Please see my addendum at the bottom of this review.

*

Such a complex (though readable) novel with so many themes that it's hard to know where to start. The wheelchair-bound narrator tells us this is a story of a marriage (that of his grandparents whom he knew until their deaths at advanced ages), but it's also the story of his wondering at his own (failed) marriage and why his wife left him when she did. Is he escaping into his grandmother's life to escape his own, or is he doing so in order to figure out his own life? The path to his insights is long (as it should be), but not long-winded (despite the one time I thought it was getting to be so).

Along the way to a satisfying ending, we get to live the amazing story of the grandmother*, a well-drawn character we empathize with. Though we may not always agree with her, we understand her. Through her Eastern (U.S.) eyes, we see the new West of the U.S. in its beauty and its harshness (sometimes I get impatient with descriptions of scenery, etc., but never here -- the writing is always deft), a world she leaves at times but can't help returning to.

*
June 27, 2022 addendum: After reading this article https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-..., I'm reassessing that what I loved in the novel mostly belonged to Mary Hallock Foote and that I should read the work of another erased woman.

Interesting sad family story. Almost, but not quite, ruined by the many superfluous, repetitive and too long descriptions of the landscape(s). I almost did not finish it but the second half is better than the first, and, besides, I wanted to know how the story ended.

Fin dalle primissime pagine è subito chiaro che Angolo di riposo non è un libro comune. La scrittura è splendida, il linguaggio ricco e la voce del narratore conquista e intrattiene accompagnando il lettore dentro il romanzo nel romanzo fin dall'inizio.
Lyman Ward è l'io narrante, un uomo quasi sessantenne affetto da paralisi causata da una non ben precisata malattia ossea che gli ha provocato l'amputazione di una gamba. Lucidamente e senza autocommiserazione Lyman guarda al proprio corpo che piano piano va disintegrandosi mentre lavora alle carte ritrovate nella casa di famiglia in cui vive e che appartengono alla nonna Susan Burling Ward. Attraverso l'analisi della fitta corrispondenza della nonna con l'amica Augusta, ripercorriamo con Lyman le vicende di Susan e Oliver: il loro innamoramento, la storia del loro matrimonio e delle peregrinazioni nelle selvagge terre del West durante gli anni della corsa all'oro. La narrazione procede senza fretta e Lyman non lascia mai intendere come andrà a finire la storia della loro unione, che però, nonostante l'ostinazione con cui i nonni cercano di salvarla, piano piano va sgretolandosi come il corpo del suo narratore.
Due storie, quella di Lyman e dei suoi nonni, che si intrecciano attraverso riferimenti storici estremamente accurati e uno stile narrativo coinvolgente, fino al raggiungimento di quell'angolo di riposo che dà il titolo al romanzo stesso.

Amazed at the depth and breadth of the writing and plotting. The biographer within the story “unwittingly” tells as much of himself as his subjects (his grandparents), and the reader cares as much about discovering the arc of his life as we do of theirs.

I love the reminder of the kind of big dreams that made America great—big infrastructure projects such as the transcontinental railway and the damming of rivers to bring water to arid but fertile lands.

Stegner is a great writer I did not know of.

I thought I was going to hate this book, and for the first few chapters I did. I had a hard time with the present-day sections of the book. Even right after I finished the book, I wasn't quite sure how much I liked it.

In the weeks after I read the book I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Really, I think that Stegner gives us the most accurate and thought-provoking portrayal of the modern woman that I have seen out of a male writer.

The main character in this book is essentially a working mother (which obviously was very uncommon at the time) who not only is expected to fulfill the traditional responsibilities of motherhood, but who also financially supports her family for a great deal of her life. She has difficulty striking a balance between her own needs and the needs of her family. But perhaps more importantly, she spends her life torn between the life and family she has (and arguably loves) and having a life and family that her friends will admire. I would argue that she (and those around her) would be a lot more happy if she thought less about what everyone thought of her and lived the life that she wanted to live.

I guess that despite this character's rather significant flaws, I felt that I identified a lot with her struggles.

If I had to distill the 555 densely-worded pages of this novel down to a couple of sentences, it might be these, found on p. 390 of my hardback edition: “Have you ever built a house with your own hands, out of the materials that Nature left lying around? Everyone should have that experience once. It is the most satisfying experience I know”.

The particular genius of this book is that, while long, it covers the better part of fifty years, and so much more is left out than written in. These empty spaces allow the reader to fill them in however he or she pleases. Want to make a case that Christian values are what holds a marriage together? The text will accommodate that view. Or talk about price paid by honest workers while greedy capitalists reaped unearned rewards and destroyed the landscape in the process? That’s in here too. Or what about: Men are unfeeling, insensitive bastards that oppress and destroy women more from thoughtlessness than evil intent? Good women stick by their husbands even in the toughest of times? Plenty of evidence in here to support those views. No wonder so many people love this book – while events are precisely described, how those events should be interpreted is largely left to the reader.

Kinda like real life.

My take: the dominant theme was the value and cost of creating art. The protagonist Susan Ward, known primarily from the letters she wrote to her salon-set friends back East, spent her life torn between the artistic life she had known in New York City and her role as wife, mother, head of household in the far less accommodating environs of the North American West. She continued producing art as events allowed, and in many cases her accomplishments were enhanced by the settings she found herself in. Literary NYC in the 1880’s had no shortage of artists rendering skaters in Central Park, passing celebrities and horse-drawn carriages on Fifth Avenue. Images from inside a mercury mine, of indigenous peasant markets in Mexico or of men exhausted from laboring two miles above sea level were harder to come by. The tension between wanting to live the artistic live in the big city vs. realizing her value as an artist in tough country was the driving force of this book, in my opinion.

Her husband Oliver was the engine that drove this tension; his job as a mining engineer meant that he had no choice but to live out west, and since she permitted herself no choice but to live with him, the dynamic was established.

Oliver was driven by practical accomplishments – finding seams of ore, inventing improvements to pumps, figuring out irrigation schemes – not to mention taking care of all the little things that living in the remote countryside requires, such as improvising cribs, sealing roof leaks and so forth. Financially, however, Susan’s art often as not kept them afloat.

Returning to my original quote about building the house together, we see their strengths merge in this instance – her creative urges meeting his love of practical accomplishment. If the book has anything to say about marriage, it is this – revel in each others’ strengths; competition is destructive. Tomorrow, after thinking it over, I may fill the blank spaces a different way and decide the book is really saying something completely different.

I loved Stegner’s respect for landscape and nature in this book. He obviously had deep feelings for the principals in his story. Personally, though, I cannot really fall in love with fictional characters that never exhibit the slightest trace of humor. The story of Oliver and Susan Ward had its sad moments, as all lives do; but in another author’s hands they might had a better sense of the absurd, been funnier and more relatable.

For bonus reads, the wonderful A Visit to Don Otavio closely mirrored the Wards' experience in Morelia, Mexico; Rising From the Plains is a riveting nonfictional account of another highly-educated Ivy League woman building a life out west; and finally 'Angle,' while fictional, draws heavily from the real letters gathered in  A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.

Have you ever had your hands on a book that you just couldn't leave alone? A book that you had to have with you at all times, reading it at the dinner table, sneaking peeks at it during work hours? Well, this isn't that book. It took me weeks to read this sucker. It really slowed down my reading pace...at least at first.

Stegner can definitely write a good story, and it did not escape my notice that this tale is richly detailed. Stegner knows the West, the stock, the people, the history, and all the associated equipment, and he knows how to describe it. The only thing I couldn't figure out was why he was telling this story in which so little seems to happen...the thoughts of a woman married to a man she eventually comes to scorn, and her haughty observations on the west and its occupants...why not turn your talents to something a little more engaging? It occurred to me that it might be a fairly interesting read if Susan Ward had actually existed, and Stegner happened to be her biographer, but to produce a work of fiction on such mundane topics seemed to be a waste of Stegner's genius. (Subsequent research revealed that Stegner actually had based his story on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, to the point where he actually copied passages.)

Stegner tells a double tale here, with the story of Susan Ward entwined with that of her grandson, an embittered and abandoned amputee who is researching a biography of his grandmother. I found it to be a slow starter, but at the halfway point I actually started to give a damn about the characters and was reading at a gallop by the time I finished. It's a tale of betrayal and abandonment and repressed Victorian desires. It was my first Stegner, but I will probably give him another try later on.

Lyman Ward, a retired historian confined to a wheelchair chronicles the life of his beloved grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, who was an accomplished writer and illustrator. Part of the story is about Lyman Ward's own situation, which includes an estranged wife and a cloddish adult son who is worried about his sick father living almost on his own in a retired place. However, most of the book is about his grandmother, a woman who found herself pioneer of the western United States during the 1870s and 1880s with absolutely no wish to be so.

Susan Ward was raised as a Quaker in New York. She married a mining engineer, Oliver Ward, whose profession required him (and his family) to continuously move to rugged and unsettled parts of the West. The novel, then, is about Susan Ward's deracination from the cultured East to the uncivilized West. With Lyman as the narrator, we are told the story of his grandparents, their travels and hardships through the West from California to Colorado to Mexico to Idaho, attempting to establish themselves, having and raising children in precarious circumstances, the pull of wildness and the push of civilization, all the while attempting to find their "angle of repose".

ANGLE OF REPOSE is based on the story of a real person: Susan Burling Ward is the fictional equivalent of Mary Hallock Foote. Foote's writing was a longtime fascination for Stegner and there has been a bit of controversy surrounding how Foote's letters were used in the novel. The Penguin edition of this explains all this in great detail.

Published in 1971, ANGLE OF REPOSE is a novel about the American West at the end of the 19th century. It is an elegy for the loss of the pioneer spirit in complacent and selfish present day America. It is also about a traditional marriage and the choices people make for love and for security and the courage, loyalty and hope required to make the marriage work. Stegner explores the hardships and frustrations and how to maintain a sense of self and independence in spite of difficulties. This sad book is an absorbing gem which won the Pulitzer Prize.

So glad it was chosen for our bookclub. Loved it as much as I did when I first read it over 20 years ago -- one of those books that reminds me of why I love reading.

n  "A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out."n

How can someone fall in love with a man's words as they flow effortlessly on paper, creating an atmosphere of dust, angst and raw emotion, yet feel like there's a superfluity of thoughts, making you want to throw a fit and toss the book on the ground? Stegner did this to me with the lack of editing in 'Angle of Repose'; it made me want to throw the book from utter boredom at times, but also engage myself solely with his prose, at others. The characters themselves were rich with just about every emotion you can think of and overall, the book was unpredictable, which I tend to enjoy more than having 'I know what's going to happen!' rolling through my mind so I can't focus entirely on what's happening.

I'm giving this a 3.5. Due to my issues above, it's hard for me to give it a 4. I did enjoy this more than not, but it'll be awhile before I try Stegner once again.

Excellent. This is a huge book and one I read very slowly to take in all the vivid imagery. I felt like I was right there as the characters moved from place to place. The author created very unique characters and their lives full of hope, joy, adversity and disappointment. The title of the book is spot on. Even though it took me a long time to get through it, I hate to leave it. So enjoyable in that kind of gentle meandering way.

DNF @ 125 pgs. // I might revisit this again in the future, but I don't want to start my year's reading off by really pushing myself on a book I can't get into. I thought the first 50-100 pages or so were just a bit slow because of the set-up, but it's not gripping me at all and I can confidently DNF this.