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A review by arielamandah
All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner
4.0
I guess it makes me a crabby old lady that I found Joe, the main character, an absolute hoot and empathized with his crankiest feelings and reactions to the people who came to squat on his property. While not quite the book that "Big Rock" or "Crossing to Safety" is, this is another solid Stegner, full of well-cast, distinctive characters all finding their way around one another. It feels, in many ways, like a warm-up for later novels: a first try at several themes or situations. Still, the story gets under your skin, Stegner knows how to pack an emotional wallop, and his depth of insight into people is impressive.
The more I read Stegner's novels in close comparison, a few odd things stand out. 1) Were "small heads" a thing that was propped up as a beauty standard in the mid-century? He seems compelled to spend a lot of time describing all the luminous, untouchable women in his novels (Marian, here, Charity in Crossing to Safety) as having "small heads." 2) The idea of mastectomy and treatment for breast cancer seems to have disturbed him - or at least concerned him - in an oversized way. In this novel Joe really fixates on the "brokenness" and "disfigurement" that he believes a past surgery left Marian with. It also appears in Big Rock, as well, handled with the same degree of almost horror. I have to imagine that our treatments have improved enough that they are less shocking now than they used to be? 3) He doesn't have a very graceful way of handling non-white characters. I'm not one to go back and write-off authors "from another time" based on today's standards, yet, as another reviewer pointed out, in writing about the West - to the point of being called the "Dean of Western Literature" - you'd expect more representation of other races. Yet, perhaps it's good he steered clear, for when he has included people of color in his novels, the treatment hasn't been especially graceful (though it did track with the nature of the characters - I'm thinking of Bo Mason, especially, from Big Rock).
The more I read Stegner's novels in close comparison, a few odd things stand out. 1) Were "small heads" a thing that was propped up as a beauty standard in the mid-century? He seems compelled to spend a lot of time describing all the luminous, untouchable women in his novels (Marian, here, Charity in Crossing to Safety) as having "small heads." 2) The idea of mastectomy and treatment for breast cancer seems to have disturbed him - or at least concerned him - in an oversized way. In this novel Joe really fixates on the "brokenness" and "disfigurement" that he believes a past surgery left Marian with. It also appears in Big Rock, as well, handled with the same degree of almost horror. I have to imagine that our treatments have improved enough that they are less shocking now than they used to be? 3) He doesn't have a very graceful way of handling non-white characters. I'm not one to go back and write-off authors "from another time" based on today's standards, yet, as another reviewer pointed out, in writing about the West - to the point of being called the "Dean of Western Literature" - you'd expect more representation of other races. Yet, perhaps it's good he steered clear, for when he has included people of color in his novels, the treatment hasn't been especially graceful (though it did track with the nature of the characters - I'm thinking of Bo Mason, especially, from Big Rock).