters here, all are shades of grey, and if we are fair isn’t that primarily the truth--the truly evil are rare and saints are virtually non-existent. show less

First published in 1943, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" is a classic tale of life in the wild untamed American west at the turn of the century. Based on some of Stegner’s personal family experiences, the novel focuses on the Mason family. Bo, Elsa, and their two boys Chet and Bruce - the fictional Bruce most resembling Wallace himself.

Covering three decades, the story begins in the summer of 1905 when sweet naive Elsa Norgaard meets Bo. You know the saying, “Love is blind”. Elsa saw Bo as a strong, energetic, adventurous companion. She totally ignored his violent temper tantrums and other neurotic not-so-pleasant personality traits. She seemed to be immune to the pain he caused other loved ones.

It may not have been such a show more depressing story if it had merely been a never-ending quest for wealth and fame. What made it unbearable was the fact that Bo selfishly dragged his wife and children along on this helpless mission. Bo feverishly went from one get rich quick scheme to the next with no planning, no patience, and no perseverance. Starting each new venture with enthusiasm and optimism but with little realism. And when a venture failed he “wore bitterness around his mouth for months”, was irritable, and crabby, causing the family to be on edge for fear of setting off his violent temper. Elsa reluctantly went along with all his endeavors, which eventually included illegal activities that put the lives of the entire family in danger.

Life was not easy: primitive living conditions, insufficient medical care, and almost no social life. It wasn’t all bad times, but for me - spending my entire childhood in one location, and ending up in the same neighborhood as an adult, it is hard to imagine moving from place to place, state to state, city to city, never feeling that any place was “home”. And living in that era, it also meant losing communication with everyone left behind. So even if Bo had been successful, it seems like a lonely, insecure life for Elsa and the children.

Stegner’s characters are finely articulated, the plot is realistic, and Stegner engages the reader with descriptions of scenery that create an ambience of authentic life in the wilderness. Writing in the third person, Stegner sometimes kept his distance from the characters, many times not using names but whole sections using the terms “the father” and “the boy”. For what purpose? To reserve judgement on Bo’s behavior? To express the emotional distance between father and son? I wonder if scholars have analyzed this aspect of Stegner’s writing.

"The Big Rock Candy Mountain" offers some good life lessons. We are all a product of our environment and our childhood experiences are largely influential in how we end up. But there are always choices and the path you take can be determined by your own strength of character. Chet and Bruce each take different paths in life - neither one really pleasing their father. But then again - Bo’s pleasure was never a result of his children’s happiness - all he cared about was money and prestige.

This was one of Wallace Stegner’s earlier novels. Almost 30 years later he wrote "Angle of Repose" which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I read both books - back to back - and though they are similar in themes of a family struggling to live in Western America during the same years, they are quite different in plot and characters.

Rated 5 Stars December 2024 show less

A capital N Novel. The pace builds slowly and steadily but it culminates into a quintessential American story. Stegner writes so well of a particular masculinity that is born of trauma, ignites in youthful vigor, but ends in humiliation. It's a sad story and one that many people know better than they'd like. Never satisfied, jumping from one scheme to the next looking for that final Big Rock Candy Mountain that does not exist, of course, but even if it did it would not satisfy these restless, damaged souls. A tremendous book. I loved Angle of Repose and didn't think I could love another as well....but Elsa and Bo will stay with me for a good while.

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 show more 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. show less

“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.”

I loved this semi-autobiographical novel. It matches the song referenced in the title; sweet and hard, full of hope and despair. There is a strong sense of place, and also of rootlessness, as the family moves from community to community, in search of the never-quite-realizable American dream. The descriptions of landscape and nature are beautiful. The characters are fully realized, and even Bo, the thoughtless husband and abusive father, seems like someone you show more might run into, maybe on a road trip, when you stopped at a bar in some small town looking for a cold drink. And he's awful, on the one hand, but you might actually like him, or at least feel sorry for him. show less

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a reminder of what fiction was immediately before postmodernism. It is the saga of one family, the Masons, told in straight-forward narrative, the events of which hew to an overarching authorial theme. The type of story Steinbeck told in The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.

Although the book opens with Elsa Norgaard, a proper young lady of nineteen, fleeing her Minnesota home and her father's recent marriage to her best friend, its true protagonist is the man Elsa marries, Harry "Bo" Mason. Bo is the archetype of the American spirit, a handsome, athletic, brash man with big dreams who is willing to cut corners to achieve them. Their thirty-year story is a tale of struggle and failure, a long downward slide show more from the respectability and idealism of youth that wears you down along with them. At first, it angers you that Bo can never get a break, that he is his own worst enemy as he endlessly uproots his family in search of the big money. In the end, you lose all sympathy for him, you become his sons who despise him. But simultaneously you are his wife who understands him, who loves the best part of him. You have seen the disaster coming for years, and when it finally arrives you are like Bruce, his youngest son, wanting to be rid of Bo forever but unable to break cleanly away. It is Bruce who enunciates Stegner's perspective, writing in his journal that "the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy," an elegant restatement of the adage about walking a mile in a man's shoes.

There's an article on bookforum.com touting Don DeLillo's Nobel worthiness. I would argue that Stegner was as (if not more) deserving. As in his other works that I've read (Angle of Repose, Crossing to Safety and The Spectator Bird), his writing is both accessible and intelligent, replete with references and allusions to other well- and lesser-known works (in this instance "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and You Know Me, Al, for example). The details that flesh out his characters and their culture are provided without explanation; they assume a familiarity with the times on the part of his readership that distances him from the narrative as an author as though you were in an art gallery without the curator's descriptions of the paintings and sculptures, interpreting them on your own without recognizing his role in presenting them to you. show less

“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 show more 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.” show less