Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs Living and writing in the West

While attempting to define a region and come to terms with the West, Wallace Stegner paints a portrait of himself, a man molded by the West. Dragged from Iowa to Saskatchewan, Montana, Utah, Nevada, and California by his father, a rainbow chaser who never found his pot of gold, Stegner led a transient childhood, growing up a frontiersman, a virtual Daniel Boone, not seeing his first flush toilet and lawn until he was 11. Seventy years later, Stegner has written more than a dozen novels, including the accclaimed Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose, and, most recently, Crossing to Safety , as well as many books of nonfiction. A compilation of recent essays that cohere nicely, Where the Bluebird Sings is part autobiography, part study of western literature (i.e., Steinbeck, George R. Stewart, Walter Clark, and Norman Maclean), part natural science and history (his discussions of the significance of aridity in understanding the West and the ecological sins of water reclamation are eloquent and impassioned). His tone ranges from optimistic (he calls the remaining western wilderness a "geography of hope") to grave (he laments the ongoing desertification of the West). He challenges western stereotypes, and he contemplates the role of autobiography in fiction writin (Crossing to Safety was his most personal novel).. With this book, Stegner reconfirms himself as one the most important contemporary writers, of the West or anywhere else. (Reviewed Feb. 1, 1992)0679410740Benjamin Segedin

The American West is ``less a place than a process,'' asserts Stegner. In these 17 graceful essays, most previously published in magazines or books, the novelist explores the dynamic tension between the West as means of escape from irksome obligations and its underappreciated role as teacher of hard lessons of community and environmental conscience. A masterful stylist who captures the untamed energy of the West in every inflection, Stegner paints word pictures of the landscape full of dry clarity. He has ``Western migratoriness'' in his blood, as revealed by autobiographical sketches tracing his peripatetic childhood from an Iowa farm to North Dakota wheat towns to Washington logging camps. In a deeply moving confessional letter to his mother he measures his life against his unspoken promises to the woman who died 55 years earlier. His love of unspoilt nature and of the West shines forth. Author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Western Americana and literary history by the Pulitzer-winning novelist. Now 80, Stegner here reviews his life in part, the West as writers have written about it, its landscape and the ever-changing effect of humanity upon it, and so on. Stegner believes that the West is finally coming into its own as a literary entity distinct from what eastern critics have found in it. Even so, he warns, ``without a more developed and cohesive society than the West, in its short life and against all the handicaps of revolutionary change and dispersion, has been able to grow--and without a native audience for its native arts--there may come a time in a writer's career when the clutch of the imagination will no longer take hold on the materials that are most one's own.'' That sentence points up Stegner's strengths and flaws: It digs into his subject of change and fragility both in landscape and citizenry, but does so in a voice more academic than earthy. Ever in search of the loamy detail, one reads through this collection of recent magazine essays and introductions to Stegner's own and others' books and finds less appeal to the senses than the wise overview, rich in itself but not rich in words. The best essay by far is a sigh-heavy memoir of his mother, ``Letter, Much Too Late,'' written some 50 years after her death, with her breath and heartbeat moved into the reader's own chest. Stegner's friendships with writers such as Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Wendell Berry ring with praise, as do his comments on John Steinbeck, Norman Maclean, and George Stewart. And one feels deeply rewarded by Stegner's wisdom about population shifts, the five or six main types of landscape, and his words about conservation, deadly dams, and the death of the desert. Absolutely worthwhile, but highly charged only here and there.