Book Review: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

Spoiler alert: in this all-but-forgotten masterwork, Jean Stafford—who was once widely regarded as the leading novelist of her generation, and who wrote this perverse, short, lyrical novel, her second, during the flailing failings of her marriage to my hero Robert Lowell—kills Molly, her child-alter ego, a girl too unloved and unloving to survive puberty, too pure and awful—like Stafford, who died pickled and childish three decades later after winning the Pulitzer with her devastating, hurtfully compassionate Collected Stories—for this or any other world, especially the necessarily allegorical one of fiction. I am broken now, hopeless; hope is proved by this book to be a contrivance. I have just read the last pages in which Molly’s brother, Ralph—who, to live, cannot love either, has no spare love—shoots her, aiming for the wild mountain lion whose stuffed corpse was to be the triumph of his new manhood. I don’t hate Ralph—how can I, a boy, mistaken, like me? And can I hate Molly, who so needed Ralph and everyone, still young enough to savor the bittersweet of her anger? What about Stafford, who hurt herself, all our selves, with this ending, her classic tragedy, writing, decades later,Poor old Molly! I loved her dearly and I hope she rests in peace. Fuck insight and analysis: my heart is shot. Why did she have to die? Why does anyone? Why do you, do I? Because of what Ralph was feeling just before he accidentally slaughtered the future? This book must have ravaged the already sleepless poet Gregory Orr, who shot his brother, too, and suffers that endless error in poetry and prose. And because Molly refused everything, she stood between Ralph and tomorrow. But he grew, he changed. Confused? Read the book. In novels people die because of what they feel. In life, people die when their bodies conk out, exhausted machines that living expends. And what happens when people feel their feelings in life? Nothing? Anything? Brenda, dear Brenda, my love, nothing happens, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. And afraid. A small breeze born in the heart gently bends a blade of grass and no one hears a word. No one reads Stafford anymore—I asked on Facebook. Stafford died, her legacy gently dispatched into the low air. O, life is terrible, literature ridiculous. Stafford’s prose, teeming and rich as loam, could take Famous Franzen’s for a walk, feed it biscuits. But who cares? Who remembers? O, to have been Jean Stafford, in the past I idealize, when the world was less self-conscious, less precise. I could be dead already, warmish beneath a blanket of dust. Joyful are the faded, the once-greats whose afterlives slipped out a hole in posterity's pocket: they are loved poignantly by a needy few. O, to be kept cozy in the bosoms of those desperate and proud, forgotten for all the good I do. Love is sunlight streaming unevenly through the canopy of leaves overhead. We can only grow in the brighter patches below, fading where light is thin. Molly, we are with you, nowhere and gone. Mostly we are forgotten, too.