The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1991) - Plot & Excerpts
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 awaresness 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 past, 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 to late or at the wrong place, always short on luck. Such people were not necesarrily 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 dam 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 dam 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.
I feel spent, having finished this book. I took more time reading it than any book in recent memory - and it wasn't only its 563 pages that made it a long read. I had to read with a pen at the ready, so many ideas and images and thoughts I wanted to highlight.The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a western book. A character study. A journey. But not a there-and-back-again book like Bilbo Baggins wrote. It's a go and go again kind of journey, searching ever further afield for that one thing that will make you happy, always finding that it just slipped out of your fingers.Bo Mason is that dreamer - a schemer who will gamble on a sure thing, following whatever lead will drop him on top of that Big Rock Candy Mountain the soonest. He'll farm, work the railroad, bootleg or run a "blind pig" - whatever it takes to get money in his pocket the fastest. And to Elsa, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, Bo's zest for life and skills with a shotgun lure her into a love that will test all the strength she's got as they live their lives during the hard years of the early 20th century.The road their life takes, the unbelievable anguish and sacrifice, the horrible choices and bum deals and the eking out of an existence, the packing up and starting over - you would think that it would be so depressing that you'd want to just chuck the book out the window. But Wallace Stegner is a literary genius because he ties up this cheerless and heartbreaking story with a writing style and way with words that is so amazing you can't help but be floored by the beauty of it. How is that possible? The turn of phrase and poignantly expressed truths stopped me time and again. And as we read the story from different points of view, we see the strengths in the characters, usually deeply hidden under 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 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 turning into something grand and worthwhile - the side of Utah that the Mormons of my ancestry probably wished didn't exist and certainly wouldn't have appreciated. The language of some characters was really rough and there were scenes of serious ugliness. But this book made a time and place and cross-section of people so real to me. I can't even use the words "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 and 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.
What do You think about The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1991)?
I got half way through Big Rock and just was too restless. In honor of our reading selection I am reading "Spectator Bird" by Stegner right now. It is only 200 pages and some passages are riveting. While I can go for pages feeling like I'm missing something. But I think I can make it on this one. He really is brilliant in the way he takes you through the development of the characters' emotional lives. Step by step. But certainly not something I would want to read regularly.
—Ruth
you can sum up this book with one word...struggle.in a grapes of wrath kind of way, this book is all about making it, and after being introduced to bo and his radiant energy and ambition, it feels promising. about fifty pages in, you realize that the book is only about struggle and that bo is truly searching for the big rock candy mountain, which always lies beyond the family's fingertips. although the novel is framed back in the day, it's a telltale story of keeping up with the joneses in the sense that if you are never satisfied with what you have, you will never be happy. i see that dissatisfaction a lot more in california than i ever saw it in texas, and it's sad. when you can set your expectations to meet reality, it frames your life in a whole new way.the best thing about stegner is that his writing takes you to each scene. you're there during those uncomfortable family fights, the brief moments of joy and happiness and within the state of mind of each family member. the character development is excellent. i tackled this book in the summer, but with the somber subject matter, i'd suggest it as a fall/winter read instead.
—May-Ling
This is Stegner's attempt to understand his parents and their making of his identity. He beautifully conceals who the real hero of the tale is until the last pages: the somewhat effeminate, philosophical son, who sees both his mother and his father for what they were, but doesn't ultimately begrudge them their sins. After all, they live on in his own history. He could only condemn them as much as he could condemn himself. The brilliant and intimate storytelling of Stegner's later novels (the notables being Crossing to Safety and Angle of Repose) is not quite developed in The Big Rock Candy Mountain. However, it is here that author executes his most incisive diagnosis of the rapturous splendor--and the treacherous curse--of the American West.
—Scott
