“The Mountain Lion”
By Jean Stafford
Afterword by Kathryn Davis
New York Review of Books, $17.95, 240 pages
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How could it be that Jean Stafford has vanished from view, remembered more for her marriages to Robert Lowell and A.J. Liebling than her considerable accomplishments as a writer? Her 1970 Pulitzer Prize for “Collected Stories” was apparently no inoculation from the vagaries of literary fashion, and perhaps after languishing in out-of-print no man’s land, this edition of “The Mountain Lion” will win Stafford new legions of readers. The novel, which appeared in 1947, is in many ways a coming-of-age story, centering on a precocious brother and sister who spend their summers at their uncle’s Colorado ranch. Sounds simple enough, but Stafford’s world is eerie and chilling — though emotionally red hot, as boy and girl chafe against their suburban, silk-and-sherry life and yet find the freedom of the frontier, and the prospect of adulthood, almost impossible to bear.