This was a slow burn.

At times, it was difficult to read, and at other times, it was heart wrenching.

If you require a faster pace, this might not be the book for you.

However, if you desire to feel as if you truly know the characters by the end, then it is.

I read this with trepidation throughout, mainly because of the volatile nature of the main character, Bo Mason.

For me, Stegner has the remarkable ability to envision a story in his mind and when he commits it to paper, it reads as if you are right there within the story.

It feels very real, without any gimmicks.

This book is considered semi-autobiographical.

When I conducted some research, I discovered that much of it is based on facts.

The characters are modeled after his own mother, father, brother, and himself.

Knowing how closely this narrative describes the author's early life makes it all the more poignant and heartbreaking.

Fortunately for us, he went on to have a highly successful writing career.

This is my second book by Stegner, and it most certainly won't be my last.

I feel completely spent after having finished this book. I dedicated more time to reading it than any other book in my recent memory. It wasn't merely its 563 pages that made it a lengthy read. I had to read with a pen at the ready, as there were so many ideas, images, and thoughts that I wanted to highlight.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a western book, a character study, and a journey. However, it's not a typical there-and-back-again book like the one Bilbo Baggins wrote. It's a go and go again kind of journey, constantly searching further afield for that one thing that will bring happiness, only to always find that it just slips out of your fingers.

Bo Mason is that dreamer, a schemer who will gamble on a sure thing, following any lead that will get him to the Big Rock Candy Mountain as soon as possible. He'll farm, work on the railroad, engage in bootlegging, or run a "blind pig" - whatever it takes to get money in his pocket the fastest. And for Elsa, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, Bo's zest for life and skills with a shotgun draw her into a love that will test all the strength she has as they live their lives during the difficult years of the early 20th century.

The path their life takes, the unbelievable anguish and sacrifice, the horrible choices and bad deals, the struggle to eke out an existence, the packing up and starting over - you might think it would be so depressing that you'd want to throw the book out the window. But Wallace Stegner is a literary genius because he weaves this cheerless and heartbreaking story with a writing style and way with words that is simply amazing. The turn of phrase and poignantly expressed truths stopped me time and again. And as we read the story from different perspectives, we see the strengths in the characters, usually deeply hidden beneath their glaring weaknesses. All except Elsa, whose strengths and weaknesses are both transparent - she is one of the most intriguing and sympathetic characters I've ever read.

I also loved that this book took me to the Utah of long ago, an emerging place, a western wasteland of outcasts and misfits that was slowly transforming into something grand and worthwhile. The language of some characters was really rough, and there were scenes of serious ugliness. But this book made a time, place, and cross-section of people so real to me. I can't even use words like "grand" or "epic" or "sweeping" because it felt too intimate for those adjectives, too painful - like reading someone's diary and finally understanding how hard their life had been. And despite the language, despite the ugliness, the scope of this book, the way it made me feel, and the sense it gave me of a time now forgotten - a time when the great wandering of early Americans was coming to a close - those things make me want to give Big Rock Candy Mountain an award.

This book is truly excruciatingly painful.

Mental and physical abuse, which is truly dreadful, seems to run in the family from father to son. It makes wives and children miserable and reserved, constantly walking on tip-toes to avoid annoying the "bad-tempered" dad. What makes it even more heart-wrenching is that this book is semi-autobiographical. The father is in pursuit of an unattainable dream of getting rich, making every possible mistake along the way. He gets repeatedly tangled with the law in illegal business activities. He takes out all his frustration on a kind-hearted, almost submissive wife, who, like most abused wives, makes excuses for his horrible behavior. And there are two kids who suffer tremendously from being around him, with not a single kind word or act directed towards them.

Such an impossible life, where the American dream has gone horribly wrong or was perhaps twisted from the start. There is so much frustration and so many disappointments that your heart will be filled with sadness as you ride along with this tragedy. Stegner is indeed a master, and this is by far the best book of his that I have read.

I'm currently on a Stegner kick, and it's been an absolute delight.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a remarkable piece of literature that truly drags your heart along for the ride. As you delve into the story, you get to witness two generations of the Mason family and their (mis)adventures as they struggle to scratch out a life in different versions of America's western frontier.

The patriarch, Bo Mason, is a complex character. He berates his wife Elsa and frightens his sons Chet and Bruce as they move across more states than one can count. However, despite his flaws, his insatiable taste for booms and busts remains endearing, or at least somehow forgivable.

The book does feel a little long towards the end, especially in the interminable tragedy that unfolds. But overall, it is a great book by a great writer who has a remarkable ability to describe the American West in all its incarnations. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the history and culture of the American West.

4.5★
If you've ever delved into the works of Stegner, a literary giant whom I regard as one of America's national treasures, you're well aware that his writings are profound and dense. The reader simply cannot rush through them. Patience and thoughtfulness are essential to fully appreciate the journey he leads you on. There's no instant gratification here. Unless, of course, you have a deep love for prose for its own sake. This particular work is divided into ten sections, and that's precisely how I savored it over the course of a week and a half. Years ago, when I was reading Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety, I remember growing fatigued somewhere between the halfway and three-quarters mark. I responded much like a child in the back seat, exclaiming, "Are we almost there?" That same feeling occurred with this book as well. It's similar to driving through the great American Southwest, across the California desert, and then over the mountains, enduring all the traffic. But then, suddenly, you catch a glimpse of it – the gorgeous coastline. You see where he's been taking you, and all those sections come together. You're filled with a sense of gladness for the effort you've expended because you finally get it. You also understand that nothing could be subtracted. All the contrasts, from the red rock and miles of hot, dusty roads to the blues and greens of the Pacific, are integral. It was all worth it, both the journey and the destination. You are satiated, satisfied, and in love with the stories he weaves, eager to embark on another literary road trip. At the same time, you feel completely inadequate in your skills to adequately review or sing the praises of his work.

This was Stegner's first full-length novel. I'm glad I read it as a mature woman. He discusses it right at the beginning of the documentary film, to which I've included a link. Who better than he to give the reader a sense of what to expect? Perhaps I don't cherish it as much as the two aforementioned works, but it has left me gratefully hungry for more, and more I shall surely have. The closing pages were so compelling that they compelled me to bump the stars up to five.

One of my favorite passages:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7650...

Extras:

The author titled this book, as well as a later one Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, from lines in a song also used in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?
\\n  The Big Rock Candy Mountain\\n by Harry ‘Haywire' McClintock in 1928. This version is not only musically engaging but also visually entertaining.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqowm...

Wallace Stegner: A Writer’s Life
A one-hour documentary in which the author participated shortly before his death. Narrated by the renowned Robert Redford.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGCC6...

Biography

http://wallacestegner.org/bio.html

On the Big Rock Candy Mountain, a place of wild imagination, where cops have wooden legs, handouts grow on bushes, hens lay soft-boiled eggs, bulldogs have rubber teeth, and cinder dicks are blind. Bo (Harry) Mason, a big and handsome man with many talents, is bored and restless, always chasing the gold at the end of the rainbow. He believes there is a place like the Big Rock Candy Mountain where life is effortless, rich, unrestricted, and full of adventure. The next venture is always going to solve all his family's problems and make them rich and happy. However, his quick and violent temper when bored or thwarted has an impact on his family.

Elsa, Bo's wife, simply wants a home for her family, a place to settle, put down roots, befriend neighbours, and watch their sons grow. Bruce, as a young adult, ponders the concept of home, longing for the familiar associations and the security it represents. Wallace Stegner masterfully conveys the longings, aspirations, and frustrations of the Mason family. His characterisation is magnificent, and he knows how to build tension and then release it effortlessly. The novel also contains beautiful descriptions and profound insights into human nature. However, it is set in the early 1900s, and there are attitudes and vernacular that may offend modern readers, including racist slurs and children with loaded guns. Overall, it is a rich and complex novel that explores the themes of chasing dreams, the concept of home, and the contradictions within human nature.

\\n  On the Big Rock Candy Mountain
Where the cops have wooden legs,
And the handouts grow on bushes,
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs,
Where the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the cinder dicks are blind—
I’m a-gonna go
Where there ain’t no snow,
Where the rain don’t fall
And the wind don’t blow
On the Big Rock Candy Mountain.\\n

This is a novel about chasing rainbows..
Big, handsome Bo (Harry) Mason has many talents. But Bo is bored, restless, driven to find the gold at the end of the rainbow. “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.” The next venture is always going to be the one to make his family rich, happy and solve all their problems. But what is the impact on his family? Bo can be funny, and trot out rhymes, but when he is bored or feels thwarted he has a quick and often violent temper. It doesn’t take much for Bo to once again have itchy feet: “Three more men had come back with Bo from the drugstore, and all afternoon others kept dropping in to have a beer and listen to stories of hundreds of miles of wild timberland, hundreds of thousands of caribou, hundreds of millions of salmon in suicidal dashes up the rivers; of woods full of bear and deer and otter and fox and wolverine and mink; of fruit salads on every tree in berry time. You didn’t need to work for a living. You picked it off the bushes, netted it out of the river, shot it out of the woods, panned it out of the gravel in your front yard.” Unfortunately not all of Bo’s ventures are on the right side of the Law…

###
It is also a novel about the concept of home… Where is home? What is home?
“Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone.”

Elsa, Bo’s wife, wants nothing more than to have a home for her family. A house where they can settle, put down roots, befriend neighbours and watch their sons Chet and Bruce play and grow.

As a young adult Bruce ponders the concept of home: “If one subscribed to the idea of home at all, one would insist on an attic for the family history to hide in. His mother had felt so all her life. She wanted to be part of something, an essential atom in a street, a town, a state; she would have loved to get herself expressed in all the pleasant, secure details of a deeply-lived-in house. She was cut out to be a wife and mother as few women were. Given half a chance, she would have done well at it.” “I wish, he said, that I were going home to a place where all the associations of twenty-two years were collected together. I wish I could go out in the back yard and see the mounded ruins of caves I dug when I was eight. I wish the basement was full of my worn-out ball gloves and tennis rackets. I wish there was a family album with pictures of us all at every possible age and in every possible activity. I wish I knew the smell of the ground around that summer cottage on Tahoe, and had a picture in my mind of the doorway my mother will come through to meet me when I drive up, and the bedroom I’ll unload my suitcases and books and typewriter in. I wish the wrens were building under the porch eaves, and that I had known those same wrens for ten years.”

###
Wallace Stegner certainly knows how to convey the longings, aspirations and frustrations of the Mason Family. His characterisation is magnificent.

He also knows how to ramp up the tension so that one holds one’s breath until he effortlessly allows the tension to evaporate like mist in the morning sun. Several incidents including one that involved a cougar and another about a horse had me just about biting my nails. There were other incidents too.

In a simple sentence he conveys a world of meaning:
“She went about getting lunch feeling as if a bed were unmade in her mind.”
“There had been a wind during the night, and all the loneliness of the world had swept up out of the southwest.”
“She ain’t going into no nest without a lot of feathers in it.”
“The boy stood on one foot, then the other, time pouring like a flood of uncatchable silver dollars through his hands.”
“Those things had weight in the memory; those were what was left when you boiled down six years in your mind.”
“To leave on a sunny day would be inappropriate; a retreat should be made in weather as miserable as the act itself”
“He lifted his face and yelled with the pressure of happiness inside him”
And Mr Stegner is also capable of long, lyrical descriptions.

Wallace Stegner draws our attention to another act of folly: “A few miles up the road toward the summit was the monument to the Donner Party, symbol of all the agony in the service of dubious causes, archetype of the American saga of rainbow-chasing, dream and denouement immortalized in cobble-rock and granite, its pioneer Woman and unconsciously ironic portrait of endurance and grief.”

But not only is there much beauty in the novel; there is also much to offend. The story takes place in the early nineteen hundreds, and attitudes and the vernacular of that time are expressed. There are racist slurs. There are also children running around with loaded guns.

###
There is so much to quote that I simply cannot resists including a few more extracts:
“People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren’t any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.” [Bruce]

““When I have put that down, I have perhaps sketched a character, I have done the sort of thing a novelist probably does before writing his book. But I have not even scratched the surface of Harry Mason. Everything I have listed is subject to contradiction by other characteristics, open to qualification in degree and kind; everything has a history that goes back and back toward a vanishing point.” [Elsa about Bo]

“For a moment his brain whirled. Memory was a trap, a pit, a labyrinth. It tricked you into looking backward, and you saw yourself in another avatar, smaller and more narrow-visioned but richer in the life of the senses, and in that incarnation too you were looking back. You met yourself in your past, and the recognition was a strong quick shock, like a dive into cold water.”

A little too dense for my liking - this could easily have been a hundred pages shorter. The excessive amount of details sometimes made it a bit of a struggle to get through. However, the prose and the story were absolutely beautiful. The author's use of language was masterful, painting vivid pictures in my mind and evoking a wide range of emotions. I found myself completely immersed in the world of the book.

I might bump this up to a full five stars in time. As I reflect on the story and the impact it had on me, I can see the potential for it to grow even more in my estimation. For now, though, it's a very solid four. It has its flaws, but the beauty and power of the prose and the story more than make up for them. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a well-written, engaging story.

This is Stegner's earnest attempt to fathom his parents and the profound influence they had on shaping his identity.

He masterfully conceals the true hero of the story until the very last pages. It is the somewhat effeminate and philosophical son who, with remarkable clarity, sees his mother and father for who they truly were. Yet, he doesn't ultimately hold their sins against them. After all, they are an indelible part of his own history. He realizes that he can only condemn them to the extent that he can condemn himself.

The brilliant and intimate storytelling that Stegner would later perfect in novels such as Crossing to Safety and Angle of Repose is not fully developed in The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Nevertheless, it is within the pages of this novel that the author offers his most incisive diagnosis of the rapturous splendor and the treacherous curse that define the American West.

Stegner's exploration of his family's past and his own identity is a captivating journey that provides valuable insights into the complex nature of the human experience and the allure and perils of the American West.

The myth of American exceptionalism is transformed into a profound and tragic tale in the hands of Wallace Stegner. His exploration delves not just into a single character but encompasses two generations of a single family. The time frame extends from the era of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier historiography, inviting a deep contemplation of memory that is passed down across generations and continuously molded by time.

The novel commences in 1905 when Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico were still territories. A significant portion of the West had only recently achieved statehood within the past two decades. The concept of the frontier persisted, presenting two very distinct visions of freedom to two of the characters. These visions were firmly rooted in the idea of escape rather than reinvention.

Elsa Norgaard, having witnessed the early demise of her mother, saw her own future laid out in a similar fashion. The frontier was her ticket out – from an overly protected life, the constraints of a patriarchal Norwegian family, and the harsh predictability of life on a Minnesota farm that seemed to wear down and eventually kill a woman. At the tender age of 19, she was excited to travel to North Dakota, where she experienced town life under the looser guardianship of an uncle and made novel and unconventional friends. Suddenly, the world seemed much larger. As she watched the summer plains, she felt a sense of hope and possibility.

Bo Mason, a few years older and far more worldly, had been chasing a vision ever since he fled his abusive father and overcrowded family in Illinois at the age of 14. His imagination only extended as far as contempt for authority and an ambition to reach a place where he could make his fortune. However, he pursued this ambition with a frightening and destructive vitality.

Bo and Elsa's marriage becomes a complex symbiosis of weaknesses, paradoxically strengthened by mutual disappointment. They have two children, Chet and Bruce. As time passes, Stegner's narrative unfolds in a chronological yet disjointed manner, representing the viewpoints of each family member. He weaves a series of stories that culminate in loose friendships, abrupt departures, emotional fragility, cautious restraint, and broken promises. The stories are both harrowing and poignant, with the knowledge that happiness always seems just out of reach.

In the end, Bruce attempts to reconfigure these stories, now transformed into memories, in search of an answer that will define his own existence and explain his family's losses. He grapples with the question of home, wondering where it truly lies and why. He realizes that neither Bo nor Elsa can provide a simple answer, but rather a combination of their qualities in unknown proportions. The landscape of past dreams, that place of impossible loveliness that lured the nation westward, is forever intertwined with human longings.

We have accompanied this family from beginning to end, delving into the deepest thoughts and self-deceptions of each member. Yet, like Bruce, we find that we cannot simply sum up their lives with a facile explanation. Stegner's power as a writer lies not in flamboyant prose but in his patient and meticulous control of detail. His incremental descriptions create a palpable mood of foreboding, while the climax of each incident remains unexpected and vividly delineated, becoming part of a chain of significant memories.

Knowing that much of the material in this book is autobiographical significantly enriches our experience. It deepens our connection to these characters and reinforces our response to their complex and often tragic lives.

I can in all honesty not say that this was one of my heartfelt, best books ever. But I can say convincingly that it was an excellent autobiographical novel.

Perhaps there was a scattering of way too many words all over the tale. It was too long and too wordy.

So many novels have been written about the American west and the deeper meaning behind the search for get-quick-rich-schemes, the big rock candy mountain, over the next rise, something for nothing, an improved world, and/or get away from man's own nature. It often left the dreams shattered but the dreamers determined. The longer they tried to find the pot of gold at the end of an ever-elusive rainbow, the further it moved out west.

I have great respect for this well-known author for pouring out the good and bad memories into this personal tale of his life as part of his drifter-family in the early twentieth century. They followed the old Scandinavian tracts through the northwest.

It must have been very painful to relate and share his memories, to throw open his hurt, anger, frustrations, heartbreak and embarrassment to a public he doesn't even know if he could trust. However, I do believe that it brought the cliché-d closure for himself and made him proud of the choices he made to overcome his personal family history. Well, he had so much to be proud of in the end. If the bad was genetic, the good was in there as well. He just had to fill up the spaces between it.

How difficult was it to flesh out the characters: their intimate lives, their thoughts, so that he could ensure more understanding from himself and his readers of his grandparents' and parents' decisions?

The frontier the family was on, was a belated one in the 1914 - 20s in Saskatchewan. They were almost literary reproducing the Kansas frontier of the 1860s. Boredom never entered the author's Huckleburry Finn world as a child (his own description of his world). His mother kept his brother and himself cultured as far as their constant moving allowed. His father was a folklore character with an explosive temper. His brother, who died young, was on his way to become a successful athlete, if it wasn't for his father's constant bootlegging to keep food on the table. A whiff of scandal surrounded the family as a result of his father's constant new schemes with shady and dubious partners. In an interview Wallace Stegner said that they were deprived of civilisation in many respects, and he had to try and catch up with it his entire life. He has been in an 'acronysm' all his life as a result. He always felt like a nineteen century character caught in the twentieth century.

Wallace Stegner's roots were deeply established in the American west. This novel is about their experiences in painful detail. He created realistic characters to establish a believable, trustworthy tale and leave the reader with a sense of awe, but also empathy, for those drifters who shaped modern America in so many ways. This book is indeed about The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and those people who took it on. It is also about loyalty in a family and how destructive and intricate it becomes. It is a hopeful, but sad, book. For me at least.

(Totally beside the point!! I noticed that Ken Kessey was one of Wallace Stegner's students in Creative Writing. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is certainly one of the most iconic American novels ever written, and for sure the best, shameful, example of how an author was screwed out of his words big time by his publishers who robbed him of his rights to royalties. While the book is still in reprint for probably a millionth time, selling even more millions of copies, Ken Kessey did not share in the bounty it generated. In fact, he hardly survived financially from other means of income he had to find, until he passed away.)

I am thus so grateful for Wallace Stegner who made such a big difference to other people's lives after everything he had gone through in his own life. This book is worth a read. It nestles as much in the historical fiction genre as being an autobiographical novel at the same time.

Bo and Elsa Mason do not lead quiet lives. Elsa, in fact, would have been content with a peaceful existence. However, Bo Mason is a different story. While some may believe he was in pursuit of the American Dream, I beg to differ. Bo is restless and constantly on the hunt for a get rich quick scheme. I would never consider the American Dream to be achieved by trying to find an angle, skirting the law, or looking for a way to work outside the system. The title of this piece comes from a folk song of the same name. Stegner makes references not to the song itself, but to its meaning.

Bo was also a mercurial person. His sons learned not to trust him, and with good reason. When things were going smoothly, he was easy-going. But let life get a bit tough, and his mood would darken. His sons then bore the brunt of his changing temperament. Elsa tried to stand up to him during these times, and one has to admire her loyalty.

This work is said to be semi-autobiographical. As such, it's difficult to know what to believe, as it isn't a true autobiography. Stegner's family did move around a lot and live in the same places. I haven't read "Wolf Willow," which is often regarded as his autobiography but is also fiction. I think the best authors draw on their own experiences. In my review of "Crossing to Safety," I quoted Stegner as saying, "It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true."

This is one of Stegner's earlier works. I loved reading it, but I do think it's not as good as his Pulitzer-winning "Angle of Repose," which is one of my all-time top-10 favorites. However, is it really fair to compare them? I will continue to look forward to more works by this talented author.

Like his contemporaries James Agee and John Steinbeck, and his literary predecessor, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner captures a voice that is uniquely American and imbues it with a spirit of tenderness and sorrow, hope and survival.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain was published when Stegner was only 34. He was already a prolific writer, but this autobiographical novel brought him the first glimmer of literary fame that would grow to a shining light and earn him the moniker "Dean of Western writers."

It is a story of epic tragedy that spans the early years of the 20th century through the mid-1930s. The central theme is grand: it reveals the ending of the dream that was the American West. By the 'teens, those vast open spaces were nearly filled and the once-wild frontiers had borders. The myths of oil and mineral wealth, the flu pandemic, and economic uncertainty busted the most promising boom towns. The unforgiving terrain and cruel climate crippled farming families and sent them to the cities of Salt Lake, Seattle, and Los Angeles to seek work and shelter.

To take this grand theme from epic story to intimate portrait, Stegner leads us into the heart of a small family desperately seeking the American dream. Bo Mason, his wife Elsa and their young sons Chet and Bruce, personify all that is most hopeful, vital, desperate and tragic about that dream. Like a firefly caught in a jar, Bo Mason flings himself wildly from one get-rich-quick-scheme to the next, dragging his family from shack to tent, homestead to tenement through the Dakotas to Idaho; from Saskatchewan to Seattle; from Salt Lake City to Lake Tahoe. Bo works tirelessly at his ill-conceived schemes; he is earnest and determined. He is also cruel, quick-tempered, selfish and vain. His wife and sons spin nearly helplessly around the vortex of his moods. Stegner, however, never regards Elsa as a victim. He gives her a strong will, clear choices, opportunities to change her fate. Yet each time, she chooses Bo. Her sons, driven by the desire to escape from their father’s oppressive shadow and shameful reputation, make choices they hope lead them far from the family’s quixotic journeys.

Stegner allows each character a voice, moving seamlessly from husband, wife, son, brother, so that you have a full view of this family from every perspective and develop affection for each, despite their deep, frustrating flaws.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is loosely based on Stegner's childhood and adolescence rumbling around the American West and the Canadian plains with his parents and older brother. The character of Bruce, a sensitive child coddled and protected by his mother, and often the target of his father’s wrath, is Stegner’s literary other. The losses Bruce suffers as a child and a young man mirror Stegner’s own and the latter part of the novel takes on a very personal and reflective tone, as Bruce becomes the sole survivor of the Mason family tragedy.

Clearly, this is a heavy read, but it is beautiful and gripping. The tragedies are rendered without melodrama; nearly all are the result of human misjudgment and folly, not some Jobian set of heavenly-sent trials. My heart broke time and again, but the beauty of Stegner’s prose sustained and uplifted it even during the darkest moments.