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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stegner's icing on Big Rock Candy Mountain., July 31, 2000
As I indicated in my review of Stegner's BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN (hereafter "BRCM"), reading fiction does not get better than reading Wallace Stegner (1909-93). His Pulitzer Prize winner, ANGLE OF REPOSE (1971) is my favorite novel, and BRCM (1943) is an equally moving book. It is easy to consider RECAPITULATION (1979) the icing on BRCM. RECAPITULATION is best read as a sequel to BRCM. Among other things, BRCM was about a father-son relationship, a son, Bruce Mason's hatred for his father, and his lifelong attempt to come to terms with his troubled family. RECAPITULATION picks up with Bruce Mason's return to Salt Lake City roughly 45 years after leaving there in Stegner's earlier novel. For Bruce, Salt Lake City is the place where "I buried my brother, my mother, my young love, and my innocence. In a few months more I buried my father and my youth" (p. 84). This is not a homecoming story. "Home," Bruce observes, is only "another word for strange" (p. 73). During his life, Stegner commented that RECAPITULATION is about "the domination that a harsh and dominating father can exert even after his death upon a son. What is revealed in this novel is the incurable damage done to Bruce Mason." In the beginning pages of this book, we find Bruce living mostly "in his head," like "the last spectator at the last act of a play he had not understood" (p. 274), his self image fused with the image of his family. He remembers his father, Bo, as a "boomer, self-deceiver, bootlegger, eventually murderer and suicide, always burden, always enigma, always the harsh judge who must be appeased" (p. 274). Through a series of flashbacks, however, in the end RECAPITULATION is about Bruce's transformation and survival. Although "incurably" damaged, he reaches a point of autonomy and finds the understanding he longed for in BRCM: "If a man could understand himself and his own family, he'd have a good start toward understanding everything he'd ever need to know" (BRCM, p. 436). Both BRCM and its sequel are autobiographical. Stegner wrote RECAPITULATION late in his career, and it contains some of his finest writing, e.g., "When cottonwoods have been rattling at you all through your childhood, they mean home" (p. 116). G. Merritt
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Much more than just the summary of a man's life., April 14, 2001
Bruce Mason, a diplomat and ambassador in his sixties, returns to Salt Lake City for the funeral of his aunt, who is the last remaining connection to a family history Mason has spent forty years avoiding. During the day and night he is there, he travels throughout Salt Lake, trying to locate landmarks from his troubled early life while reminiscing about the events which permanently influenced choices he made and directions he took as an adult. Gentle and reflective in tone, despite its scenes of sadness and disillusionment, this is a novel quite different from Stegner's epics, such as Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, with their enormous scope. Here, he creates what amounts to a memoir--a record of the life-changing experiences which one man, Mason, associates with his family, friends, and upbringing during the brief 24 hours he is in Salt Lake City.
Although this is supposed to be a sequel to Big Rock Candy Mountain, with the same main character, one need not have any familiarity with that book to enjoy this one, a book so introspective that one cannot help but wonder about the degree to which it is autobiographical. Like many of us who have outlived and, in some cases, out-achieved our parents, Mason finds his memories bittersweet. He is filled with resentment for the unintentional injuries and deliberate cruelties which made his youth and adolescence a misery. At the same time that he recognizes that he would never have been so motivated to achieve and escape had he not been so needy and so "hungry."
Though many authors have dealt with the "you can't go home again" theme, Stegner suggests here that one must go home again, not to relive early, unpleasant events again and again, stuck in the past, but to relive those events and reevaluate them from the perspective and experience one has gained over time. Unsentimental and uncompromising in its message, the book is a touching and sensitive look at the baggage we all carry with us and the need to put it aside. Mary Whipple
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Yes, a beautiful book but I howled in frustration at the end, September 16, 1999
A beautifully written, powerful book. I'm sure in literary and high-minded ways in its entirety it all made sense. But on the basic level of reader and story, I felt cheated. The plot as constructed and pursued seemed to "promise" a delivery from page one that was not made. The unrequited reader! I was so immersed in the threads of his life and the characters from his past, I expected those last doors to open, long-delayed encounters to happen... Still, Stegner is masterful and I look forward to reading those of his books I haven't yet. 20 years ago I loved Big Rock Candy Mountain (yet had forgotten all the characters and did not realize this was a sequel until after). One of the most stunning pieces of writing I have ever encountered is his story of a winter cattle drive in Wolf Willow.
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