I have read this once before. I love Stegner's writing, yet I had forgotten just how depressing this story is ... the brokenness of relationships is a heavy weight, if only in fiction.

Crossing to Safety remains my favorite Stegner.

Here is the definition of angle of repose: "the maximum slope, measured in degrees from the horizontal, at which loose solid material will remain in place without sliding." It is an engineering term and determines all sorts of things in construction, from how deep to dig a ditch to how high your slag pile can grow and still maintain its shape.

But in this novel, Stegner applies the term to people as well. How much stress can the people of this novel endure before they pass their angle of repose and fall apart at the seams? And if that should happen, what happens next...how does one keep going? Our narrator Lyman Ward, a former history professor who is now wheelchair bound and nearly immobile due to bone disease, intends to write a book about his grandmother Susan Ward,describing her life as the wife of a mining engineer in the late 1800's.

But since Lyman is a main character as well as our narrator, we shift perspective sometimes even in mid-chapter from Grandmother to grandson. This could have been jarring, but I had more of a feeling that Lyman and I were writing Grandmother's life together, and every time I felt the need for a breather, for a bit of thinking about what was happening to her at that point, there was the modern world again, with Lyman
wondering about the very things I was, or about something that was happening then in his own not entirely stress-free life.

We live with Grandmother through the various phases of her life, from California to Colorado to Mexico to Idaho and beyond, She was an artist and author, a woman who had to bear the responsibility of providing for her family when her husband's projects did not go as smoothly as they should have. In her day this would have been much harder to deal with than in our times, I think. In a way she was never completely at ease with
her husband and the life they led because of his profession. If she had been 100% with him from the beginning, would the end result have been any different?

Lyman at one point decides how the book he thought would be a history of The West through his grandmother's eyes had turned into a history of a marriage. What was it that made his grandparents seem so unhappy? What had happened all those years ago that affected their angle of repose? How were they able to re-establish it....or did they ever accomplish that difficult engineering feat?

Stegner's use of words is lovely. This is my favorite line, coming much later in the book than I remember from the last time I read it. Susan is alone at their house in Idaho, the family has gone to town to the July 4th celebrations, she can see the fireworks from her patio, and later in a loaded silence this happens: “A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone.” That line stayed with me from the first time I read this Pulitzer prize-winning novel, and touches me so deeply I can barely explain why even to myself.

This book started out great, but quickly got repetitive for me. Learning on Wikipedia that Stegner derived (with permission!) large parts of it from real letters published the next year certainly took winds out of my sails. Several critics have mentioned that Stegner's version of Mary Hallock Foote diverges considerably from the original - a necessity for the author trying to fit his story to her narrative. That being said, it is impossible not to recognize the talent behind the writing and the clever weaving of the story of the amputee grandson writing about the tribulations of his grandparents while also telling one story of how the West was americanized. My favorite bits are probably the dialogs between Susan and Oliver, but I found there was an annoying sucking sound as their lives spun like broken records with only slight variations as Oliver drifted from broken promise to broken dream over and over again. Both the author and the narrator are fairly conservative with respect to history and although capable of tenderness, both are afflicted with a deprecating view of women which also hampered my enjoyment. Perhaps you will say that Roth or Updike are even more deprecating to which I will answer: they don't pretend to be sort of hip old farts like the narrator in this book feigning a modern attitude, but in a sort of condescending way in his dialogues with Shelley while in fact being quite reactionary. And, yes, I will read Crossing to Safety to give Stegner a second chance!

An interesting read nonetheless.

“Is there gas in the car?”
“Yes, there’s gas in the car.”
-Steely Dan (to the point)

I think the world is turning each of us into lawyers, the one group of people I execrate.

Angle of Repose is a book with an amazing amount of words. Pages and pages brimming with the lexicon. However, most of these words are incredibly relevant and undeniably necessary in describing, through his eyes, what the writer wants to convey to the reader. His ear for dialogue, community, male/female genres and his knack for precise language is beyond average. It soars.

I have close to zero interest in history, engineering, mining or the old cowboy west, especially in a twenty-thousand-page novel consisting of forty billion words. It intrigues me about as much as hemlines and drapery. And yet I read it.

And I liked it.

His conjecture, “Acceptance is the main component of Wisdom,” is disputable but somewhat valid to me.

And his description of life in the late 1800’s American west must have entailed extensive research. Just reading about the mundane chores of everyday life was fascinating. As prosaic as our lives are now but painted artfully by a master’s pen. Stegner presents a clear picture, so much so, that you can feel, touch, and smell (could be my running shorts) whatever he is speaking about.

How different and how difficult it would be for any one of us to exist somewhat successfully in those days.

Anyway, most of y’all have read this novel.

It’s a good one. Just short of the five stars for me but I make allowances for effort.

Steinbeck needs not to worry but this particular writer is great.

it doesn't surprise that this book won the pulitzer prize. it's an ambitious novel, cleverly constructed, effectively blending life and fiction, containing some beautiful sentences.

this is the story of lyman ward, a historian who has gone into retirement, afflicted by a bone disease that has resulted in the amputation of his right leg, living alone in the house that was his grandparents, and it is also about his grandmother, susan burling ward, an artist and writer, who moved from the east with her engineer husband, oliver, to the western frontier. we are shunted back and forth in time, from lyman in his present (1970), to the depiction of susan's life in a biography he is creating about her, and also to her letters to her first love and best friend, augusta (drake) hudson.

it behooves me to acknowledge that stegner did not write the wonderful letters between susan and augusta. with names and other personal details changed, these are in fact real letters written to helen (dekay) gilder, the source material for the novel he alludes to in the acknowledgement at the beginning, some of which were published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote. between the disclaimer and how i felt when reading these letters, i thought they didn't seem his, and on doing a quick web search discovered the existence of mrs. foote. The basic details seem to be these: stegner asked for permission to use the letters, was given permission by family members, except that one planned to publish the letters in their entirety, and so did not want him to publicly acknowledge them. the disclaimer at the beginning of the novel was hit upon, but people later said he was wrong to use them wholesale without proper credit, and that, furthermore, he had defamed the character of mrs. foote when his fictionalization diverged from her true life. as far at that goes, i can see no difficulty with the second point: he quite plainly states he is using this life as a model for his story, that is not a "family history". as to the first? well, that one's a little tougher. ideally he would have recreated the letters, or referenced them but it doesn't appear to me that this was done maliciously, but only to accede to the wishes of the heirs. as it stands, i think their use only underscores the feat of engineering that is this novel's construction, as they serve as the backbone to the two imagined tales refracted from them to the stories of lyman and his grandmother.

the three narrative ropes are braided together masterfully and the echoes of the grandmother he depicts are often found in his perspective of his own time. lyman sees no joy in his future and is determined to cast his eyes back to the past, to the story of his grandparents, to blot out his own life. when he returns us to his grandparents' story, each time i am grateful to be away from him, from his pain and frustration, because despite the anxieties in the life of susan and oliver, these accounts are expansive, gorgeous at times, describing the places and adventures and misadventures of their search for a place where both of them can find balance, that angle of repose that gives the book its title.

why only three stars? admittedly, there is a lot to admire in this book but as beautifully constructed as it is, i felt removed from the characters. i do not say that they weren't well drawn, or that i didn't like any of them (oliver ward is the best of these people -- and it's clear that stegner wants you to know it) but i felt they kept me out, and that lyman (and stegner's) admiration for the stoic, and emotionally distant kept me from fully embracing them. in that respect, i feel it is a very WASP-y novel, and these books always seem to leave me on the outside looking in.

things that really irritated me:

- lyman's repeated use of the german phrase "ohne bustenhalter" when talking about shelley, the daughter of his caregiver ada, and short-term secretary. i get it: lyman's inhibited sexuality clashes with the free-wheeling era in which he currently lives, and it's probably easier for him to fixate on a woman's braless breasts in another language. maybe i am echoing shelley's part in questioning the biography he is writing for its sexual inhibition as i chafe against this phrase. maybe stegner wants to piss me off with this, i don't know.

- the ending of lyman's story. i do not find fault with the final paragraph, but the events immediately preceding it. what serves as the climax seems an impatient clutching of loose ends fashioned into a rough knot. i know the novel is long but this seemed like a cop out.

what i really liked best about this book were all the questions i ended up having; there is so much to consider in the fact of it, the overlap, the deconstruction of its fiction and realism: how the letters drove the book in fiction and in life; how shelley questions lyman's book as it unfolds inside the book i was reading; how much of any life has its truth revealed to anyone outside of that person's private thoughts. while i resist the ending, i accept the sum of its parts, and the reflection of the writer's craft that is perhaps its greatest revelation.

Wallace Stegner was once quoted as saying " It’s perfectly clear that if every writer is born to write one story, that’s my story", this was referring to the tour-de-force novel that is 'Angle of Repose' which just about ticks all the boxes in terms of literary perfection, containing masterful writing of great prose and vision, an epic, engrossing and mature story charting four generations of an american family trying to carve a piece of history into the western frontier, and richly detailed characters that take us on a journey that truly stands the test of time. Retired historian Lyman Ward charts the remarkable story of his grandparents and in particular his grandmother Susan Burling Ward, confined to a wheelchair in their old home he goes through many a letter starting from the latter stages of the ninetieth century regarding their first encounter, marriage, children, friends and work colleagues, and long travels in search of work opportunities for Lyman's grandfather Oliver Ward who is trying and often failing to tap into the development of mining. Having been bought up east in the New York area where civilization is settled and life grand, Susan would go on to make the ultimate sacrifice regarding her own aspirations and leaving behind her family and very close friend Augusta to travel far west with her husband who has a clear vision for their future. With Susan a refined and well educated young lady and Oliver an overly enthusiastic adventurer type who is always humbled in the presence of his wife they head out west in search of the all-american dream.

What is striking in the early stages is the experience of seeing the west through eastern eyes where Susan is horrified at the lack of any culture and order who discovers a land of dirt, dust and immense heat that make up a hostile and unforgiving place to try and settle where the terrain is a character in it's own right (this Stegner does impeccably) , eventually she does start to appreciate the raw and rugged beauty of her surroundings but with Oliver gone most of the time Susan is often left on her own and throughout their married life she often defines herself with life back east. Once settled in a home it's not long before they are on the move again due to financial problems and Oliver would take up a post elsewhere but with one of three children they would go on to have the emotional strain for Susan is beginning to impact hard, with the trend of traveling often and leaving son Ollie back east she is clearly starting to question her love, but love is a powerful thing and does keep them together through thick and thin, well at least for sometime to come. Oliver I think never really realized that his wife has a life of her own as well, with his worthiness as husband and provider being enough to keep the family in check where he just does what he thinks best to secure a bright future for them, but money issues, uncertainty and suspicions about Susan's love for him, troubles are never far away.

Had Susan's story been just the main focal point then there is every chance this could have turned out to be a flat epic melodrama but thankfully this is not the case as Lyman Ward who is our narrator is every bit as important to the overall structure with the perspective of his own self that helps to broaden the novels scope. It's going over his grandmother's life that starts him to bring his own into the equation, with a grown son who he may not see often, an ex-wife who he definitely does not want to see and little in the way of friends apart from those who help him around the house he is quite a lonely person where it seems looking into the past is his only way to find solace. Stegner is technically brilliant here where swinging back and forward in time helps keep things from getting boring as at near six hundred pages I can't think of a single moment that became an issue. Recognizing america's change both people and the land is what is what lies at it's core, mixing the culture east with the barren west, family history both young and old, the power of reality and the frailties of big dreams, this is one epic family saga that vastly exceeded my expectations and ranks as one of the grandest novels I will ever read.

Little did I expect that the taming of the Wild West could be so intricately reflected in the ongoing evolution of a marriage, with all its tensions, compromises and sporadic moments of exultation; a marriage that seemed doomed to failure from the start.

Lyman Ward, retired historian and scholar, now prostrated in a wheelchair, sets his mind to write the story of his grandparents and their generation, of the many young adventurers who embarked on a non-return trip to the inhospitable Western lands to lay down the foundations of a future civilization in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The evocative, fast-paced storytelling takes the reader into virgin landscapes across the American border, from Idaho to Mexico, featuring the West as the silent protagonist of this historical epic, mixing flawless and highly descriptive narration with letters that document the daily life and struggles of Sue and Oliver Ward to make a home of this remote, unforgiving territory.

As Lyman absorbs his grandmother’s intimate thoughts through her correspondence, he is unconsciously searching for a way to come to terms with his present, which has him paralyzed in a deadlock situation. Abandoned by his wife, dependent, and isolated from the world, he juxtaposes the values of the sixties with the ones that ruled in the “Old West” and drowns his frustration and loneliness in whisky every night, hoping to find the definite answer in his grandmother’s resolution to stick to her own decisions, to her marriage, for better or for worse, in spite of the many differences that separated her from her husband.
Sue, more a lady than a woman, a refined, sophisticated artist and social creature from the East character based on the illustrator and writer Mary Hallock Foote, never ceased to feel that she was living in exile among brute rogues. Her husband Oliver, more a man than a gentleman, an idealistic engineer with many ideas and few words, sought self-realization laboring under his sense of impending failure. The silent battle of wills brings the couple to the limit, and circumstances, the disappointments and tragedies of life converge towards a false arch in which they submit to each other in what Lyman calls the “angle of repose.”

In mining jargon, that term refers to the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling to find immovable rest. It takes three generations for the Wards to find such balance, if not complete mental peace, because life is merciless, punishment sometimes disproportionate and humans too complex and volatile to be simplified in black and white actions. But Lyman finally understands that above any aspiration to moral justice, greatness or dignity, above pride or self-discipline; the only chance of a future, the only means to accept his situation is to forgive the cumulative errors of the past.

This is probably the finest account I have ever read about the awakening of the West.
This is also one of the best novels about the evolution of marriage that presents it as it really is, without embellishments of any kind.
This is also the finest meditation on the contradictions of progress and inconsistences of human nature.
Stegner’s prose is crude and elegant, fragrant with his personal values. His memorable characters provide such depth of realism, so rare in fiction, that they will acquire a permanent dimension in your mind, and in your heart. Do not resist them and allow the current of Stegner’s flowing storytelling to wash you till you reach your angle of repose, and breathe in the regenerative breeze of possibility.

Stegner makes the job of writing seem effortless.  His brilliance shines through as he uses wheelchair-bound Lyman, a writer writing the history of his grandmother Susan Ward going back to circa 1870-1895. Susan's published writings and illustrations and her personal letters of her married life in the American West  provide him  (and we readers) wonderful insight into the human experience--interpersonal  relationships, a marriage between social opposites--seamlessly juxtaposed with Lyman's  estranged family in 1970.   Oliver Ward was a mining engineer and inventor, whose job prospects were often sketchy, while  Susan made her own money selling her stories and sketches, money  that  Oliver was too proud  to allow being spent on anything a man was expected  to provide.  Wonderful,  complex characters who you get to know  intimately, or as intimately as Susan's letters allowed. Lyman in present day has to fill in some of the blanks and mysteries left unanswered -- speculating, guessing, making assumptions.

It all makes you wonder why, after centuries of husbands and wives dealing with the same personality clashes and financial stuggles,  very few still make a success of the marriage thing, to this day. We still experience the same stages where ingredients like hope, faith, trust, loyalty, and understanding in the right measure might (or might not) carry you through.

“Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.”

“Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.”

I enjoyed his Crossing to Safety, but this one was just beautiful.  A little  long, 22 hours of audio, but Mark Bramhall's voices and his consistency were absolutely amazing.  So fitting for this equally amazing book.

Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972 for this book. Goes to show you that you should disregard my reviews! Absolutely no taste, whatsoever. This book took me over two months to read because I kept putting it down. Down being the operative word here. It was not only a "downer", but lacked the skill of a good editor. In today's publishing world, Stegner wouldn't have gotten away with such a ponderous, heavy book. This was written in the "old way," with the author making it apparent that he had an eternity to tell his story. There are tons of good reviews about Angle of Repose on this website that tell about the plot, and so I'll leave that to you to discover. Really, when I was done reading it I felt like a heavy load was taken off my back, so I truly don't want to revisit the story. Trin, who gave a review on this website, expressed my feelings: "This fits into the category of "Books I feel I ought to like but really, really don't."

4* Angle of Repose
TR Crossing to Safety
TR The Big Rock Candy Mountain
TR The Spectator Bird

In this book, Lyman Ward, a wheelchair-using historian, describes the life of his frontier-era grandparents. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972.

 “The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across the high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.” 

With this and other passages, Leyman Ward brilliantly relates nature to the human condition, the cultural divides between the East and the West, generational divides, and familial divides.

I'm as in awe of this book as I was in Jr. High after our first long drive through 14 hours of flatland, as we began our 80-minute long winding ascend up the snow-filled mountains on Rt 40 to Winter Park Colorado.  It's not like the easy drive to Vail or Breckenridge, it's work and especially in a time when flatland carburetors weren't adjusted for thin air like those of the locals.  I was instantly in love.  It seemed impossible that anyone ever settled and built roads there.  I remained in awe and wonder on all of the many subsequent trips there. Thanks to visionary builders, the rest of us get to enjoy this majestic territory.

In this multi-generational story, Oliver Ward is one of those visionaries during the tail end of the great western expansion.  He was a brilliant mining engineer, forging his way through rough territory testing, building, and trying to provide for a wife and later children living in isolated mining camps.  His bride, Susan Ward, is a proper Victorian lady who is a well-respected illustrator and author from New York.  She would much rather be in New York City mingling with socialites. She maintains a foot in that world through her friend Augusta as she writes back to him.  She also continues to write and make illustrations for herself and other authors. 

Susan Ward and her husband are largely based on the real-life story of Mary Hallock Foote and her engineer husband, Arthur De Wint Foote.  Stegner uses actual letters and other writings of hers.  He has permission but there is some controversy about how much leeway he was given.  I can't bring myself to worry about that,  because how else would I have heard about Foote?  I'll be trying to find her work now.   I can't imagine anyone crafting a novel better than this, so I see no blemish.  

The story is told through the eyes of Susan and Oliver's grandson Lyman Ward who they raised.  He is a retired history professor who has a bone disease, is confined to a wheelchair, and is all alone after his wife left him.   In his boredom and isolation, he starts going through his Grandmother's letters to try and understand his Grandparents fractured marriage as well as his own, and in doing so, he uncovers universal truths that relate to more than his family.   He uses two main theories in his approach, that of the Angle of Repose and of the Doppler Effect.   Together they build a story that breaks through the clouds to the tallest mountain peak, laid bare and illuminated in the glow of the sun.  

The reader is clued in early that the title to this book is loaded as he addresses his late Grandmother with questions he'd like to ask her.  

 “Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”? I suppose you replied, “By living with an engineer.” 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."    

And regarding the Doppler effect he further imagines a conversation with her: 

“There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.”  

This seems so simple that to hear a life coming at someone tells a more well-rounded and accurate story than one looking back and Stegner does this beautifully with Susan and Oliver Ward.    I loved every minute of their story and of Stenger's and Foote's beautiful writing. I also loved the technique of the Grandson looking at history to make sense of his own life and ideas. 

There's so much more to say about this book, but it's best discovered by the reader.  Will this be among everyone's favorite books for the same personal and intangible reasons that it is mine?  I doubt it, but if you like a good western historical novel set during the tail end of the Western Expansion combined with stellar writing, you will likely enjoy this.   I want to read all of Stegner's books after this.

Wallace Stegner's masterpiece. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972 and so much more richly deserved than many Pulitzer winners. This novel creates characters of incredible depth using language that is staggeringly beautiful without being pretentious or obscure. Highly recommended--it is one of the best novels I have ever read.