Angle of Repose

"Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity."


This novel won the author a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. It is about a wheel chaired historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. It is directly based on the letters of Colorado author, Mary Hallock Foote.

i don't normally have high expectations of pulitzer winners, but this. is. beautiful. i don't even know what else to say. beautiful. ( )

Beautiful. ( )

This put me in mind of East of Eden, but with a much more personal edge to it. I guess it would be like East of Eden written from Cal's son's point of view. And there was less unambiguous "good" and "evil" in Angle of Repose than in East of Eden; it was just people acting the way people do, which is most often neither good nor evil. At any rate, I really enjoyed it. It seemed true to me (not in a "true or false" sense, but in a "true to human emotions" sense). I've been on a kick to discover more about the American West, and I like the clearer picture Angle of Repose has given me. ( )

[Angle of Repose] is an interesting book both for the way it's written as well as for the story it tells. It's a book within a book. Lyman Ward is a 57 year old historian who has lost half of one leg and has a completely stiffened spine. He moves into his ancestral home in Grass Valley, CA (that's in the Sierra Nevada foothills in northern CA) to research his grandparent's lives, largely by reviewing a large collection of letters his grandmother wrote to a childhood friend. Part of the story deals with his physical struggles and his relationship with his son, ex-wife, and his current care-givers. The bulk of the book, however, is the story of his grandparents.

Grandmother was born int he mid-19th century to a proper middle-class quaker family in Connecticut. She is well-educated artistic, loves literature and good conversation. She marries grandfather Oliver on the rebound after a man she is fond of and who she thinks is going to marry her instead marries her best friend (with whom she may have had more than a platonic friendship). Oliver is a mining engineer in love with the west and with an outdoor life. He's the strong silent type, and rather uncomfortable in "polite society". He's a dreamer of big dreams; she's a practical person concerned with the day-to-day

These two start life together in California. Grandmother thinks it is a temporary adventure; grandfather knows it is his life. The story follows them through ups and downs as mines close, opportunities turn out to be not what they seem, comfort and friends are found in remote places, and dreams are followed.

The grandparents' story is a wonderful look at life in the American west at the end of the 19th century but that is not what Lyman is really interested in. He says: "What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any."

The "angle of repose" is the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling.

This is a wonderful book, rich in many ways. ( )