Wallace Stegner’s novel Big Rock Candy Mountain has always hovered at the edges of my attention. I recall stocking it as a bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company, and I liked the title. (The song of the same name, about an imaginary hobo paradise “where they hung the jerk who invented work,” is one of my favorites.) I always figured I’d read the book one day, and last month I found a nice copy sitting in a Little Free Library on Beacon Hill. This, I figured, was my sign.
I’m glad I finally read Big Rock Candy Mountain, but it is by no means an easy or enjoyable reading experience. In fact, it is 500+ pages of beautifully composed misery porn, telling the story of an American family on the edges of society in the dawn of the 20th century. The husband is an abusive loser who keeps coming up with and abandoning get-rich-quick schemes, and his family helplessly orbits around him as he travels from North Dakota to Saskatchewan to Utah, leaving nothing but heartbreak in his wake.
I learned near the end of Big Rock Candy Mountain that it is loosely based on Stegner’s own life and childhood, and that made me appreciate the book more. As an act of processing the misery that he experienced, writing Big Rock Candy Mountain must have been a consequential experience. But it’s not the first Stegner book I would recommend to anyone—Angle of Repose or Crossing to Safety are both better for neophytes. But if you’re looking for an American saga full of desperation and hope and heartbreak, you’re in the hands of a master with this one.
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