The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
Published 1991 · 563 pages · 154,825 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is The Big Rock Candy Mountain to read?
The Big Rock Candy Mountain scores 39 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
- Stegner writes plain, sensory realist prose with western and farming terms and little ornament. It sits close to The Great Gatsby in accessibility but is less ornate.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Sentences are clear and measured, with occasional long descriptive stretches of landscape. Closer to The Remains of the Day in clarity than to any modernist.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The book grounds its ideas about ambition and the West in concrete scenes of moves, farms and bootlegging. Comparable to To Kill a Mockingbird in how ideas arrive through events.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- A multi-decade family saga with many places and incidents, but it unfolds at a steady pace. Lighter than Anna Karenina, heavier than Beach Read.
- Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
- Stegner shows Bo's damage through action and the sons' reactions, though the narration is mostly direct. Readers infer Elsa's unspoken grief, but nothing is hidden like in Gatsby's Nick.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The candy mountain of the title and the restless moving carry the book's meaning, with the land as a steady presence. Symbolism is clear and signposted, near 1984 in directness.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- The title's hobo-ballad paradise ironically frames Bo's dream, and the narration is sympathetic yet critical of him. It is milder than Gatsby.
- Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
- The family story reaches a clear conclusion, though the costs and Bo's meaning stay unsettled. Closer to Beloved in resolution than to open-ended modernism.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- The narrative is largely chronological, following the family from place to place with shifting viewpoints among Bo, Elsa and the sons. Simpler than Anna Karenina's parallel plots.
How The Big Rock Candy Mountain is regarded
The Big Rock Candy Mountain holds a literary regard score of 64 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.