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4.5
It is rewarding to discover an author and a book that deserve more recognition than they have received. One such author is Jean Stafford (1915--1979) and one of her major works is "The Mountain Lion" (1947), her second of three novels. Stafford and "The Mountain Lion" continue to receive critical recognition and they received popular recognition during her life. She was awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her "Collected Stories". The Library of America published a volume of her novels in 2019 and a volume of her collected stories in 2021, both edited by Kathryn Davis. And in 2010, New York Review Books published this edition of "The Mountain Lion" in its "Classics" series, also with an Afterword by Davis. "The Mountain Lion" received renewed attention and strong critical reviews with the New York Review republication and the two Library of America volumes. Still, the novel and the author are not as well known as they might be."The Mountain Lion" is a novel focusing on two places and two characters and two writing styles, one formal the other colloquial. It is set in the late 1920s on a large, prosperous walnut farm in Covina, California and on a large cattle ranch in rural Colorado. The two places are contrasted and related throughout the story. The walnut farm is mercantile with an air of attempted gentility. It is owned by a widow with four children, with servants and immigrant workers and is frequented by an unctuous minister and his wife. The ranch is owned by a step-relative of the California family. It too is prosperous, but large and wild, with no cultural pretensions whatsoever.The two primary characters are the two younger children in California, Molly and Ralph. As the story opens Molly is eight years old and Ralph is ten and the two have just recovered from scarlet fever which has lingering effects. The two children are inseparable companions, both introspective and bookish, and stick together with few friends in school and with a distant relationship to their mother and to their two socially active and non-intellectual older sisters, Rachel and Leah.In the first few scenes of the book, the children's step-grandfather dies, and his son,, Uncle Claude, 36, invites Ralph and Molly to spend the summer on his Colorado ranch. Stafford's novel explores the tangled family ties. The setting moves back and forth from California to Colorado until when Molly is 12 and Ralph is 14 they are sent to the ranch for a year as the mother takes the two older girls on a European tour and sells the ranch to move to Connecticut.The novel explores the development and deterioration of the relationship between Molly and Ralph with the changed environment of the ranch, and the pulls of puberty and gender roles. Ralph is in search of finding what it means to be a man and becomes attracted to Uncle Claude and to the rugged mountains, open spaces of Colorado, and ranching life. He is also learning about sexual attraction. Molly becomes ever more introverted. She stays to herself and devotes herself to writing and to her diary. The relationship between Molly and Ralph is full of sexual innocence and awakening with incestuous hints on both sides. The once inseparable brother and sister become alienated but still inseparably one.The novel unfolds slowly. Stafford writes beautifully and descriptively with emphasis on the natural world in both California and Colorado and how it intertwines with the lives of the characters. The two primary characters, Molly and Ralph, and the host of secondary characters in California and Colorado also are described insightfully from the inside. The book is full of detail, both realistic and symbolic, and every scene and every word in the novel tells. The novel needs slow, careful reading. It works to a terrible climax which, in retrospect, has an air of inevitability. Stafford's sympathies are clearly with Molly, with her bookish nature, self-destructive behavior, and introspective, heavily fault-finding, angry character. Stafford herself was raised in both Covina, California and in Colorado and her book has autobiographical overtones. She lived a tormented, troubled life with three husbands, alcohol and drug addiction and depression and created in Molly a character with a great deal of herself."The Mountain Lion" is a singular work, troubling, slow, and difficult. With its beautiful descriptive writing and tragic story it is not an easy book but rewards reading. It deserves recognition as an important American novel.Robin Friedman
