The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

Jean Stafford’s second novel, The Mountain Lion, is a dual coming-of-age story originally published in 1947. Siblings Ralph and Molly Fawcett, the youngest of four children growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, are the family misfits. Tied together by scarlet fever and its resultant sickliness, the dark-haired, gangly, ugly adolescents are out of place in the company of their snobbish mother and doll-like older sisters.

Ralph and Molly look forward to the annual visits of their step-grandfather Mr. Kenyon, a rich but unrefined rancher, and worship him as a god. Mrs. Fawcett, by contrast, reveres her cultured merchant father Mr. Bonney, associated in the family’s mind with the likes of President Cleveland and Alfred Lord Tennyson and who, “portable, ubiquitous” in his urn, “would always be at hand.”

They are unsettling, too-real children. Hyperaware of their surroundings, the behaviors and mannerisms of adults, and their own emotional states, they fixate on memories real and imagined that are as vivid as life and at least as fraught. Grandfather Bonney, Cleveland and Tennyson form a triad seen by Ralph as “fat, hatless, wearing morning coats, walking abreast along an endless beach, eternally nearing a sand bar.” Molly’s version of the same family myth “saw them lying all three in one enormous bed with a moon like a jack-o’-lantern shining in on their big rosy faces through a dormer window.”

They are also brutally unforgiving. As Ralph comes under the wing of a real “Kenyon man,” his resentment for his maternal grandfather grows stronger until he wishes he could drain all the Bonney blood from his veins. Molly has a list in her notebook of “unforgivables,” and name after name is added until finally she herself is among the damned. Stafford is unflinching about the depths and darknesses of childhood.

When Mr. Kenyon inconveniently dies during one of his visits to the Fawcetts’, Ralph and Molly gain a new fellow in his son and Mrs. Fawcett’s half-brother, Claude. Despite their mother’s overprotective, fretful nature, the children are allowed to spend one summer, then another and another, at Claude’s ranch in Colorado, where they immediately begin to grow in ways heretofore impossible. But where the youngest two Fawcett’s were allies against their family and connections in California, at the Bar K ranch Ralph finds someone to tutor him in masculine pursuits and Molly entrenches herself further into the life of the mind and the pen.

The estrangement between brother and sister is slight at first, but doomed to widen as they close in on the adult world. Ralph is ready to become a man in emulation of his uncle, but Molly can’t follow him. When Claude asks, about Ralph’s eyeglasses, why he doesn’t “leave them things off all the time,” the boy determines to do just that:

He began by not wearing his glasses for an hour at a time and then for two hours and then for whole days except when he went out to shoot. It caused him at first to have hammering headaches and they, in turn, made him eventually vomit and then writhe miserably on the settle in Mrs. Brotherman’s sitting room with a damp washcloth over his forehead. But he persisted, and within a few weeks his headaches came infrequently and he was able to see almost as well as he had done with his glasses. Molly tried it too, but in vain: her eyes were much worse than his and without her glasses she was as blind as a mole. After that, everything happened.

Molly is prevented physically from the happiness of normalcy and belonging, her problems inextricable from the body she wishes did not exist. This extends to an inability to accept adult sexuality, the cause of serious discord with her brother. When Ralph’s initiation into life on the ranch includes witnessing a calving, “[h]e was not in the least embarrassed, only filled with wonder.” But when he tries to share his new knowledge with Molly, “she stuck her fingers in her ears and screamed at him, ‘You’re a liar! You’re a dirty liar!’ and her nose began to bleed.”

These two children of Stafford’s creation are described with aching closeness amid a landscape of harsh beauty. They climb mountains capped with pink, “even on the coldest days when the snowdrifts were deep and the pine needles in the glades were ossified with ice.” In summer, a forest fire turns the sun “as small and lusterless as a withered orange” behind a veil of smoke. The ranch is so much bigger and wilder than California, the open spaces of the real West holding all the possibilities and dangers of a more authentic life. Stafford’s resolute portrayal of children as younger, less-finished adults, with all the complication that entails, likewise carries the good and bad inherent in such authenticity. The realism that gives rise to characters like Ralph and Molly doesn’t let them off easily, but there is an undeniable rightness to their story.

Reviewed by Nicole Perrin

The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford
New York Review Books, 2010
Paper, 248 pp, $14.95
ISBN-13: 9781590173527