Big Rock Candy Mountain

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Amazing. My first Stegner, but hope to read a lot more. It was an intense exploration of his life and so therefore, male and female, mother and father, abuse and joy, home and homelessness, family shame. Here is a good taste of what you get:


Thinking of homes and burial grounds and things of ages and peoples past, driving to Reno where his folks live now, Bruce says to himself:

"Those were the things that not only his family, but thousands of Americans had missed. The whole nation had been footloose too long, Heaven had been just over the next range for too many generations. Why remain in one dull plot of earth when Heaven was reachable, was touchable, was just over there? The whole race was like the fir tree in the fairy-tale which wanted to be cut down and dressed up with lights and bangles and colored paper, and see the world and be a Christmas tree.

Well, he said, thinking of the closed banks, the crashed market that had ruined thousands and cut his father's savings in half, the breadlines in the cities, the political jawing and the passing of the buck. Well, we've been a Christmas tree, and now we're in the back yard and how do we like it?

...Was he going home, or just to another place? It wasn't clear. Yet he felt good, settling his bare arm gingerly on the hot door and opening his mouth to sing. He had 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, the 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."

from Wallace Stegner's Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943)

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