the mountain lion

The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972)

I felt I had been reading too much British and European literature recently, and so looked for something essentially American on my shelves and The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford was the perfect choice.  This is another book that had stood neglected on my shelf for many years.  I had started Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel once many years ago and had not liked it, and so I must I have formed an aversion to her that kept me from reading this book.  I’m glad that I finally have.

The Mountain Lion is a novel about childhood that flows beautifully and clearly from a potent and essential well.  It tells the story of a sister and brother, Molly and Ralph Fawcett, who grow up on a walnut farm in  California.  Their father is dead, and their two sisters, Leah and Rachel, are old enough to exist in their own separate sphere of family; their mother is loving but distant and ineffectual, and has little sympathy for either of her two strange younger children.  So Molly and Ralph cleave tightly together, and the novel examines the strong bond they share and how that bond is inevitably and tragically severed.

Much of the novel is set on their Uncle Claude’s ranch in Colorado, where Molly and Ralph spend several summers in a more stimulating and liberating atmosphere than their home. But is also here, on the ranch, where Ralph pursues a friendship with Uncle Claude, a friendship that tragically affects his relationship with his sister.  Molly, who wants to be a writer, is a precocious and unpleasant child, both judgemental and unforgiving.  But she is also very funny and smart, and Stafford makes her seem achingly real and alive.  So her sudden death at the very end of the novel is shocking and devastating, and casts a disturbing blackness back over the bright open landscape of the book.

A fresh, alive, beautifully written novel — a masterpiece of its kind.