Angle of Repose

I'm afraid I must come down solidly in the contrarian camp on this one. So many LT colleagues have loved and praised [Angle of Repose], but rarely has a fine author frustrated me more than Stegner did here. When I started reading it, I thought I was going to set it aside almost immediately. I didn't take to the narrator, Lyman Ward, who sets out to research his grandmother's life and write her biography. Nevertheless, once the story of Susan Burling Ward began, I changed my mind, hated to put the book down, couldn't wait to get back to it.

With her talent for drawing, and his practical, idealistic plans for engineering projects, Susan and her husband Oliver seemed destined to leave their mark on civilization, setting out into the show more American West in the second half of the 19th century. These sections of the novel are often brilliant, containing icy-fresh prose and damnably fine evocations of terrain, weather, landscape and sky. But when the author reverts to Lyman's story, which is as grotesque as his mutilated calcified body, I simply could not care about, nor could I see the point of his torment, in the context of the novel. Ostensibly, there were to be connections made between his situation and his grandparents' life. He had known and loved both Susan and Oliver Ward, and he set out to understand something about their blighted marriage that he apparently hoped might help him deal with his own. As far as I could see, that didn't happen, while his story added nothing to theirs, which began to feel repetitious as one scheme after another came to nothing, and the elder Wards drifted apart. Although her writing and drawing were often the family's primary source of support, neither Susan nor her husband seemed to hold them in any particular regard. The respect and admiration Susan once felt for Oliver's single-minded pursuit of a dream dwindled with his prospects. As Oliver's latest venture failed yet again, necessitating yet another long separation from Susan and their children, not even Stegner's mastery of the language and talent for description of the grandeur of the American western landscape could make me want any more of it. And I grew impatient with Susan's interminable letters to her beloved friend back home, parts of which are apparently not Stegner's invention, but actual excerpts from correspondence written by the woman who was his model for Susan, Mary Hallock Foote. Frequently, Lyman Ward inserts himself into the narrative, telling us what he knows, and what he only imagines; where he got certain details, and which ones he has had to fill in when the source material is silent. I was overcome with irritation at what I call "TMA" (too much author). The distinction between fact and fiction, narrator and author, became blurry. I'm not a fan of the modern frame for the historical story, as I have seldom seen it done without finding it contrived. Finally, I found the modern ending awkward, painful and bewildering, while the conclusion of Susan's story was abrupt and unsatisfying. It pains me to be so negative about [Angle of Repose], which I have anticipated reading for several years. Unlike many other lauded works of fiction that just didn't work for me, I don't even feel inclined to give this one another chance some day.

June, 2015 show less

Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was... I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were—inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones...plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.

When the book opens, history professor Lyman Ward has returned to his childhood home - his grandparents' house in Grass Valley, California. A bone disease has severely restricted his movement and confined him to a wheelchair, but his mind is still active. He plans to devote his time to reading his grandmother's show more papers and writing the story of their marriage. Ward's grandmother was Susan Burling Ward, an artist and writer who had followed her mining engineer husband west after their marriage. Susan was a cultured woman, and she didn't intend to spend her whole life in the “wild west”. Once her husband established himself in a career, she believed they would return to the East where she would resume her position among her cultured friends. That didn't happen. Lyman's research among his grandmother's letters, diaries, and papers reveals the hopes and disappointments of his grandparents' marriage and their shared life in the West.

As Lyman tells Susan and Oliver's story, it's easy to forget that, while they're the subject of the book that Lyman is writing, Lyman himself is the central character of this novel. The opening sentence establishes a conflict: “Now I believe they will leave me alone.” Who is "they"? Lyman's son, Rodman, for one. But who else? What do they want Lyman to do that he doesn't want to do? Lyman sets aside his own conflict to research and write about his grandparents' lives. Lyman is good at avoiding his problems, except when he's forced to by a surprise visit from his son, or by the provocative comments of his assistant, Shelly, a product of the 1960s counterculture. Every now and then Lyman has a thought or makes a connection that inserts itself into his grandparents' story, reminding readers of his presence.

This novel will likely be among my top five reads for the year. It's a book deserving of careful study and multiple readings. I'm already thinking about my next reading of this book, when I'll pay more attention to its structure than the story. show less

According to a well-known essay by William Gass, it is not a good thing for any ambitious writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, because the prize has consistently been awarded to mediocre writers, and thus brands each of its recipients with the stamp of mediocrity. There are, however, (as even Gass admits) the occasional execptions where the Pulitzer jury slipped up and gave the prize to an outstanding work. Angle of Repose is, in my opinion one of those exceptions, in fact it is a very big slip-up as it is a truly exceptional work of fiction.

The novel has a lot of reviews both on Librarything and on Goodreads, so I assume that it is somewhat popular. I suspect, however, that this popularity extends mostly to readers from show more the US only - I at least had never heard of Stegner before, and I consider myself decently informed about US fiction in the 20th century. Part of this at least might be due to the fact that Angle of Repose is essentially a Western – a Western, however, in the sense that Heaven’s Gate is a Western, i.e. more concerned about what the American West during the days of the pioneers actually looked and felt like, as opposed to contributing to (or even concerning itself with) its myths and legends. Angle of Repose, then, is for the most part a historical novel, describing the fate of Susan Ward and her husband Oliver Ward in the American West at the end of the 19th century. But it is a contemporary novel as well, because it also tells of how Lyman Ward, a retired history professor tries in the late sixties of the 20th century to piece together the history of his grandmother Susan from letters and other documents. The latter, although taking up somewhat less of the novel’s pages, is not just a framing device for the former, but both strands mingle and interweave intimately and form a single narrative from which one cannot lift one part without undoing the other.

While Angle of Repose is not a depressing book, it is a sad one – the beginning might be exuberant, in places even giddily so, but its palette grows gradually more sombre, and by the end has shaded into a deep melancholy. This novel, in other words, is an elegy, and on at least three distinct levels. On the first and most obvious one, it is an elegy for a place and a time, namely the Old West. Stegner never attempts to make them seem romantic or glamorous, but pretty much every line of the book is infused with an ache for the loss of the pioneer spirit and bemoaning the complancency and self-centredness of present day America. Of course, this might all very well be just the point of view of the narrator whose perspective is likely tinged by his own, not inconsiderable problems - chiefly, a crippling bone disease and the unfaithfulness of his wife. And the latter leads us to the novel’s second level of elegy: It also is an elegy for a way of life, namely traditional monogamous marriage. Stegner presents us with three generations of partnership in The Angle of Repose: First, the marriage of Susan and Oliver Ward which passes through many hardships, struggles and separations but lasts for sixty years until both partners die within months of each other. Second, the marriage of narrator Lyman Ward and his wife Ellen which founders at the first major crisis (the diagnosis of Lyman’s incurable disease and his wife subsequently leaving him for his surgeon). And third, the marriage between Lyman’s temporary secretary Shelly and someone called Larry Rasmussen (who we never get to see first hand) which seems not really a marriage at all and to be over before it really started. Again, there is the narrator’s not exactly impartial perspective to be considered, but there is a clear line drawn here and it is one of decline.

It is becoming clear that perspective and point of view play a large role in this novel, and this leads us to its third level of elegy: Angle of Repose is an elegy for a literary form, namely the realist novel. I don’t think there is any doubt that the book’s undertaking is basically realist – it is giving the reader a portrait of the American West, and one of unparalleled vividness: The tired clichés of people coming alive, of descriptions jumping off the pages of a book – they seem to have been invented after a reading of Angle of Repose, the writing is just so incredibly colourful and evocative. But at the same time, the novel is highly reflective about this evocation; while conjuring up the sights of the Old West, its sounds and smells, its sensations and tastes, it never lets us forget that this is merely a reconstruction, and one based on a very slim foundation of facts. Lyman Ward, the narrator who pieces Susan’s life together, makes no secret that a huge part of what he is writing are things that he extrapolated or simply made up from his grandmother’s letters and the occasional news clipping. Overall, it is a constant theme of the novel that even writing as vivid as this never can catch up to reality, and it comes to a head in the way the novel handles the climactic catastrophic event in Susan’s and Oliver’s life, namely by mostly burying it in ellipsis and leaving it to the reader to imagine what precisely might have happened. And what resolve there is for the present-day narrative thread happens in a dream, and one that explicitely references Kafka, to boot. The novel realizes its own impossibility and fittingly collapses into itself rather than that it ends.

And that is not even all, there is an additional level to it - as if not quite trusting fiction to do the job on its own, Wallace Stegner based the story of Susan Ward very closely on the real life of writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote, and even went so far as to incorporate excerpts from her letters into his own novel (sparking off a controversy which apparently has not quite simmered down even today). Thus, it requires historical documents to give the novel its authenticity, and its claim to realism rests on some ten percent of quoted letters, with the rest being so much smoke and mirrors. This of course raises the question of why one would write a novel at all, and not a work of non-fiction (of which Stegner himself wrote several) or, in this particular case, edit a selection of Mary Hallock Foote’s letters (as someone else did after the interest in her work that Angle of Repose created) – a question that the novel does not really answer, and a question that maybe is without an answer, at least for as long as one sticks to the premises of realism.

All of this might give the impression that Angle of Repose was a difficult novel, but that impression would be quite wrong – while it is a highly reflective novel, it is also an immense joy to read (or at least it was to me – skimming through some of the reviews, quite a few of which call it boring, your mileage may vary), mainly because of Stegner’s writing which raises vividness to a new level and really pushes the boundaries of how evocative prose can be. Angle of Repose is full of descriptions – they are not long, but very numerous, and you can open the book on any page at random and will invariably come across something – a piece of scenery, a perspective on a building, a glimpse of a face, the reflexion of light on water – something observed with startling precision and caught in a beautiful phrase. There is much to admire in this novel – its evocation of the American West, it’s thoughtful composition, it’s fully rounded characters which are deeply flawed as humans are but still likeable – but what really makes it stand out and had me add it to my list of favourite novels was the precision and power of its writing, that had me stumble from one wonderful description to the next until I was dizzy from delight, literally drunk on Stegner’s language. show less

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. (p. 211)

Lyman Ward is writing a family history. More specifically, it's the story of a marriage between his grandmother (Susan Burling Ward) and grandfather (Oliver Ward) who lived in the American West in the late 1800s. Day after day, Lyman pores over family records, news clippings, and letters, and show more records his thoughts on cassette tapes. Lyman lives alone, is out of touch with his family, and severely disabled due to a bone disease. He gets around in a wheelchair, and uses only a few rooms of his house. Every evening a neighbor woman stops in to check on Lyman and give him his bath, and they have a nightcap together. The story of Susan and Oliver Ward begins around 1870, when Susan was a budding artist in New York. She moves in artsy social circles, and spends nearly every minute with a very dear friend, Augusta. When Augusta decides to marry Susan sees their relationship beginning to change, and she sets her sights on Oliver, a mining engineer. While they agree to marry, the union is put off for several years while Oliver establishes his career and readies a home for himself and Susan.

When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother. So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. (p. 277)
In moving west, Susan sacrificed all she knew and held dear. Accustomed to moving in cultured, literate circles, she initially threw herself into mining camp life with gusto. But she brought her art supplies with her, and continued to draw. Augusta's husband Thomas, now a successful magazine editor, commissioned several pieces and relied on Susan for her interesting portraits of life in the far-off west. Susan also enjoyed evenings by the fire with two of Oliver's colleagues, Frank Sargent and Ian Price. In them she found others who loved literature and stimulating conversation; it fed her soul.

I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid .... Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality. (p. 382)
Oliver was a successful engineer, rewarded for his hard work through promotions and special projects. He was a bit of a dreamer, envisioning possibilities and developing new materials and methods in his own time. He was usually a bit ahead of the curve, with ideas not quite ready for prime time. And while money was often tight, Oliver refused to allow Susan's earnings to be used to support the family. Oliver and Susan had a family, and moved several times for Oliver's work. Their son Ollie (Lyman's father) was often sent to stay with relatives in New York, because the mining camps were deemed unsuitable.

Through his research, Lyman carefully pieces together the story of Oliver and Susan's marriage, reconstructing the series of events which brought their relationship to the "angle of repose" (the angle at which soil settles after being dumped). Susan loved Oliver and had faith in his abilities, but was often disappointed with the actual results. She wanted so badly for her children to grow up refined and "Eastern," and became increasingly frustrated with their living conditions and the people she encountered day-to-day. Susan and Oliver's fortunes, and their hopes for the future, ebb and flow over the years. As Lyman tells Susan and Oliver's story, he tries to come to terms with his own failed marriage and the rapidly changing world around him.

I absolutely loved this book. The prose captured me instantly, and I became completely wrapped up both in Lyman's California of 1970, and the dusty Victorian mining camps. I identified strongly with Susan: her feelings of isolation, her persistence in keeping her artistic talents fresh, her devotion to her family, her longing for intellectual stimulation. And my heart went out to Lyman, with his own isolation and struggles with a failing body. These characters were so real to me; during the week it took me to read this book, I thought about them all the time. Towards the end, I wanted to prolong the relationship -- instead of rushing to finish, I read the last 50 pages very slowly, setting the book aside to make it last. This will undoubtedly make my "Top 10" list for the year. show less

The term ‘angle of repose’ refers to the slope at which an object ceases to roll. Stegner uses the term in his deeply layered, Pulitzer Prize winning novel to describe his narrator’s journey for understanding.

Lyman Ward is broken, having suffered an amputation and a debilitating disease that has left him largely bound to a wheelchair. But the fracture in his soul is deeper still. His condition has left him unable to work, his wife has left him, and his emotionally detached son wants to put him in a home. In defiance, Lyman takes up residence in his grandparent’s old home in the Northern California hills, immersing himself in the writings and drawings of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward. Lyman begins writing her biography, show more detailing how she, a product of an educated, Victorian household, falls in love with Oliver Ward, a rugged dreamer and adventurer. The couple’s struggle to fit into each other’s lives in the shadow of an untamed land offer Lyman a better understanding of his own struggles.

Stegner is a true voice of the West. The poetry of his description in everything, from the arid landscapes to the lush hill country, is unparalleled. Every tiny detail is laid out, the delicacy of every bloom and the melody of every native bird. And while that might seem tiring, it is anything but. Stegner’s prose is easy to lose yourself in, and the book is easily one of the most complete narratives of any I’ve read. This is the kind of book that you take your time with, and don’t notice you’re doing it. Most criticisms look to Stegner’s source material, Mary Halloock Foote’s writings published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, but Stegner’s personal understanding and love for the West and its rugged people is clear in every line.

[Angle of Repose]’s story matches Stegner’s deft prose, with multiple layers to pick at, no matter how deep you want to bite. At once, the book is an adventure tale, a character study of sacrifice and compromise, and a philosophical exploration of time and change and human need.

Bottom Line: This is that rare book that can make you back up to read a paragraph or a page for the beautiful language that describes the background setting, and then, on the next page, make you reach for pen and pad to jot down a carefully constructed, if rarely uttered, truth.

A favorite for the year and a new edition to the All Time Favorites!

5 bones show less

Staggering. Riveting. Perceptive. Penetrating. Wallace Stegner knows how to get inside a marriage and pull at it and prod at it, until it settles down into what it cannot help becoming and finds its angle of repose. This story is the saddest kind of story possible, because it is about the loss of opportunity, the loss of happiness, and the loss of what might have been. It wrenches and tears and tatters the reader. I was gasping from the injustice, the cross-purposes, the lack of communication and the sorrow of characters wanting the wrong things.

Stegner’s prose is poetry. His descriptions are revealing in a way that cuts to the heart of both his external and his internal subject matter. He grabbed me by the throat early on and I was show more hooked in almost the first paragraph:

I believe in time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.

As he plumbs the life of his grandparents, Lyman Ward plumbs the depths of what it is to live connected and disconnected from those around us. What it is to love a life, a friend, a man or woman, a place, a child and an idea; and what it is to betray the trust of others or your own needs and desires. This book is packed with combustible materials, that spark and hiss and finally fly apart in a deafening explosion of emotional release.

Each of the main characters is fleshy and real. Lyman, who might initially seem pitiable in his handicapped condition, proves to be strong and intelligent. Susan and Oliver are, if anything, too strong and independent for their own good. They are the sterner stuff that the West was forged from, but they maintain their sensibilities and weaknesses--the flaws that make them all too human.

I have been married for 35 years to a man I both love and respect. At times it has been amazingly easy to be married, at times it has been equally difficult, and there have been moments of “what if” and “I might have” for both of us. It is unrealistic to think that any one person can or should live his life in a measured sync with you. Marriage is work, with compromise and obstacles, and if you throw in the difficulties of life in the late 1800s and settling the West, understandably challenging. If you have ever packed up and left your home for parts unknown (and I have), you can recognize how well Stegner understands the pain of lost family, lost worlds and lost dreams.

When reviewing a book like this one, I have almost uncontrollable desires to “talk” about it. I want to delve into the specifics, reflect on all the lessons to be learned, revel and roll in the astute revelations that the author has shared. At the same time, I want to allow others to read and enjoy it as I have without a single spoiler to be had anywhere. So, I will not say anything more about what this book is “about”, except to say it is about us, whomever we are, because it is about what it is to be human and vulnerable and to succeed and to fail and to endure.

I hope everyone reads it and enjoys it as I have. I am so glad to have come to Wallace Stegner at last and feel a bit put out that he has been waiting for me for over forty years. Thank you, Mr. Stegner for your gift and forgive me for being so late in accepting it. show less

Story was great, beautiful writing (slightly overwritten), portrait of a marriage told by a grandson via his grandmother's letters to a lifelong friend. It won the Pulitzer, I think it's a wonderful book when he wasn't overwriting, the dialogue was perfect. Recommend with a note to be patient.