I didn't find this all that engrossing - it's a slender story following on from 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' (I would read that first), and set many years later when one of the characters returns to his youthful hometown, Salt Lake City. It is a kind of meditation on memory, regret, family, change, missed chances and roads not taken. There's some very good writing, and memorable scenes, but in the end it doesn't have the weight and impact of some of his other novels. ( )

Summary: When former ambassador Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City for the funeral of an aunt, long-forgotten memories of his youth come back to challenge how he has remembered this formative part of his life.

Memory is a funny thing. What we remember and how we remember former events and people are far from static. They are written and re-written, deleted and restored throughout our lives.

Bruce Mason is a successful former ambassador, still on call for delicate negotiations. It is how he is known, and knows himself. His youth in Salt Lake City has faded to the far recesses of his memories and thoughts. That is, until an aunt for whom he is a guardian passes and he must return as the last living relative to bury her.

When he arrives, he is given a package saved by his aunt. In it are a letter sweater, letters and mementos from Nola, his one serious relationship with a girl. He spends much of his short stay remembering her–how they met, were drawn to each other, the times they were intimate, and the choice he made to delay marriage to pursue law school, sending her pretentious but unfeeling letters, led her to break off the relationship and take up with Bailey, his sexually seductive friend.

He also gets a call from Joe, the high school friend who drew him out of the isolation enforced by his bootlegger father. He worked for Joe’s dad, who wanted to bring him into the business. Joe brought him into a social network that drew him out of his shell. He keeps putting off calling him back, visiting the house late at night but never connecting.

Other memories flood back. The tragic life of his brother. His bootlegger father who he could never satisfy and who constrained his youth, both in not interfering with clients and keeping hush-hush his illegal activity. His long-suffering mother, dying of breast-cancer while his father makes another “business trip.”

He walks and drives the streets, so changed from his youth, bringing back other memories. The aunt’s funeral, concluding the book, ends with a thunderstorm, in some ways cleansing away all the memories as Mason prepares to depart. Or does it?

We are left wondering about the connection between the person he was and the pain he had known, and the person he has become. How is the man he is now related to the youth he remembers. We wonder why he doesn’t want to see his best friend, and why he had not been in touch with this friend after he left Salt Lake City.

And reading this makes one wonder how we have edited our own memories of the past. What have we stuffed in a closet? What self have we crafted and cultivated in our adult lives? Some, it seems, spend most of their lives wistfully looking back on the years of their youth as “the best years of our lives” while others try hard to forget them? It seems to me that Stegner’s novel, for the latter group, underscores the truth that “you can’t go home again” and if you do, you better be prepared for what you may find. ( )

“What is an event? What constitutes an experience? Are we what we do, or do we do what we are?”

In this book, Wallace Stegner returns to one of his characters from The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Bruce is the sole survivor of the Mason family. It is 1977, and he is now a retired diplomat. He has returned to Salt Lake City, where he spent his teenage years, to arrange his aunt’s funeral. He looks back on his adolescence, coming to terms with his regrets and painful past. We meet his abusive father, loving mother, supportive friend, and ex-girlfriend he intended to marry.

“This territory contained and limited a history, personal and social, in which he had once made himself at home. This was his place—first his problem, then his oyster, and now the museum or diorama where early versions of him were preserved.”

It takes place over the course of two days, but the narrative floats back and forth between the present and the past (1920s to 1930s). The writing is exquisite. It is character-driven, quiet, and contemplative. It contains poignant scenes that are easy to bring to envision.

“He feels how the whole disorderly unchronological past hovers just beyond the curtain of the present, attaching itself to any scent, sound, touch, or random word that will let it get back in. As a stronger gust rattles through the tops of the cottonwoods below him, he stops dead still to listen. Memory is instantly tangible, a thrill of adrenalin in the blood, a prickle of gooseflesh on the arms.”

It is about memory. It is about the lucky breaks, choices, and decisions (or postponements) that determine a person’s path through life. While one can enjoy this book for the pure poetry of the writing, I think it is best to read it after The Big Rock Candy Mountain (one of my favorite books and highly recommended).

“He was beginning to discover that the memory had no calendar. Inside there, all was simultaneous. A sense of time had to be forcibly imposed on it.”
( )

Although there are a couple of other books I've read this year that may be technically better, damned if this isn't my favorite. Like a Tchaicovsky movement from The Nutcracker, I have read and reread this sucker so many times that it has become a part of me, incorporated in an organic way in my very thought processes. Passages will enter my mind, like verses of scripture. Few books ... no other books, perhaps ... have so influenced my view of the world.

People talk of scripture, how they can turn to any random page, and find comfort therein. This somewhat strange and obscure book is like that for me.

The following are various Stegner quotes I've collected. Enjoy.

Reading Salt Lake City with Wallace Stegner

At Home in the Fields of the Lord

A Gentile in New Jerusalem: certainly I was. Salt Lake City is a divided concept, a complex
idea. To the devout it is more than a place, it is a way of life, a corner of the materially
realizable heaven; its soil is held together by the roots of the family and the cornerstones of the
temple.

Salt Lake City is an easy town to know. You can see it all. Lying in a great bowl valley, it can be
surmounted and comprehended and possessed wholly as few cities can. … The streets
are marked by a system so logical that you can instantly tell not merely where you are but
exactly how far you are from anywhere else … Looking into the blank walls of cities … breeds
things in people that eventually have to be lanced.

In Salt Lake I wrote my first short story and my first novel. In Salt Lake I fell in love for the first
time and was rudely jilted for the first time and recovered for the first time.
Because I believe in the influence of places on personalities, I think it somehow important that
certain songs we sang as high school or college students in the twenties still mean particular
and personal things. “I’m Looking over a Four Leaf Clover” is all tied up with the late-dusk smell
of October on Second South and Twelfth East. … “Exactly Like You” means the carpet, the
mezzanine, the very look and texture and smell, of the Temple Square Hotel.

Recapitulation

Progress had been at work on it. Old buildings had been replaced by newer, taller ones, and
something drastic had happened to Main Street. Its sidewalks had been widened well out
into the former traffic lanes, and the streets narrowed to half its width. … The effect was like the
Soviet exhibit at a World’s Fair, something created by Heroic Workers. Merely human activites
would be diminished on such a street.

It Is the Love of Books I Owe Them

I am coming along Thirteenth East on my way to an eight o’clock class. It is a marvelous
morning – it is always a marvelous morning, whether the air is hazy with autumn and the
oakbrush on the Wasatch has gone bronze and gold, or whether the chestnut trees along the
street are coned with blossoms … I am enveloped in a universal friendliness. I turn at the
drugstore on Second South and start uphill toward the Park Building at the head of the U drive. ( )

I don't expect Wallace Stegner novels to be plot heavy, but I thought this one suffered a little from its lack of direction. I didn't dislike it—parts of it were quite profound—but this is probably as close as a "meh" as Stegner gets for me. ( )