Happy Accidents
On the pleasures of stumbling upon books in the wrong places.
Jean Stafford, in 1945.
I found Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion at a thrift in Marfa. I thought, I ought to read some Western fiction, you know? It just seemed like, The Mountain Lion—who could be interested in that? I almost bought it as a joke. I don’t like reading logically. I love having a library of lots of odd books around me, and whenever I’m staying somewhere for a while, I buy a ton of books; I like to reproduce a kind of mini used-bookstore experience wherever I am. So I picked this book up on a whim.
Right away, I could see what a fine stylist she was, though there were so many things that were of the period, including amazing racism, just casual racism. But as the book proceeded I began to see a doubleness there—Stafford’s speaking truthfully about her era without being simply of it. I started to realize that this is an astonishing writer.
is a family novel, and it starts with four kids living with their widowed mother, who’s been through a couple of husbands. They’re in Los Angeles, and then they have this opportunity to go to Colorado to live with their booze-swilling, big-booted grandfather, who their mother disapproves of. The family’s sort of divided into two older, perfect,
