I read this book several years ago, but I am now bringing this review to Goodreads.

In one word:

Brilliant.

Wallace Stegner is best known as "the Dean of Western Writers."

His commitments to ecology, family and community against the forces of modern economic development (even then) show up in his writing beautifully.

But this book, is like a love story. First the marriage.

And then...The fight to stay relevant and independent when one character becomes disabled.

And of course, the land.

He describes it so well. It is mesmerizing.

But be patient with the book. It is a long one. The paperback is 672 pages. Normally with a book this long I get antsy, but, his writing is beautiful and I wanted to stay with it each day I opened it, because the characters drew me in. I was interested in their story.

And of course, I wanted to visit the landscape.

If you like exceptional writing and tales of the West, I think you will really enjoy this one.

I have wanted to read this for at least a decade, just never followed up, after a bunch of unsatisfying mystery books I had checked out for my husband I was craving something substantial, much to my surprise this is a local book and being new to the area it really cemented my interest. I listened to the audio all day long, when I wasn’t, I keep thinking about it and yearned to get back to the 1800s even if i was only gone from it for twenty minutes. I may not have appreciated it as much if I read back it in the 90s when it was written, but living in the area I could not have been more receptive, only chagrin was the death of the roses as I was feverishly planting mine while listening.

I have to admit that I am disappointed. The first two books by Wallace Stegner went straight to my heart and will forever remain my favorites, but this one?
It promised loads, it is the highest rated book by the author, it’s a Pultizer Prize winner and everyone unissono sings its prize, and yet….
Lyman Ward, a retired historian, recently deserted by his wife and suffering from a bone disease, works on recreating the life story of his grandmother. The narrative alternates between past and present, between the late eighteen hundreds and 1970’s. The grandmother is obviously an interesting character and the writing is just as good as I have expected but I just don’t feel that I am sharing the author's fascination with her, with her life and her on and off failing marriage or her relationship with her friend Augusta.
The book is full of struggle, to remain faithful, to keep hope, to remain independent, to write a book…. And to that I have to add my own struggle with the story that I felt kept preparing for a magnificent flight any moment, but in the end it just refused to take off, despite nearly six hundred pages of trying.

Somehow I ended up reviewing this under this other edition.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I don't know how that happened, especially since I read this edition and especially love this cover!

Need time to gather my thoughts on why I love this book so much.

6★

What to say? How to say it?
I have been in love with this book since reading it about 35 years ago and wanting to reread it, yet fearful it might not hold up, or I wouldn’t. Tastes and perspectives change and I didn’t want to fall out of love. Now I marvel how my much younger, unmarried self was able to connect to this story so fiercely then, because as a much older, married for 28 years woman, it was a Whole Foods experience now.
As the end was nearing and the emotional intensity escalated, my breath was a bit shallow and my pulse quickened. Not many authors can make that happen. Experienced Stegner fans highly anticipate his denouements which he painstakingly makes you wait for.
This one is surely perfection, but soon I will revisit Crossing to Safety and won’t be surprised at a photo finish for first place.
Marriage and human connection in literary fiction—nobody does it better.

“Angle of Repose” is the fourth novel I have read by Wallace Stegner, It is, in my opinion, his best work. It won the Putlizer Prize in 1972. With Stegner, one cruises through prose that soothes and lines that sing. It is like being immersed in an orchestration of grand music that dips and swells as a compelling story unfolds.

The story was set in the 1970s in Grass Valley, California. When the novel opened, Lyman Ward, the 58-year-old narrator protagonist, a recent amputee and retired Berkeley History professor, was observed talking to himself, speaking into a recorder and sorting through his grandmother's papers based on her reminiscence, books, letters and pictures. He was trying to put together a biography of his grandparents (Susan and Oliver Ward) whom he loved and respected because he believed that the past was the only direction we could learn from.

What impressed me was how Stegner had an affective radar attuned to the sensibilities of women. Yet, despite his obvious sympathies toward his grandmother, Lyman was sufficiently fair-minded to detect what he deemed unbelievable by his grandmother’s report (e.g., how her one evening's acquaintance with Oliver Ward led to a tacit engagement through five years of absence). Stegner wrote with a fine comb as it were that untangled strands of conflicting emotions. There was searching clarity that threw private leanings and longings into relief and made the reading experience intimately rich and satisfying.

As suggested by the novel’s title, the angle of repose was the dominant theme. The first reference to it was made by Susan Ward who used it in her writing to describe “human as well as detrital rest”, which pointed to her "own wandering and uneasy life" as she followed her mining engineer husband on his pioneering adventures out West. Lyman too confessed he was aiming for that angle himself and wondered of his grandmother, "Was the quiet I always felt in you really repose?" In the second reference, mention was made of “The twelve-foot banks [that] slope back at the ‘angle of repose’, which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling." Lyman, reflecting on his grandparents’ difficult marriage, wondered “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." The point where strivings cease.

The second theme was marriage. On this, Stegner wrote with a seasoned hand as was evident too in “The Spectator Bird” and “All the Little Live Things”. What held a marriage together for more than sixty years? What made the union of opposites possible? Stegner unraveled the ties that sustained a marriage of a seemingly incompatible couple. But he also suggests there is a point of no return where couples are broken and can never be put together again. "Not even gentility and integrity are proof against the corrosions of human weakness, human treachery, human disappointment, human inability to forget?" Susan had to deal with emotions that a genteel education had not prepared her for. Oliver, in his turn, could not forget and forgive a perceived betrayal.

Some of the loveliest writing centered on the challenging landscape on the Wards' sojourn in the West. There was some really exquisite writing about Leadville, the wild, beautiful place where the Wards lived in a log cabin with a view of the mountains. Stegner coaxed ineffable beauty out of the mountains where "grass won't grow, cats can't live, chickens won't lay."

I can go on about why I truly enjoyed this novel. I suppose in all of our lives, each of us struggles to find that angle of repose. Excellent writing. Perceptive prose. Five brilliant stars, no less.

For me, it took a while for this novel to reach a certain momentum as the author introduces the reader to the narrator, Lyman Ward. He is a wheelchair-bound historian in the process of writing a biography of the life of his grandparents, Oliver and Susan Ward. He recreates their lives, mostly from his grandmother’s letters written in the 1870’s. I’m a great fan of American Western fiction but I lean towards a pared down, spare writing style; so this woman’s florid prose and descriptions – her very formal, pretentious manners were often mind-numbing for me.

Oliver’s mostly failed career took them from California to Colorado, Mexico, Idaho, and back to California. My commitment to this novel deepened once they settled in Leadville, Colorado. As a Colorado native, I can only imagine the severe weather and hardship that living in Leadville must have been in the late 19th century! By this point, a degree of disenchantment begins to set into what was once a marriage full of promise and feelings of affinity.

This story beautifully illustrates the dynamic forces at work in their marriage – an unlikely union between the genteel and educated Susan from the east and Oliver Ward, an unworldly and straightforward mining engineer. Susan Burling Ward left her New York life dedicated to art and literature to marry and follow Oliver Ward as he struggled to become a successful engineer in the West. Over the course of their marriage, scars from Oliver’s failed business ventures, their constant relocations and the reality of late 19th century frontier life intervene. These hosts of disappointments and unfulfilled goals culminate in a tragic incident that forever changes Oliver and Susan - and with its ripple effect, it is even perceptible in their grandson, the narrator. As he researches his grandparent’s complex relationship issues, Lyman Ward increasingly gains some insight into his own failed marriage.

I was surprised, by the end, at my depth of feeling for this couple. I think everyone who has come to the ending of a failed relationship can relate to this story. It is a nuanced, beautifully written novel about love, betrayal and forgiveness, or lack thereof. It is also about the meaning of marriage and the struggles that exist between two people trying to wrestle with their own issues while holding on to what they have with each other – ultimately settling in for the long haul (my interpretation of reaching an “angle of repose” in a relationship.)

Epic, eloquent and thought-provoking!

Imagine you go to a stranger's house and he insists on showing you a photo album of his grandparents for like 25 hours straight (the time it took to read the book). Imagine his grandparents are utterly boring people who can't make even an affair or deaths seem exciting. And the whole time he's musing and you just don't care.

That's Angle of Repose.

Wallace Stegner is one of my favorite authors. I fell in love with his writing and storytelling when I first read The Spectator Bird and was amazed when I found I enjoyed a much longer novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, every bit as much. So it is fair to say that I have anticipated reading Angle of Repose as much as anything else and more than most. Of course, with that much anticipation you would almost expect some level of disappointment. There was none. The novel is majestic. As I worked my way into it, I felt no desire to rush the experience. I wanted to savor it. If I was tired, I put it aside willingly as I did not want to miss out on any of the experience. Ultimately, though, I did not enjoy it as much as the other two novels. The characters were just as rich in detail and layered in complexity. The story was simple, and yet worthy of every one of the 531 pages. I liked and respected Oliver Ward, and I respected and admired Susan Burling Ward, but I never felt as close to them, as if they were breathing the same air I breath, as I did with the other two novels. The story did not pull me along with the urgency that I might hope for. I thought the structure of the novel was wonderfully designed and beautifully executed. I very much appreciate when an author uses a structure that blends with and enhances the story; Wallace Stegner does that very well here.

It is an incredible story, well told, that I will be thinking about for a long time.

#2016-usa-geography-challenge: COLORADO. I chose this book to represent the state of Colorado in my geography challenge but it is actually set throughout the territories of the wild west of the late 1800s, in such places as California, Mexico and Idaho, as well as Leadville, Colorado.

angle of repose
noun
1.
the maximum angle to the horizontal at which rocks, soil, etc, will remain without sliding.

This is a marvelous book on so many levels! In the year 1970, Lyman Ward, a history professor with a debilitating bone disease, has retired to his family's California homestead near the old Zodiac mine to record the story of his grandmother's life on tape, using her old letters, sketches, stories and novels, even a few newspaper accounts.

He insists to his son Rodman that he is not writing a book of Western history but perhaps a book about a marriage: "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."

Lyman has retro-fitted the old homestead to be wheelchair accessible and has hired Ada, an elderly neighbor, to care for his needs--against the wishes of his son and his doctor who would put him in a care facility. Ada's daughter Shelly, a hippie home from Berkeley for the summer, is transcribing the tapes. She and Lyman have bemused conversations contrasting the sexual mores of the Victorian era expressed in Susan's letters with those of the hippie generation Shelly is experiencing a hundred years later. Three marriages are contrasted: those of Susan and Oliver which lasted some 60 years through hardship and struggle, Lyman and his ex-wife (who ran off with his surgeon while he was still recovering from leg amputation) and Shelly and her 'husband' who wants her to join a free-love commune in Nevada City.

The story alternates between the present day (1970) and 1870-1890 through Susan's letters and the story Lyman imagines to flesh it out. Susan Burling is a talented young lady, a Quaker from a good New York family, and an aspiring artist with beloved friends and contacts in the NYC literary world, when she meets Oliver Ward, a quiet man with dreams of being an engineer and making a living in the mining enterprises of the western frontier.

After they are married, Oliver prepares a home for her in the hills above the New Almaden mines where he is employed but Susan is disappointed to find she has to pay for her own railroad ticket to join him there. This rankles and sets the stage for future disappointments throughout their long marriage.

Oliver is full of dreams and ideas but never seems to have the cash or the backing he needs and worse, he is often taken advantage of because he is too trusting. They move from place to place, scrabbling to make a home and a life out of the wild. To Oliver's chagrin, soon Susan begins earning her own money through her illustrations and stories. At first, he refuses to use those funds but eventually has no choice--after all, they have children that must be provided with a home, fed, educated and protected.

Susan is a genteel, cultured lady in a rough world, inhabited mostly by men, so it is no wonder that she is the love interest for many--and one in particular that predictably leads to tragedy in their lives.
They survive even that and find their 'angle of repose' in their old age. Can Lyman use their example of forgiveness to find his 'angle of repose' at the end of his own life?

I'm giving this book 5 stars even though it wasn't absolutely perfect (namely, there are some sections that drag) but the writing was nevertheless so beautifully done, it deserves highest praise. These flawed characters, their hardscrabble lives and the wild places they lived really come to life in these pages. It is definitely taking its place on my list of favorites.

A Western like no other, this novel takes place mostly in the usual Western mining towns in the 19th century, but what usually happens in Westerns happens in the background at most. The foreground involves two Easterners, one an engineer with dreams and ideas, the other his wife, an Easterner through and through, who fights the West internally. It’s a Puritanical novel of pride and sacrifice, with so much left unsaid and so much done for nothing.

Stegner’s structure, of alternating chapters of the story of the narrator’s grandmother (much of it based on the narrator’s imagination) and the narrator’s life in the present, works very well, as do the two voices, of the narrator and of the grandmother in her letters. Things happen a bit too abruptly toward the end (after not happening for most of the novel’s extended length), but all in all this is a great American novel. A 4.5.

An amazing book-a 5 star rating in the highest sense. It is on my short list of all time favorites now and will be reread.