All the Little Live Things (Contemporary American Fiction)

Though it's moral issues are presented a little more black-and-white than in his two more widely acclaimed novels, "Crossing to Safety" and "Angle of Repose," this short novel can be read successfully on a variety of levels. It showcases many of Stegner's recurring ideas: living consciously in an increasingly unethical environment; suicide as an easy escape from responsibility; and how the choice is never between "life and death" as much as it a decision about how you want your life to effect those around you. But analysis aside, I love this book for Marian Catlan, one of Stegner's most intricate women yet. This novel is my personal favorite of all Stegners and one of the best novels I've ever read.

The first analogy which came to mind after reading this book was that it was like being in some kind of a heavyweight boxing match. You read the book and you take a pounding and you set down the book and you're dazed. The emotional involvement is almost that physical. The second analogy, which I thought of later, was that of looking at an expensive diamond. You see a new depth of beauty every time you turn it in a different direction.

It is the story of a 64 year-old man, Joe Allston, who moves to a five acre ranch in what is apparently an area south of San Jose, California. He is retired, and he moves there with his wife to escape everyday life, and enjoy his remaining days in peace. It is 1967. But two events occur which shake him out of his quietude. The first is the sudden and unexpected appearance of Peck, a 24 year-old hippie, who asks them if he can camp out on their property. Reluctantly, and out of a sense of repressed guilt over the death of his own 38 year-old son three years earlier, Joe agrees. The second event is the appearance of a new neighbor, Marian, a 30ish woman, with her husband and child. Joe is smitten by her beauty and charm and immediately--in a purely platonic way--falls in love with her.

They have a lengthy discussion on the first day he meets her. He wants to know what she is planning to do with the property, which has gone untended for many years, and she tells him that she's going to do--nothing. She loves nature the way it is, she says, and relishes the wild, untamed, natural beauty of it. He tells her about poison oak, stink weeds, snakes and other vermin, and says to her that it is not possible to not want to change nature. He tells her about the flea-ridden gopher he had killed that morning on his property. "Do you think, for one minute, that that gopher would not rid itself of that vermin if it was able to?"

Joe is unable to change her mind, but he has many discussions like this with her, on his back patio, with his wife, in the summer sun. All of them are very charming and intelligent people, and we grow to like them immensely.
Meanwhile, Peck is taking advantage of him: building a treehouse, inviting friends over, and illegally hooking up electricity and water. As this irritant continues, disaster strikes. Marian has cancer, and only a short time to live. And between her and Peck, Joe finally comes to some realizations about himself: he wasn't merely seeking a pleasant retirement, he was instead trying to escape from life itself, and that it cannot be done. One cannot get off the treadmill--life is the treadmill.

It all sounds very simple I suppose, but the book is rich in everything. The characterizations are detailed and complex, and the plot moves as a result of the character's actions. Nothing is contrived. Joe's observations are original, witty and mature, and the conclusion of the story is unbelievably powerful. Stegner aims high and doesn't miss. This is a superb literary achievement, and possibly the finest novel I have ever read.

This is one of the most powerfully emotional books I have ever read. It is not third-person entertainment. It is a book that makes a reader think about how to accept, if not submit to life, with all of its fullness, including both joy and pain.
The story is set in the late 1960's, around the retiring life of Joseph and Ruth Allston. Joe tells the story in first person, over a period of about one year. It opens with a dreary October day as Joe and his wife, Ruth, return home after a somber event. The rest of the book traces what led up to that event, and the overwhelming affect a young woman had on Joe's life.
The woman, Marian Catlin, is Joe's opposite. Joe is a highly responsible, controlling kind of man, with traditional values, who has recently retired and moved to the hills of Northern California to build his perfect life and to escape from the painful memory of the death of his 37-year-old son. Marian, the same age as his son, is his new neighbor and welcomes life openly, with all of its vitality. Joe loves Marian as his own daughter, and he reluctantly learns to accept life much more openly, and with a far deeper degree of sorrow than he has ever known.
There is another interesting character who plays a key antagonist role, a dysfunctional hippie named Peck. Peck has all the irresponsible qualities of Joe's deceased son, and he hates him for it. The interplay of emotions created in Joe by the rebellious, irresponsible Peck with the openness and acceptance of life by Marian results in a gripping tension that builds flawlessly throughout the book, to the powerful end.
There are some dramatic scenes in the story, but the real drama is what you will feel tugging within your own heart. This is an exceptional book, one of a few to remember over a lifetime...and you will.
As a writer, myself, I could not recommend this book more highly. Wallace Stegner, the accomplished, deceased author, gave us a treasure of a book.

This is one of the most powerfully emotional books I have ever read. It is not third-person entertainment. It is a book that makes a reader think about how to accept, if not submit to life, with all of its fullness, including both joy and pain.
The story is set in the late 1960's, around the retiring life of Joseph and Ruth Allston. Joe tells the story in first person, over a period of about one year. It opens with a dreary October day as Joe and his wife, Ruth, return home after a somber event. The rest of the book traces what led up to that event, and the overwhelming affect a young woman had on Joe's life.
The woman, Marian Catlin, is Joe's opposite. Joe is a highly responsible, controlling kind of man, with traditional values, who has recently retired and moved to the hills of Northern California to build his perfect life and to escape from the painful memory of the death of his 37-year-old son. Marian, the same age as his son, is his new neighbor and welcomes life openly, with all of its vitality. Joe loves Marian as his own daughter, and he reluctantly learns to accept life much more openly, and with a far deeper degree of sorrow than he has ever known.
There is another interesting character who plays a key antagonist role, a dysfunctional hippie named Peck. Peck has all the irresponsible qualities of Joe's deceased son, and he hates him for it. The interplay of emotions created in Joe by the rebellious, irresponsible Peck with the openness and acceptance of life by Marian results in a gripping tension that builds flawlessly throughout the book, to the powerful end.
There are some dramatic scenes in the story, but the real drama is what you will feel tugging within your own heart. This is an exceptional book, one of a few to remember over a lifetime...and you will.
As a writer, myself, I could not recommend this book more highly. Wallace Stegner, the accomplished, deceased author, gave us a treasure of a book.

Wallace Stegner's _All the Little Live Things_ focuses on a nine-month period in 1967 in California and the lives of five neighboring families in a rural area on the verge of becoming a suburban subdivision. The first-person narrator, a crusty sixty-seven year old retired literary agent, Joe Allston, describes his relationships with his neighbors and his own struggles to maintain a healthy, ordered garden. Each of the five families has its own philosophy, whether explicit or implicit, and its own eccentricities. Much of the novel examines how people coexist and how lives become enmeshed. The Allston's garden, which despite Joe's efforts is constantly being overtaken by gophers and poison ivy, is a metaphor for how life all too often resists people's hopes and desires.

The Allstons are an older retired couple from Manhatten who have moved west to find solace and comfort in the anonymous quiet of gardening. The Welds have lived on the land for generations as farmers and with each generation must sell more and more land to survive. The LoPresti family is wealthy and socially connected. Fran, the wife, indulges her artistic sensibilities in sculpture, in part to deflect her tense relationship with her daughter Julie. The Caitlins are a young family new to the area. Marian, the wife and mother, is a beautiful thirty-year old woman whom Joe dotes over. The Allstons adopt Marian, her husband John, and their daughter, Debby. Finally, there is Jim Peck, a graduate student, who squats on the Allston property. Jim Peck and his "family" of accolytes represent the excesses of the 1960s counterculture and the dangers of chaos.

The novel works in a flashback sequence. As he walks around his property, Joe Allston reflects on the momentous events of the past year and his feelings of loss. He feels that he is "infected with consciousness and the consciousness of consciousness, doomed to death and the awareness of death." At the same time, he realizes that the loss he has suffered has made him richer (see the quote for the review) because death, in some sense, affirms the experience of having actually lived. Marian's view, which Joe accepts intellectually but not yet emotionally, is that one must "be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless." Throughout the novel, we see Joe stripping back the layers of himself in his self-reflection. We see his rage as well as his sensitivity and acceptance. He even seems to acknowledge that he has fallen in love again to fill the void in his relationship with his wife.

Interestingly, the ending of _All the Little Live Things_ is similar to Stegner's last novel _Crossing to Safety_ and is written with the same intensity. One of Stegner's gifts is his ability to depict multiple generations in his novels and the conflicting viewpoints of generations. While Stegner usually sides with the older generation, there is a continuity in outlooks among the old and the young. Joe learns about himself--his demons as well as his strengths--in his interactions with his neighbors.

If you don't know Stegner, the title might suggest another pious paean to furry critters and cutesy pets. But Stegner is too much the hard-minded analyst for that. Not at all cold, mind you. This is a supremely pasionate writer. Stegner is the novelist who redeems absolutely the humanity of the Grump. The main character is keenly aware of his flaws, stodginess, and resistance to change, and he agonizes over the conflict between his values of hard work, self-critique, and acceptance of the amorality (read cruelty) of life, and the fuzzy standards of an encroaching young back-to-nature set. There is an amazing love story at the heart of this book--of the avuncular grouch for a young dying mother--so well written it will teach even those who have never been in love what it is to revere the divine in another human being. The dark irony of Stegner's title plays its many levels around and within the woman he loves.

Every once in a while you happen upon a novel where you know you'll never forget the experience of reading those words. You know you'll never forget the characters. You know you'll never forget the lessons it taught you. You know that no matter how many books you read in your life, there won't be more than a handful to come close to it. All the Little Living Things is certainly one of those few.
All the Little Living Things is one of the finest novels I have ever read. I will not go into the plot because other reviewers have done so very well (read Paul McGrath's review; it's far better than mine), but I will say that it is immensely readable. Everything that happens in the novel happens because of the character's actions or thoughts. Nothing is contrived. Reading the story truly is a physical, not just a mental exercise, and you are exausted after finishing the novel. The prose is also superb. This is the third novel I've read by Wallace Stegner, and I don't know how many pages I have written down of quotes from the novels that I want to remember. The greatest thing about this novel is most definitely the characters, though. Joe Allston, who is also the main character of The Spectator Bird, is singularly the most complex character I've read in literature. You know everything about him, every aspect of his character. The supporting characters are superb too. They take on many dimensions. This novel thrives on the insights Joe gains from just being around these people. It is amazing to see Joe change: to see him learn about his relationship with people of a younger genteration, to see him learn that he can't escape life, and to see beauty in all aspects of life. It is amazing to learn with Joe.
All the Little Living Things really is a marvelous novel. I really cannot express how great it is. It is a masterpiece of twentieth century American literature, and I think that Wallace Stegner is without a doubt the greatest American novelist yet.

Reading this novel was often like looking at an impressionist's painting. It's incredibly rich in scenic description, character nuances and, most importantly, mood setting tone. Wallace Stegner lives on through his writing and we shall all be richer for this reading experience. This novel, while focused on a socially turbulent era (late 1960s), is timeless. Generational and political conflict, as well as the matters of preservation and development, life and death, and the persistence of human crisis will always be relevant topics.

And so we have the characters portrayed in All the Little Live Things. Joe Allston, the narrator, is much like a diarist recording his keen and colorful observations from his five-acre hideout in glorious California. With his wife Ruth at this side, together they grieve the loss of their 37-year-old son, and try to fit in as key players in their new community. Meanwhile, a freethinking, anti-establishment sort named Jim Peck squats on Allston's property--first with permission--however, Peck takes extreme liberties. Joe's distain for him (and his beard!) is the focus of much of the novel, and it leads him to come to terms with his feelings toward his son. Meanwhile, there's another neighbor, a young woman named Marian, who helps enable Joe to come to terms with his feelings about both life and death.

This is the most beautifully written novel I've read all year. Highly recommend for those who appreciate fine, sensory-based literature.

Michele Cozzens is the author of [[ASIN:1932172300 It's Not Your Mother's Bridge Club]].

Just finished this novel last night. Wow! An all-encompassing emotional ride from beginning to end, this story pulls you into the small, intimate world of a few key characters. Joe and Ruth are keen to live a relatively sheltered retirement in a small, rural Northern California town where they can nap, bird watch and take long walks. Enter Jim Peck, a young, hedonistic demi-God who wears a wild beard, unkempt hair and flashing eyes. After convincing Joe to let him camp on the land, a succession of events follows wherein Joe and Ruth's idyllic world is transformed into a strange battle of wills and dangerous confrontations. We learn that Joe has lost his son, an only child, in a strange surfing accident and this intrusion of peck triggers a jumble of emotions and questions for Joe regarding his son and the relationship (or lack thereof) that they had. As Joe grapples an spars with his inner turmoil while battling wills with Peck, a young couple moves in nearby. Marian, a wildly optimistic woman with views that are sympathetic to Peck's, quickly endears herself to both Joe and his wife, Ruth. The two couples begin spending a lot of time together. At the same time, Marian befriends Peck and his growing band of fellow free-thinkers, leaving Joe with even more to think about. Without giving too much away, a building sequence of events results in a crazy spiral of tragedies that will leave you reeling. Stegner is one of my favorite authors and I must say that this is by far my favorite book of his. Really sets your emotions and thoughts into play. Not a light read, by any means, but a moving and thoughtful one that you won't soon forget.

Although written before The Spectator Bird, I think the events in this novel take place after that one. We see Joseph Allston and his wife Ruth living in the hills south of San Francisco where they retired after the death of their difficult son Curtis. We know it isn't a book likely to end happily when the opening pages have Joe wrangling with growing old: "I was pondering the vanity of human wishes and the desperation of human hope, the tooth of time, the vulnerability of good and the unseen omnipresence of evil, and the frailty and passion of life." (p7) and "I drift from grief to anger and from anger to a sense of personal failure that blackens whole days and nights; and from that all too familiar agenbit of inwyt I circle back to the bitter aftertaste of loss." (p10)

Joseph reacts to two main foils. Jim Peck is a long-haired, anti-establishment dropout to whom Joe reluctantly gives permission to camp on part of his land. Jim reminds Joe of his lost son who was belligerent; even a few years after his death Joe has a hard time bending and forgiving "I can't separate love and respect. Curt demanded what I couldn't give, I insisted on what he wouldn't accept. Never never never never never." (p188) Similarly Jim will not give Joe the respect he demands; he simply wants to do what he wants without question or interference. Joe feels trapped and "half suspected that the irresponsibility of his search for freedom forced me to be more conservative than I wanted to be." (p110) This aspect of the novel is straight out of the late 1960's with the culture clash between young and old.

Joe's other foil is Marian Caitlin - a lover of all the likes "little live things" (p 59). She first comes upon Joe when he kills a gopher who is tearing up his lovely plants in his well tended garden. They argue about good and evil. Marian favors letting nature take its course whereas Joe is an inveterate gardner - "improving" things by bringing order.

But Marian is so full of love and joy that Joe and Ruth are completely taken over by her: "...we caught Marian's affectionateness as if it had bee a communicable disease: she was the Typhoid Mary of love." (p 93). She was the loving daughter they never had. "She is one of the old Willie Yeat's glimmering girls, with apple blossom in her hair, and I admit to a pang. God knows what it is - maybe envy that someone is lucky enough to have such a daughter." (p58)

Joe is trapped in the person he is: demanding respect for its own sake. But rather than moving the points of the novel through action, the weak point of the story is that arguments between the characters go on and on; at one point in a long letter Joe writes but never sends to Marian.

There is a motif of roads; it is difficult to travel on the unpaved roads in this exurbia. There are two bridges that play important parts in the action; both are extremely difficult to cross. This motif of difficultly traveled roads played a part in the other novel of the pair, The Spectator Birds, where the road to their place was muddy and people needed help getting through.

There is enough clever writing, deft descriptions of people interacting, and beautiful descriptions of nature to pull this book from the ditch. When waiting for an important phone call Joseph tells us "the ring was explosive, something toward which fire had come on a long fuse." (p319).

All in all this is a good book, not a great one. I loved the first three Stegner novels I read: Crossing to Safety, Angle of Repose, and The Big Rock Candy Mountain. I suggest you read those three novels if you are starting out and leave The Spectator Bird and All The Little Live Things to round out your collection.