Oh beautiful, he said, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties, and penury and pain.

Many ambitious writers have chased the elusive concept of writing the Great American Novel [GAT], a challenge launched in 1868 in a critical essay on literature. For my money, Wallace Stegner comes real close to doing exactly this in his early novel. It is a semi-autobiographical study of where he comes from and who he is.

The Mason family's journey westward in the early 20th century is emblematic of second or third-generation immigrants. They leave their established farms on the East Coast in search of liberty and riches in the still undeveloped West. The GAT should deal with the over-used concept of the rags to riches American Dream, as seen through the eyes of a child in the lives of his parents, Elsa and Bo Mason.

Bo Mason is convinced that the Big Rock Candy Mountain is real and waiting for him. He drags his family from place to place in search of his get rich quick pipe dream. Something always seems to go wrong with his projects, often because they fall outside the law. Bo is not afraid of hard work, but he always gets tired of slow and steady and hatches another plan.

In counterpoint to Bo's restlessness is Elsa's dream of a real home. She went westward in search of a better life, but her dreams are those of a homemaker. She is the true anchor of the Mason family, but Bo seems to take her for granted.

The novel is episodic, with each section detailing a specific period in the family saga. The story is picked up by their younger son Bruce, a sensitive and introspective boy. As he grows up, he becomes more interested in the questions about his origins and his relationship with his parents.

I was captivated by the richness of detail and the lived-in, authentic vibe of the setting. The novel has the authority of the eye-witness and the lyrical turn of phrase that will become emblematic of Stegner's later novels. It's a long story, extremely detailed, but I never felt the need to put it down.

The final chapters turn from history to analysis, as the Mason family seems to go from one tragedy to the next. The good work put in the previous pages still kept me glued to the book as I followed Bruce reasoning out his feelings and trying to put his family saga in the larger context of a nation in search of its identity and its heart.

This search for the true roots of a nation divided by bigotry, pipe-dreams and violence should be even more relevant in 2024 than it was in 1943. The introspective journey of Bruce Mason could mark a way out of the divisiveness that seems hell bent on destroying the very fabric of the nation.

This man, Harry Mason, whom we consign to the grave today, is a man who has been condemned by me and many others. We have sat in judgment on him and found him guilty of violence, brutality, and willfulness.

He was often inconsiderate of others and obtuse about their wishes. He was a man who never knew himself, was never satisfied, and was born disliking the present and believing in the future. By any orthodox standard, he was not a good husband or a good father.

Buddy read with @Maegan, and we both had the same opinion of Bo Mason. He was a sonofabitch until the end. There is a scene that stuck in both of our minds and that we will probably never forget. (It involves an angry father, an annoying child, and feces.)

This novel, set in the 1911-1960s, is loosely based on the life of Wallace Stagner. It is a wonderful family saga that spans three generations in 10 parts, although it does have its slow moments. I am always drawn to these kinds of stories as I love to peek into other lives and understand what makes people tick. It is not out of nosiness, spite, or jealousy, but out of pure curiosity and perhaps a bit of empathy.

I have never read any other Stegner novel, but I am definitely going to read more of his works. RIP. He was a teacher at one point, and Larry McMurtry studied under him, among others. Stegner has the power to make the reader envision his vision. He took me to many dark and happy places in this book. His writing style reaches out to us and makes us feel less like rushed robots and more human with more heart.

I loved learning about Elsa. She was the mother, the glue, the key to happiness for the Masons. The ending was sad, but I'm not sure if it was just. Bo got what he wanted up to the very end. The final chapter is told from Bruce's perspective. Bruce, the younger of the two sons, was a victim and a survivor, and I liked him too. His life is a bag of mixed emotions, and no amount of therapy could help him.

I highly recommend this author.

A big, fat, sprawling novel with a truly fascinating story line. It's exactly the kind of book that I used to absolutely love to wallow in. I would lose myself in its pages for hours on end, completely immersed in the fictional world it created.

However, now things have changed. Such books no longer have the same allure for me. Instead, they make me feel restless. I find myself in a strange state where I want more and at the same time I want less.

The writing, of course, is good. It may not be overly lyrical, but it is competent and engaging. The plot is always believable, which is a great strength.

But if I could have been Stegnor's editor, I would have taken a blue pencil to those passages of endless description. There are times when the details seem to go on and on, almost overwhelming the story. And those sections where he felt compelled to explain every motive and every thought in his characters' heads could also be trimmed down. Sometimes, leaving a little to the reader's imagination can make the story even more powerful.

He had a distinct notion of where home would ultimately be, both for himself and his father. It was over the next range, on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, that place of impossible loveliness that had lured the entire nation westward. It was a place where the fertile land seemed to ooze wealth and the heavens rained down lemonade.

Just imagine taking the painful childhood memories and transforming them into a work of art like this. Using a kind, patient, and gentle mother and a violent, ruthless father who was hell-bent on bullying the world into giving him what he desired, to showcase the value of the American spirit. Writing about an older brother with so much potential, yet who could never quite put it all together. Recounting one's own growth as a whining, sensitive, and undersized boy who had to search deep within himself for strength and endurance. And presenting us with 30 years in the life of a family in the first half of the 20th century in beautiful prose that foreshadowed his later works. The book jacket claims it is semi-autobiographical, and an internet search convinced me that it closely followed his own young life. But how does one take all that raw material and shape it into something so remarkable?

This was published in 1943, when Stegner was 34 years old. Although not his first novel, it was the first successful one. Indeed, it is dense, and yes, it is perhaps a bit too long, though I'm not entirely sure what he could have omitted. With Stegner, you never quite know where you're headed until you reach there, but he makes the journey truly unforgettable.

This is a family saga that is well worth the effort in terms of both your time and emotional investment.

This book has been residing in my bookcase ever since 1978.

I truly need to express my gratitude to the Goodreads friend who recently mentioned this title in my feed.

That simple act motivated me to immerse myself in a great story.

Mr. Stegner pens about his own life and the American Dream that was set in the early 1900's.

There is a certain magic within these pages, and it also brought a few tears to my eyes.

The way he describes the events and the characters makes the story come alive.

It's like taking a journey back in time and experiencing those moments along with the author.

The book is not just a simple narrative but a profound exploration of the human spirit and the pursuit of the American Dream.

It makes you think about your own life and the dreams that you hold dear.

Overall, it's a remarkable read that I would highly recommend to anyone.

Wonderful prose that flows like a gentle river, engaging story that hooks you from the very beginning, and characters that seem to leap off the page and into your heart. I had the pleasure of reading this with a dear friend, and when we finished, we sat down with mugs of warm tea and had a two-hour long discussion. We delved deep into the plot, analyzed the characters' motives, and shared our own interpretations and feelings. Even two weeks later, these characters are still vivid in my mind. They have become a part of my literary landscape, and I find myself thinking about them from time to time. This is the mark of a truly great book, one that leaves a lasting impression and lingers in your thoughts long after you've turned the final page.

I hesitate to write much since I am incapable of conveying how deeply this tragically intricate novel moved me. I mostly tend to read American and German literature from the first half of the 20th century. If that strikes a chord with you, I think, like me, you’ll love this book as I did, from the first word to the last.

Stegner’s tale is an American saga, not about gods and heroes but, much like Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil and Laxness’s Independent People, about common folk who pioneer and struggle to make something out of nothing in a brutal, hostile world. It provides deep insight into how collective individualities build national character and identity. I am reminded of the classic Doonesbury cartoon when Mike embarks on a motorcycle tour of the country as Zonker asks him to “Call me when you find America.” Reading this epic would have been a good starting point for that journey.

Set in the first third of the 20th century, we follow the Mason family as they struggle to prosper and consistently fail to set roots of stability. Bo Mason drives and draws along his wife and two sons through sporadic, momentary cycles of booms and prolonged and brutal busts. Their nomadic journey takes us throughout the West during historical episodes that include frontier settlement, the Klondike gold rush, the Spanish flu of 1918, prohibition, and the advent of legal gambling.

The beauty and depth of Stegner’s descriptive writing is all-consuming and overwhelming. You can feel the musty grit of the North Dakota winds; you can smell meadow flowers of a lazy Montana summer day; you can feel Bo’s car struggle through a vicious blizzard; you can hear the guns go off to celebrate the end of World War I; you can smell the stench of a rotting horse carcass; you can see the dust floating in the sunbeam coming into a stuffy room; everything is a visceral experience. Most importantly, these characters are as completely human and real as any about whom I’ve ever read.

Bo Mason “was a man who was born disliking the present and believing in the future.” His compelling drive to search for that mythical Big Rock Candy Mountain of contentment is constantly stymied by his violent frustrations, bluster, fears, insecurities, and dreams. Elsa Norgaard Mason is the force of stability, a loving mother of two boys, who might well be one of the most sympathetic characters in American literature, whose “qualities…would get you saintliness, but never greatness.” And as we see her boys Chet and Bruce grow up from infancy to childhood, we constantly strain to wish them good, happy lives.

I truly relished this book to a great extent. Initially, I had the intention of penning one of those extensive, meandering reviews that outstanding books rightfully merit. You know the type: a review that incorporates a staggering 17 million examples of the author's remarkable writing and an equal number of one's own profound thoughts regarding life and literature, making one sound like a completely self-absorbed, pseudo-intellectual buffoon. However, despite my best efforts, that simply wasn't in the cards for today. Consider yourselves fortunate!

I'll simply state this instead: The character development and the writing are truly outstanding, and certain scenes are indelibly etched in my mind. (In fact, perhaps "seared into my brain" is a more fitting description.) I'll never forget the scenes where Bo endeavors to return to his family amidst a fierce blizzard and a raging flu epidemic. Wow, that was nail-biting and thrilling stuff! On the other hand, I would much prefer to forget a particular child abuse scene that occurs relatively early on. It nearly spoiled the book for me. Not due to the horror of it, but because the way it was presented bordered on melodrama. Other scenes that I had reservations about include one where Bo engages in a two-way conversation with a mannequin and Bruce has one with a closet full of his mother's clothes. Generally speaking, I don't have an issue with Magical Realism, but I felt that those scenes clashed with the style of the rest of the writing.

One other minor gripe I have pertains to its length. I appreciated the episodic manner in which it was written, but some of the episodes seemed superfluous. For example, that episode with Bo and the mannequin: WHY?

I'm not familiar with the melody of the old hobo tune that shares the same title as this novel, so "Hard Candy Christmas" by Dolly Parton was constantly playing in the back of my mind as I read it. Nevertheless, it suited the mood quite well.

My first Wallace Stegner novel! I am extremely pleased to have crossed that bridge (all puns intended). It's a captivating story that delves into the complex themes of family, the search for home, escape and return, survival against adversity, the American dream gone awry, and ultimately, forgiveness.

Told through the voices of multiple narrators, specifically the four members of the Mason family, the story spans over thirty years in the lives of Elsa, the man she loves and marries, Bo, and their two sons, Chet and Bruce. During these years, a rich tapestry of emotions unfolds, including love, humor, anguish, tears, apprehension, and love again. There is also frequent moving and, at times, hate, as Bo constantly reevaluates what will make his dreams of success a reality. The main issue, which gradually becomes clear to Elsa and the reader but remains elusive to Bo, is that his dreams are more like fairy tales with a dark side.

One of the most palpable lacks or losses for all but Bo is the absence of a place to call home. They would live in one place for 5 years before the urge for another frontier struck again. Other than that, it was just a few weeks or maybe a year. As Bruce poignantly remarks later in the novel, "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 fortunate enough to live in one place all your life. Home is where you hang your hat. [He had never owned a hat] Or home is where you spend your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement...Is home that, or is it the place where the people you love live, or the place where you have buried your dead, or the place where you want to be buried yourself?" p459

There is so much in this novel that is written beautifully, with many things that I could relate to and will be pondering for some time. For most of us, home and family are at the core of our lives. However, for the Mason family, home was a curse.

Highly recommended.

I cannot say I enjoyed reading this book. It is depressing. The family is doomed, there isn't much humor and the author's writing has a melancholic tone.

Furthermore, each episode went on and on and on; the author used too many words to get his message across.

Nevertheless, I left the novel with a vivid awareness of each character's being. I really came to know them. I felt like I had known these people, grown alongside them. As the novel neared its end, I was jolted when I recalled how these characters were in their youth. I felt I had grown up alongside them. I remembered past Christmases, shockingly inappropriate parental behavior and shared moments of kindness too. Birth and death, it is all there. I saw what life and age had done to the family. This, the author did exceedingly well. I believe Stegner wants us to see that to truly understand a person you must know all the messy details of their lives and even of their ancestors. What our parents have lived through does not stop within them, it continues to influence the next generation and the next and the next.

The novel does have an historical perspective. It depicts life in western USA during the early 1900s. It depicts that period when pioneering came to an end. It depicts chasers of rainbows, people who were disappointed when they arrived on the pioneering stage just a little bit too late to cash in big, people who thought it possible to get something from nothing. Quick money: be it gold mines, gambling, stocks. These are people with big dreams that for one reason or another always turns up five minutes too late or at the wrong place, always short on luck. Such people were not necessarily lazy or not willing to work, at least in their youth, but as they failed time and time again they were never able to alter their behavior. Why? Some people are big dreamers, I guess.

Look at the book's title. Do you remember the song with the same name? If you know the song you will grasp the content of the book.

I like learning about past events. Why wasn't I satisfied by learning about this time period? The lives depicted what I have heard happened in my own family. My maternal grandmother's parents lived through the stock crash. They lived out west in Kansas and Missouri during the dustbowl. They went from rags to riches to rags again. Yes, many times. This particular great-grandfather of mine was born a gambler. So the story did speak to me personally. It did perhaps teach me a bit about their lives. But it was so damn depressing. It is more depressing than even holocaust memoirs since the troubles described are due to the actions of the characters themselves. You cannot get mad at a higher outside forces that destroys you. These people are destroying themselves. And they continue time after time to make the same damn mistakes. Some because they are dreamers, some because they do it for love.

When you are done reading this, what are you left with? There is no moral message on how we can improve things. It all feels rather hopeless. We humans are a sorry species. The book did move me. Now at least I have tried a book by Stegner. My husband read Angle of Repose. We concluded that both the style and the plot events were similar.

Wow.... What can I say that can do justice to this book?

It's truly an amazing journey with Stegner's family. We follow them from before he was born until his early adulthood. His father, with his grandiose ideas and restless spirit, drags the family all over several states and even to Saskatchewan, Canada, in search of the next "get rich quick" scheme.

Although the book jacket synopsis describes Bo Mason (the character name for Stegner's dad) as "ruthless and violent", he is much more than that. He is a multi-layered character, and it's fascinating to watch him age and observe his complicated relationships.

Best of all, for me, is that a significant portion of the book takes place in Salt Lake City in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It's great fun recognizing all the place names mentioned, such as the Newhouse Hotel, South Temple, Millcreek Canyon, East High, Saltair, and dozens of others.

I will definitely read this book again someday. Stegner was only 34 when the book was published, and it clearly shows his great talent and promise. I love reading books like this that make you want to have a highlighter pen handy, just to save the particularly poetic and thought-provoking phrases.

It's a remarkable work that offers a deep and engaging look into a family's life and the times they lived in.

Towards the end of this epic story, Bruce Mason, a mere 20-year-old first-year law student who had skipped a few grades, began to keep a journal. It wasn't just a record of his daily activities or thoughts on current events. Instead, it was his attempt to understand the complex family dynamic driven by a flawed father. He described the journal as being like an author's notes, yet another parallel between himself and Stegner. Both had a saintly mother, a volatile father, an athletic older brother who didn't skip grades like Wally and Bruce, and a nomadic upbringing that included stints in Saskatchewan, Montana, and Salt Lake City. Here's Bruce, reflecting on the impossibility of truly understanding such a thing:

"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."

Nevertheless, the book did trace back as far as it could to figure things out. In the process, Stegner said he managed to unload some deep-seated resentments. I'm reluctant to go into too much detail as Stegner should have the chance to reveal important plot points in his own way. Suffice it to say, he does it well. Each vignette completely draws you in, magnified and made grand by his sense of time and place. And every character profile has human dimensions that only a truly talented and observant writer can convey.

OK then. [Taking a deep breath before attempting the tightrope walk that keeps me from over-sharing while at the same time justifies why the book deserves all 5 stars.] One genealogical precursor in this story was the father's father who lost an arm and any sense of humor he might have had as a prisoner in the Civil War. Another was the mother's Norwegian heritage and farm upbringing that made her hearty and resilient. Each member of the immediate family gets POV treatment, which helps the long story move at a more lively pace.

Bo, the dad, was the personification of testosterone. He was broad-shouldered, handy with his hands, quick-tempered, energetic, charming (at times), respected by ruffians, good with guns, and mostly loving towards his wife Elsa. He chased dreams of a big score, easy money, or metaphorically, the Big Rock Candy Mountain just over the next rise. (BTW, the book shares its fitting title with a song featured in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou. "And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth" is my favorite line.) Bo pushed boundaries, was confident (or maybe "delusional" is a better word), and liked to signal his "big man" status whenever he could. In one instance, he paid more for the diamond stud in his tie than I do for 3 years' worth of clothes and accessories, even before adjusting for inflation. (Hmm... I'm not sure if that says more about him or me.)

Elsa was more practical but rarely had much influence. In contrast, she was consistently kind. The only criticism of her is that she might have done more to protect the "little birds" in her nest. The older brother, Chet, was in many ways like his father. If Bo could be called a "man's man," Chet could be labeled a "boy's boy" - physical, a ringleader, adventurous, and at least half-full of mischief. Bruce was more of a mama's boy. He did share one trait with his father, though: an intense willfulness. When the two were together, Bo's manly standards and his own intransigence made harmony as scarce as big money. Bruce's reflections later in the book were powerful and wise (overlapping 99% with Stegner's own). Father-son relationships often teeter unevenly between pride and disappointment, depending on how the two generations view each other and how reconciled they are to their differences.

Stegner once said this was a book about motion. The family certainly moved a lot, with that B.R.C.M. always calling. There was also a different kind of movement. Young Bruce, who was wise beyond his years, noted that people weren't fixed points so much as lines, always changing a little from what they were "like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. […a man] 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." With Stegner drawing the plots, every wiggle was worth noting.

The book was published in 1943 when Stegner was 34 years old and teaching at Harvard. The three other Stegner novels I read were written decades later. It was interesting for me to sample the young Wallace Stegner before the line of his life led him to celebrated works like Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety. In his younger years, he seemed to write with more raw power, hurt, and emotion. As he aged, he became more refined and perhaps more quotable. He was never less than great, though - marked by mature insights even as a young man and brimming with intelligence throughout.

I'm giving this book 4.5 stars and rounding up to 5. The small deduction comes from descriptive passages that I sometimes felt could have been shorter. I also think that as Bruce/Wallace exorcised his demons, there wasn't enough elapsed time or self-awareness yet to say what would fill the void. A quote by Bruce near the end, though, hints at how both the protagonist and the writer thought the blanks should be filled.

"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."

Knowing what I know of the writer to come, he iterated his way to that goal quite well, surpassing those candy mountains along the way.