I finished The Big Rock Candy Mountain last night. Here’s my Goodreads review:

I hope it’s not sacrilege to say this, but I found Stegner’s writing style a bit uneven. At times he strikes an elevated, epic tone. At other times he slips into a more casual, second-person narration. Now and again a sentence or line of dialogue is a cringeworthy clinker. The first chapter is the most polished and best written, but also (for me) the slowest and hardest to get through. If the entire book had matched its tone, I’d have respected the novel more, but I’d have liked it less.

Stegner’s at his best when he’s not too polished, not trying to hard, when he lets himself slip into second person, when his sentences are long but uncomplicated:

The farm was that feeling, too, the sense of straddling two nations, so that even though you were American, living in Canada, you lost nothing by it, but really gained, because the Fourth of July was celebrated in Canada and Canadian holidays like Victoria Day and the King’s birthday were celebrated in Montana, and you got in on both. And you lived in Saskatchewan, in one nation, but got your mail in Montana, in another.

Quibbles about prose style notwithstanding, I did actually like this novel quite a bit. After the first chapter, I was fully engrossed in the story, and I strongly identified with the characters. As the child of a man who always sought the Big Rock Candy Mountain (where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings), I felt by the end that Bo Mason was my father.

The relationships among the characters, the actions they take, the lifelong consequences of those actions—all of this, Stegner gets exactly right. Some of his sentences may strike a false note, as I’ve mentioned, but his characterization and plotting never do. He may have been writing the story of his own life, but he did so with immense frankness and sensitivity.

It’s a mark of a great writer than in describing the specific history of one family, Stegner is able to touch upon the history of every family.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll remember that my dad died last fall, and that his death brought up a surfeit of memories and emotional snags.

(Heads up. Spoilers a-comin’.)

Bo Mason, the flawed patriarch of the family in The Big Rock Candy Mountain, meets his end in quite a different way–not at all in the way that my dad died–but even so, I felt that Stegner gave me a glimpse into my father’s final days. It’s almost certainly not true that my dad ended his life angry, bitter, depressed, desperately lonely–but over the course of the novel I’d come to conflate Bo and my dad that I cast the latter quite easily in the role of the former. As the action of the last chapters played out in my mind’s eye, I saw my dad poring over his accounts, counting up every last dime, buying a suit he couldn’t afford, failing to come to grips with the collapse of the last can’t-miss deal.

Easy as it was to dovetail my reality with Stegner’s fictional world, in the end, I’m grateful that Bo Mason and Jerry Dean were only similar, and not the same. And although it knocked me for a loop to learn that my dad had been happy at the end of his life, I’m now glad that that was the case. Maybe, finally, after decades of searching, he realized that there’s no Big Rock Candy Mountain, and that wherever you are, if you listen hard enough, you can hear the bluebird sing.