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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!!

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!

n  I came to feel like the contour bird. I wanted to fly around the Sierra foothills backward, just looking. If there was no longer any sense in pretending to be interested in where I was going, I could consult where I've been. n



From my angle of repose, this book grew on me slowly, a sprawl of words initiated from a cinch slate of exposition that grew and expanded into layered lushness, much like the frontier-era American West Stegner writes about. Swollen with depth and complexity, the story of Susan and Oliver is told from the perspective of their grandson, Lyman, a fifty-eight-year-old retired historian bound to a wheelchair, unable to move his body because of bone disease. Lyman's wife has deserted him for his doctor. Studying his grandmother's letters and recreating their family history and legacy, affords Lyman a daily routine and something to look forward to each day, something to keep his mind off the pain. And Susan Ward, his grandmother, is an illuminating character. A successful artist and art lover, she finds herself in the middle of the uncivilized West with her engineer husband, Oliver, who will start and lose many jobs on his quest to becoming successful. They will fall in love, raise a family in shacks across the country, lose optimism along the way, and still maintain a 60-year marriage, despite setbacks. Years later, their grandson would trace the history of their love, life and travels through letters that his grandmother wrote to her best friend.

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

This novel, whose excerpts are taken directly from Mary Hallock Foote's real letters, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972. How befitting that the father of Stanford Writing Program writes so beautifully and profoundly of his deeply loved western center of America. As usual when I read his novels, I find a piece of myself within one of his characters. Like Virginia Woolf in Night and Day, he reminds me that feeling simpatico with a character transcends race, culture and place. In fact, transcendence of time is what this novel does well. Susan and Oliver strive for a dream that would outlive them and find itself in their legacy, in their offspring and the offsprings of those who make a living through them. They traverse the West, taking risks that not too many couples have and despite their heartbreaks and turmoil, they create a historical legacy that leaves a mark in places they've been, a legacy which through their grandson, becomes transcendent. Their love, their relationship, transcends time.

i give it two stars for the gentle, thorough, and consistently engaging prose, which drew me in despite my growing qualms about the book as i read. (although i should note that this praise doesn't hold for the final chapter, which felt like an incongruous cop-out). stegner explores the potentially fascinating intersections of several themes--manifest destiny, history, individualism, pride and gender roles, to name a few--but he does so with the painfully dated social conservatism of his narrator's voice (the book was first published in 1970). while stegner's storytelling takes a slightly more critical bent than its narrator and principal characters ever do, nonetheless the book reads a bit too much like a wistful eulogy for the good ol' US institutions of marriage, pioneers, capitalist exploitation, gentility, land removal and racism.

Angle of Repose is the Pulitzer-prize winning fictional work by Wallace Stegner awarded in 1972 that has become a contemporary classic. It was considered by Stegner to be the masterpiece of his literary career and substantial body of work. The narrator is Lyman Ward, a retired history professor afflicted with a chronic debilitating condition that has left him in a wheelchair subsequent to the amputation of one leg. His wife has left him and he is resisting his son's suggestion to put him in an assisted-living facility. It is at this point, that Lyman Ward decides to go to the home of his grandparents and research their interesting history, as they were pioneers in the burgeoning west, and perhaps find himself in the process. His grandfather Oliver was an engineer specializing in mining, canal and water projects, while his grandmother Susan was writer and artist, often having to support the family. With his grandfather's engineering projects, the family lived in remote areas in California, Colorado, Idaho, South Dakota and Mexico. It is a multi-generational saga with very complex and interesting characters giving much insight into families and relationships weaving together all of these stories. It should be noted that the fictional Susan Burling Ward is based on the life and writings of Mary Hallock Foote, a nineteenth-century writer and illustrator. This timeless classic is not to be missed.

"Remember the one who wanted to know where you'd learned so casually a technical term like 'angle of repose'? . . . But you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life. It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don't mean the rigid angle at which I rest in this chair. I wonder if you ever reached it."

"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."

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972, this book is considered by some to be Stegner’s masterpiece. It’s a great read that is largely based on the true story of a woman pioneer in the west when so many other books about this era tell the stories of men.

Layered on the frontier story is the fictional story of the man writing it who turns these pioneers into his grandparents. An older divorced man confined to a wheel chair with one leg missing, Stegner interweaves his narrator’s isolation on a western ranch and his family’s efforts to get him into some kind of assisted living. He has a local woman and her daughter help him bathe and dress, take dictation and type his story. Their family dramas provide us with at times humorous interludes to the main historical saga. The daughter is a flower child from Berkeley and our old-fogey narrator spares no words in telling us what he thinks about that generation.

The historical saga is mainly the true story of Mary Hallock Foote, child of a wealthy New York Quaker family, born in 1847. By marrying a young mining engineer headed west to make his fortune, Mary choose to leave her life of comfort and culture tied in with famous New York literary lights to go live in shacks in western towns where she was often the only educated woman for miles around. It was as if she had gone to Mars.



To keep her brain alive, she writes frequently to literary friends back east (often without seeing them for years) and we a learn a lot about her marriage, their family hardships and her financial struggles from these real letters. She’s an artist who sells her sketches of western life and short stories back east to magazines like Harper’s and Century Magazine. As her husband struggles, often her income becomes the sole support of the family.

For the 60 years of her marriage (1876-1936) she lived in New Almaden near San Jose, California; Leadville, Colorado; Deadwood, South Dakota; Boise, Idaho, Michoacán, Mexico and Grass Valley, California. It took her a long time to realize that what she thought of in her youth as an “excursion” had become a lifetime commitment to exile from her Eastern roots. Nothing went well; they always struggled financially and lost money on irrigation schemes. At one point she confides in a life-long male friend (and perhaps a lover) “There lie the most wasted years of our lives.”



Some passages I liked:

“I am impressed with how much of my grandparents’ life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. Contrary to the myth, the West was not made entirely by pioneers who had thrown everything away but an ax and a gun.”

“It is not the Nevada City I knew as a boy. Towns are like people. Old ones have character, the new ones are interchangeable. Nevada City is in the process of changing from old to new.”

“…the West was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men.”



The way Stegner used Mary Foote’s letters caused controversy among her family and among literary critics in a way that sullied Stegner’s reputation. Yes, he had permission from the family to use her letters as historical background for the story. But he published many of her previously unpublished letters verbatim, making up a good portion of the book. The letters were later published separately in a book titled A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote.

To photo: Deadwood, South Dakota from oldglorygunsmith.blogspot.com

Middle photo: Leadville, Colorado in 1904 from narrowgauge.org

Lower: Mary Hallock Foote sketched by her daughter from Wikipedia