Angle of Repose by wallace stegner

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I read this book based largely on the Goodreads reviews. Maybe I'm not as smart as other reviewers, or maybe other reviewers give it high praise because it was a Pulitzer Prize winner and they didn't want to look dumb (something to which I have no aversion), or maybe this was just a fluke, but I didn't think this book was worth reading. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I started the book about 4 or 5 times, and when I finally did slog through it, it was in 5 and 10 page increments. I just couldn't get rolling with it. My bottom-line, four word review is: This book is boring.

Not to say that it didn't have good points. There were two real strengths, in my opinion. (1) As others have pointed out, Stegner has an extraordinary way with words. His descriptive prose is remarkable. It flows like poetry from line to line to line, and definitely sets a scene. (2) This is the only Pulitzer Prize winning book that I have read that contains the phrase, "I felt a hot erection rising from my mutilated lap." Ah, memories of seventh grade algebra.

But those don't make up for the bad. NOTHING HAPPENS. Maybe I should put a spoiler alert there (or here), but nothing happens. The book has no plot. They go from place to place to place. He's unsuccessful. She is a pouting snob. They wait for their break. They move. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Don't get me wrong, I can enjoy books about relationships and internal strife and family struggles. I don't need hermaphrodite crack dealers racing jet skis through burning buildings while cheating on their KGB spy/stripper girlfriends or anything. But I do need some plot.

Also, the main character, the narrator's grandmother, is one of the more annoying characters that I have ever come across. I spent the majority of the book hoping that she'd step in front of a train. Alas, she doesn't. It took me 550 arduous pages to learn this.

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Enal

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

4.5 stars.

I was trying to think of a quote from this book which might sum it up best. I think I've narrowed it down to this:

I suppose in a way we deserve the people we marry.(p. 204)

Now, I'm just trying to figure if I agree with that statement and to what extent.

There were so many beautiful (achingly so) sections in this book, I lamented the fact that it wasn't mine to highlight and mark up (yes, library, I was good to your book).
To spare you, I will limit myself to three:

n Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.n

n It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood.n

n I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually--and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure.n

A powerfully quiet book about the realities of marriage, work, unrealized hopes and dreams, unmet expectations, disappointments and joys-- and how we, ultimately, cope with all of them. What we will choose to do, how we will respond.

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Universalist

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

There are few authors that have Stegner's skill with words. For this alone, I love his work. He has created realistic and complex characters in this look at marriage, the settling of the west, and even some thoughts about the present day.
I subtract one star because there are some slow (boring) spots that I had to plow through; a little editing would have made this a 5 star book.

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NotReshi

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

n  ”I am on my grandparents’ side. 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.”n

n  ”I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back … that is the only direction we can learn from.”n

While confined to a wheelchair, Lyman Ward begins to read through his grandmother’s papers, her stories, old letters, and their story. A story that tells of the history of the west, when it was still a frontier to be settled, and of her struggles from being uprooted from the only home she ever knew, in the east, leaving behind not only family and friends, but comfort and the well-established civility of her life for a life devoid of certainty, comfort and culture.

n  ”Was the quiet I always felt in you really repose? I wish I thought so. It is one of the questions I want the papers to answer.”n

n  ”But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.”n

Lyman’s grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, and grandfather, Oliver Ward, take us through the changes they encounter, while periodically returning to Lyman’s thoughts, his reflections on his days in Grass Valley while researching this story, his thoughts on the changing of America, his thoughts on the story of his grandparents, his thoughts on the people in his day-to-day encounters. And always returning to his grandmother’s thoughts, trying to burrow his way into her feelings beyond the words she left behind.

n  ”Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished.”n

Regrets, unspoken or unwritten as they may be, filter through, but for most of these years Susan at least tries to rise to the challenge presented by each camp they find themselves residing in with Oliver, a mining engineer. From California to Colorado, and then to Mexico, followed by Idaho, and then back. During those years, they went from newly married to having their first child, and then more children.

A glance behind the scenes of four generations of one family, of life on the western frontier, an insightful, objectively penetrating look at a marriage, Stegner mining it for gems that invariably expose dirt, destruction and what remains.

n  ”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.”n

I added this book to my list of Want-to-Reads back at the beginning of February 2016, after reading Stegner’s “Crossing to Safety” in 2014, and debating which Stegner novel to add, so sure that I’d already read his best. Which is his best out of even just these two? Both are magnificent.

Highly Recommended

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_Sirius_

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

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 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.

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therealnagora

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Es mi segunda novela de Wallace Stegner, y comienzo ya a lamentar que su obra este tan pobremente traducida al español. Ángulo de reposo es un libro de gran alcance narrativo, histórico y humano. Un viaje maravilloso a través del oeste americano a lo largo de casi un siglo. Pero lo mas importante, un viaje al interior de nosotros mismos, a los lugares más oscuros y inexplorados del alma humana.

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WaltzIT

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

The next review is for Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. This was our latest book club read for the month of February. It is a beautifully written, eloquent, descriptive book. It has been highly, highly recommended to me by several people...readers who I respect. Most of them have said that it was the best book they have ever read. Wow! That is saying a lot. This book is a very long and epic tale of a husband and wife who move to the west in the late 1800's to settle. This was good news to me. I love long, fat, epic, historical fiction...and it was. It is told through the research of the this couple's grandson, Lyman Ward, a historian, who is now in his fifties and handicapped. He begins to research his grandmother's life for a book he is writing. A lot of the story is told through letters that were sent between his grandmother, Susan, and her best friend, Augusta. It is a story of the marriage of Susan and Oliver and the hardships, joys, and disappointments they experienced with a backdrop of the scenic west...California, Mexico, Colorado, and Idaho.

This is a Pulitzer Prize winning book. The writing is beyond beautiful. Stegner reminds me a bit of Steinbeck. I really liked this book...was it the best book I have ever read? No. But it was certainly one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. I love the way the story unfolds...letters, documents, flipping time periods (the late 1800's and the 1970's). Stegner doesn't sugar coat the characters. They aren't larger than life. They are human and not always sympathetic. I found myself disliking Lyman, Susan, and Oliver at different times thorough out the book but I grew to care about each of them.

I rate this as Excellent for the writing alone. I was a bit disappointed with the ending. I felt like I had invested a lot and was some what let down and wanted to know more but that would've added another 500 pages to the book!!

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snowwolf9000

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner is a genius! His writings are timeless. His character development is superb. Stegner’s wonderful writing makes these characters come alive. Characters I soon relate to, grow to love and miss terribly when I close the last chapter. I carry many of the folks I’ve gotten to know through Stegner’s writing, long after the story has been told.

“Lyman Ward is an ill and wheelchair-bound retired history professor (aged 58). Recently divorced by his wife, he struggles to find his way through the turns his life has taken. Determined to write a biography of his beloved and famous artist/author grandmother, he moves into his grandparent’s long-empty home in Grass Valley, California. The year is 1970”.

Was it all a dream??? I don’t know!

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Angle of Repose

wallace stegner jackson j. benson

This edition

Lyman Ward

Susan Burling Ward

Oliver Ward

Rodman Ward

Frank Sargent

Ada Topham

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About the author

wallace stegner

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