Colorado Adventure

THE MOUNTAIN LION (231 pp.)--Jean Stafford--Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

Unlike oil and water, symbolism and realism can be mixed--but it takes a skilled hand. Ambitious young Novelist Jean Stafford (Boston Adventure) takes a try at it in her second novel, and doesn't bring it off. In parts The Mountain Lion is beautifully clear--a delicate, sharp story of childhood and adolescence. But it darkens toward the end, and winds up in a desperately contrived coincidence.

Novelist Stafford (who is the wife of Poet Robert Lowell) tells the story of Molly Fawcett, a plain, wise little girl growing up near Los Angeles in the 1920s. Going on nine when the story begins, she and her brother Ralph, 11, are the "intellectuals" of the family. Molly writes poetry and reads The American Boy; Ralph has already studied the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Reproduction. Like any brother and sister, they sometimes fight, but the rest of the time they are such cronies and co-conspirators that Molly thinks they might one day get married.

By the time Molly is 13, and puzzled over whether she should become a Catholic or a Buddhist, she is even more puzzled to find that Ralph has acquired mysterious male interests of his own. One night, staying with her uncle on a Colorado ranch, she goes to her room, pushes the washstand against the door, and gives her diary a piece of her mind. "Ralph," she writes, "has gone beyond the pale. I am his permanent enemy and do not know whether I will ever speak to him again. ... I intend to read all of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Stevenson and James Fenimore Cooper while I am here so that I won't have to have anything to do with R.F. He and Uncle Claude were talking about hunting a mountain lion. I can think of nothing more boresome personally."

The lion, a fairly obvious symbol of adolescent terrors and stirrings, is shot and killed in the end. Molly accidentally gets in the way of Ralph's shot, is killed at the same time--which is pretty dank symbolism and practically plain nonsense in any other terms. At her best Novelist Stafford handles the story well; but when she wants to be tragic she succeeds only in being melodramatic.

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