The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California by Matthew D. Stewart (review)

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• The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California by Matthew D. Stewart
• James Barilla

Matthew D. Stewart, The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2022. 241 pp. Paper, $29.95.

Stewart's book focuses on the poignant connections between Wallace Stegner's writing about the value of building a lasting sense of community in the American West and his experiences of life in the hills overlooking Palo Alto, California, a landscape defined today by its proximity to Silicon Valley. Stegner, Stewart contends, was far less sanguine about the future of the West as the "Geography of Hope" than is widely assumed from his published writing. Drawing upon Stegner's written correspondence as well as close readings of his novels, Stewart argues that near the end of his life, Stegner arrived at a view much closer to despair over the burgeoning of what he saw as "formless non-community" in the West (174). Instead, Stegner found solace in the contours of small-town life in rural Vermont, where in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were "spread in a grove of ferns" in the town of Greensboro, a community he'd studied, written about, and lived in part-time (176). In Stewart's reading, this final gesture was the culminating expression of Stegner's lifelong search for a model of lasting commitment to place and community, even as it belied his written commitment to western possibilities.

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth follows a roughly biographical arc, beginning with Stegner's arrival in the Los Altos Hills near Palo Alto in 1945 after joining the faculty at Stanford. Stewart's stated aim is to "place Stegner's characters in conversation with Stegner himself, the historical record, and his many readers" (5), and he does so effectively and persuasively through close readings of several key novels combined with biographical details and a parsing of the many letters sent from readers in response to each of these works. The first chapter, for example, describes Stegner's attempts to settle into the nascent Bay Area suburbs while exploring the concepts of regionalism in both essays and fiction. The chapter includes an extensive close reading of Stegner's early forays into "suburb fiction" set in the Los Altos Hills, such as the short story "A Field Guide to Western Birds." Stewart traces the development of a protagonist, Joe Allston, who would make repeat appearances in Stegner's later novels, and [End Page 77] seeks connections between the portrayal of community and belonging in the fiction with the biographical features of Stegner's own attempts to inhabit the region.

By the mid-1950s Stegner was developing comparative studies of place-based communities that were supported by fellowships in the social sciences. Stegner's plan was to compare the fabric of communal life in three different locations: Eastend, Saskatchewan, which he described as a lingering expression of the dynamism and rootlessness of frontier life; Greensboro, Vermont, where he was accustomed to joining other literary figures for the summer; and Taasinge, Denmark, a village whose communal dynamics in his view had remained almost unchanged for centuries. In Stewart's recounting, Stegner visited these communities and conducted interviews but also chafed at the social science methods of inquiry and ultimately abandoned the project as too broad in scope. Nevertheless, the project provided important grounding for the more personal insights on the structures of lasting communities, which he went on to develop in the nonfiction/fiction hybrid work Wolf Willow.

Stegner published All the Little Live Things in 1967, in the midst of countercultural upheaval. Stewart's third chapter explores this novel's thematics of place-based belonging, continuing the analytical trajectory he began in the first chapter with his reading of Stegner's short "suburb fiction." The chapter delves more fully into Stegner's papers, parsing the significance of notes and scribbles Stegner left in the archive. It includes an extensive synthesis of reader responses as well, through which we can see how the novel's reception reflected the passions of the time.

All the Little Live Things also laid the groundwork, in Stewart's...