Angle of Repose Shared Read February 2023

Paul Cranswick and Karen Richardson will be reading Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose in February 2023. Join us, won't you?

Wallace Stegner was known as the "Dean of Western writers." He founded the creative writing department at Stanford University and his students included such diverse authors as Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, and Ernest Gaines along with many others. Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972.

I read this about 10 years ago before I joined the group. I really enjoyed it. I don't think I'll reread it tho, not even sure I still have it. But I'll follow along.

I do have Recapitulation and Big Rock Candy Mountain on the shelves somewhere, I should get to them some day. ;)

>2 mahsdad: I haven't read Recapitulation but Big Rock Candy Mountain was pretty stunning.

Thank you for setting this up, Karen. I have already put the book on my reading table ready to go!

>4 PaulCranswick: I had a battered paperback copy at some point so will check my shelves today. I've been working on the February reading pile.

This was a five star book for me a few years back. I won't be rereading, but I'll be following along.

I read it in July 2011 and gave it 4 1/2 stars. That was before I had a thread on L.T. so I can't refer back to my thoughts but do remember thinking that it was a wonderful book. I probably won't do a re-read either but do have this thread starred and will follow along as well.
Good reading to all!

I've had this book for awhile so I plan to join the shared read.

>8 Kristelh: Good news.

Added this one to the group wiki.

There was a rather vigorous discussion of this book among 75ers for the August 2015 American Author challenge when Wallace Stegner was the author of the month. The discussion is full of spoilers so I would only refer to it after one has read the book. https://www.librarything.com/topic/191545#

>10 drneutron: & >11 RBeffa: Thanks Jim and Ron.

I am planning to make a start on Wednesday straight away as the group read thread has already whetted my appetite.

I had hoped to join Mark in his read last year, but couldn't put my hand on my copy, I found it today. I will probably start reading it next weekend, it will be a reread for me.

>13 Caroline_McElwee: That is good.

I have started and have a public holiday today to make plenty of inroads into this chunkster.

>9 PaulCranswick: Good news!

>10 drneutron: Thanks!

This is a reread for me but I am thoroughly enthralled by Stegner's prose. He moves between present and past so easily. I am planning to finally also dig into Stegner's biography that has been sitting on the pile for awhile.

>15 witchyrichy: I started off slowly, Karen, as I got distracted by RL events at work (on my holiday!) and by book buying for which I am feeling guilty.

I have just completed the first part and expecting the story proper to begin. It certainly has the feel of a slow burning epic.

I am enjoying how Stegner slowly gives the reader information about the character.

>16 PaulCranswick: I have been trying to take my time and really absorb Stegner's prose. It has been a little easier to take my time as I am visiting with family and friends so can't just disappear and read.

>17 Kristelh: He has a really interesting way of moving the story along: sometime as it happens and other times through memories.

>1 witchyrichy: Waiting for my Abe.com copy of Angle of Repose to arrive -
my original request got cancelled because someone else ordered it first - everyone wants it now!

I started my reread at the weekend. Not far yet as not much reading time, but hope to take big bites this week. So far enjoying as much as my original read 14 years ago!

>19 m.belljackson: I thought I owned it but couldn't find it so ordered mine from Better World Books.

>20 Caroline_McElwee: I am home from travelling and getting caught up on life. Looking forward to getting back to the Ward family tonight. I am also enjoying this reread.

I've not had much reading time this past week, but am enjoying Angle of Repose as much as I did the first time I read it. And can tell I would read it again.

I don't remember many specifics from my first read, but I remember the tone, and that the characters were well drawn and quickly became friends. The places are as familiar as any one has visited once before, as in you have some sensory recognition, without much detail.

I'm about half way through. In Leadville.

Although my 2007 review still pretty much stands, I think this time round I began to get angry with Oliver more in the last third of the book, his incapacity to avoid being duped and to see how he was breaking down his wife.

Also the controversy about plagiarism only known to me a while after the first read. I would have to read the source material to know what I felt, but from what I have read about his use of her letters, I would like to think he would not do that were he writing now. But even then a simple note of attribution would have kept him right.

2007 Review:

From the outset I was seduced by the tone and voice of Lyman Ward, the key narrator of this novel. In his late 50s and almost wheelchair-bound due to a partially amputated leg, Lyman has set up home in the rural area he grew up in, looked after by an aging neighbour and her family, and frowned on by his ex-wife and son Rodman. To occupy his time Lyman sets himself the task of writing the biography of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, and hence also his grandfather Oliver Ward, using the correspondence and writings and drawings that survive. They are two pioneers of the mining West.

I don’t have any sound knowledge of the history of this time, but I felt a strong pull to the tough lives of these characters and their fellows who worked with them in an unforgiving terrain, with financiers and investors repeatedly letting them down and leaving them in the lurch, poorer and more poverty stricken as the story progresses, and the Wards move from place to place, project to project, hope being sparked and snuffed with each exile. What begins for Susan as an adventure, she is on some levels an early feminist perhaps, yet still constrained quite tightly by Victorian mores, following her husband begins as something she desires, but gradually spirals down and deeper into bitterness with the relentless failure.

The novel is layered and rich, and among other things is about the tension between the lives of the cultured (Susan is from a highly cultured and literate society, an artist and writer), and the life of action and practicality – her husband’s life as an engineer and that of his colleagues and workers. At the outset Susan believes this tension can thrive and grow, but with increasingly fewer people to share her passions, the tautness becomes unsustainable.

As well as Lyman’s voice, he also permits Susan to tell her own story in her letters to her cherished friend the increasingly famous Augusta, long married to the poet Thomas Hudson, who may have once made a husband for Susan, and who sustains her at a distance with creative contracts to draw and write. Through Lyman, the novel addresses the difficulty of writing biography, and of how that difficulty is complicated when the biographer is related to the subject. Other subjects emerge including community, unrequited love, blame and the sometimes destructiveness of expectation.

The ‘angle of repose’ is an engineering term for the angle of rest. Lyman’s name itself, may be a play on the term. Lyman doesn’t want to give in to his disability, but at the end of the novel he wonders if he himself could be a bigger man than his grandfather in being able himself to let go into repose. His grandparents never could.

There is often a debate about whether a writer can write authentically in the voice of the opposite sex, Stegner proves that he undoubtedly can.

>23 Caroline_McElwee: Caroline, nice review.

I finished it back in February. I enjoyed it. I found Lyman to be an interesting character. I enjoyed how the author slowly developed this character for the reader.

I think the whole world of literature and writing would greatly suffer if males could not write about women and women could not write about males.