Well here are some pretty serious #daddyissues. This book tells the story of a couple who get married, have two children, and move restlessly across the Midwest looking to strike it big. At least the father is looking to strike it big. The mother is just hanging on.
It’s a broad sweep of middle America across decades, involving possum-hunting and gold-panning and bootlegging and the Spanish Flu. (This was remarkably like todays’ COVID. They went on lockdown, they wear masks, it made me wonder if really medical science has not come on that far after all)
The book is so jam packed with incident, some of it so random, that I started to suspect it must be based on real life. I also wondered this because it was so completely judgemental towards the father character. This dad came from poverty, and pulled himself up into wealth. He couldn’t stand the idea that he was going to be trapped in a $100/month job because of his lack of education and was always looking for the next big break. I found this kind of inspirational, like he was a class warrior. His youngest son doesn’t take it that way, and is horrified by his bootlegging (but not so horrified that he doesn’t take that sweet moonshine money to pay for his law degree).
I learn from the Introduction that indeed this is the story of Stegner’s own family. Sadly his mother, brother and father all died within three years of each other, and it was then he decided to write about them. This casts the book in a different light for me. I see what it is, his effort to record and remember them, to create a monument to their messy lives. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be the only one who remembers your childhood, though I guess that if I am lucky enough to live to a great old age I will find that out. I wonder if I’ll want to write about it, when its only me left.