So good. The characters stayed with me throughout the 2 weeks I needed to finish this book. It's a long, descriptive novel that needed the excess of pages to fully tell its story. Make it all the way through. Refrain from putting it down like some other reviewers did. It's a hard book, I'd guess, much like the old western frontier.

This is a story within a story. It is the account of Susan Ward, a cultured New York young woman, a talented illustrator, who moves to the untamed West in 1875 with her engineer husband who moves the family from one primitive setting to the next in pursuit of jobs. It is the record of the thoughts and observations of her grandson, a 58 year old historian, a man severely crippled by a degenerative illness that robs him of his ability to move, who spends his days combing through his grandmother’s affects to write a fictional account of her life. While Susan resists the primitive conditions of her new life, her grandson resists the reduced physical situation of his life. I think this novel intended to explore themes such of our limited perceptions, the nature of interpretation, maybe even the passage of time. But, I was not up to the task of comprehending the deeper layers built into this book. I never felt as if I fully understood any of these characters and found the movement between past and present diminishing to both rather than mutually illuminating as was obviously intended.

Fiction moves me most when it’s most piercingly honest – when it reveals to me places in my heart that I’ve been afraid to recognize. Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose examines the part of us that's reluctant to forgive and that cannot seem to learn how to forget. The book is hauntingly true and ruthlessly introspective and it left me, at times, gasping for breath at the beauty of its lyricism - it could serve well as a master class in honest writing.

Stegner writes from the perspective of a not-so-old man who has become recently severely disabled and, in turn, divorced. This wounded soul is spending time at his grandparents’ farmstead, among his grandmother Susan’s copious letters to her best friend, Augusta, who represents everything Susan left behind to come west for her husband’s career as a mining engineer in the 1860’s. Though Susan achieves an esteemed career herself, this is a chronicle of the longings and regrets she can’t seem to leave behind.

Angle of Repose shines a light into a void that exists, to one degree or another, within all but the most enlightened among us and Stegner unburdens his literary soul within these pages in a way that lesser writers fear. He reminds us that we shall all be in need of forgiveness at some time in our lives and that we’re well-served to bear this in mind whenever we find ourselves searching our own hearts for the place within them where forgiveness dwells. Angle of Repose is, at present, the best novel I’ve read, displacing The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby, which shared that place in my thinking until now. I don't always understand why certain books won the Pulitzer but this novel leaves no room for doubt. It is a literary treasure.

“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.”

When I picked up this Pulitzer Prize winning novel, I assumed it to be a captivating story of the settling of the western frontier. It was that. But it was more than that too. Much more. At its firmly beating heart, Angle of Repose is a gripping portrait of a marriage. Two marriages, actually. As Lyman Ward tries to make sense of his wife’s sudden exit from his life following his confinement to a wheelchair, he decides to delve into the lives of his grandparents, Susan and Oliver Ward. I went kicking and screaming into another story about the dissection of a relationship, wondering if I could handle another. I’ve come out relatively unscathed (I’m perhaps becoming numb these days) and a deeply satisfied reader as a result.

“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…”

I think it is human nature to want to peer at the lives of others in order to shed light on and find consolation for our own troubles. It’s one of the reasons we read, yes? Much of the time, Lyman seems to speak directly to his grandmother, living as she did in another century. But she is already gone from this world when he attempts to unravel her life. Much of what he learns is from letters she wrote to her dear friend, Augusta Drake, back in New York. Susan left Augusta as well as a life of literature, art and intellectualism behind in order to pledge herself to a man and a life she knew little about. This isn’t just a story about a woman turned adventuress and heroine of the West, however. Susan isn’t some grand conqueror of the frontier; she doesn’t throw aside all her inhibitions and principles in order to ride off into the sunset on her horse, snatching at whatever she wants in life. It’s much more real than all that. Like the rest of us, she confronts doubts, struggles, and temptations. There are failures, tests of faith, loss of confidence. Similarly, Oliver Ward is no icon of the West. He’s a quiet, honorable man who doesn’t always meet her expectations.

“She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his cross-hairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died of thirst.”

I so loved my romp across the American western frontier, from California to Colorado to Mexico to Idaho. Stegner’s prose is beautifully descriptive and this novel is indeed sprawling - across the country and across the generations. The analysis of marriage is sharp and penetrating. Like the men and women of the West, I had no idea what lay ahead, but I eagerly anticipated one page after another. I was not disappointed. I alternately soared with hopefulness and shrank with apprehension. The ending was simply breathtaking. This is my first Wallace Stegner work and it was everything my friends here have told me it would be!

“It’s as if every morning the world had to create itself all new. Everything’s still to do, the word isn’t yet spoken. It’s like standing in front of a whited block that you have to make into a picture. No matter how many times I watch it happen, I’m never sure it will happen next time. I keep thinking I’m looking into our life, and it’s as vague and unclear as that.”

“The dove’s long mournful throaty cooing was a dirge for the failed and disappointed, for the innocent and incompetent, themselves not excepted, who wandered out to this harsh place and were destroyed.”

What a story and what a writer!!!! This is quite a marvelous novel written by Wallace Stegner and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. Considered a masterpiece of American literature, Stegner tells a story of marriage, its successes and failures. On the surface it is a picture of his protagonist’s grandparents, Oliver and Susan Ward, but once immersed into the story, we find a deciphering of his own failed marriage. Divorced and suffering from a debilitating disease which has left him wheel-chair bound, Lyman Ward begins to write the history of his grandparents’ lives. As he gets absorbed into his work, he struggles to understand Oliver and Susan’s marriage as well as his own.

As a retired history professor, Lyman values history but his son, Rodman doesn’t see the point or importance. Lyman thinks there is much to glean from history if you’re open to it. He is saddened by the huge shift in the younger generation of 1970 who put less value on the past and what can be learned from it. Without Rodman’s total support, Lyman decides to take on living alone in the home his grandparents last lived while delving into his grandmother’s letters and documents. His grandmother, Susan Burling Ward is an east coast, genteel woman who is the epitome of refinement. When she unexpectedly marries Oliver Ward, a mining engineer, Susan’s life becomes greatly altered in ways she is unaware. She is uprooted from her home and familiar world and planted into the life of the West when it was raw and rudimentary.

My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. 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.

Lyman Ward becomes engrossed in his grandparents’ life discovering roadblocks, difficulties, lost hopes, agonies, unspoken heartbreaks, betrayals, unforgivenesses, unfulfilled expectations. Stegner’s story is complicated but engrossing, captivating and agonizing. His prose is gorgeous and just absolutely stellar. I sat mesmerized with his words too many times to count. This story really allows you to put yourself into its center and evaluate your own relationships. With so much to think about and talk about, it is impossible to justly write about this flawed couple. It is best to take the plunge and discover on your own what makes this an iconic American novel of the West.

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.

How does a mere mortal with no talent or skill for writing review a book written by Wallace Stegner?
I will only write a few thoughts about this 1971 Pulitzer winner novel, which was called a Western epic. I am not generally drawn to Western pioneer stories, but this was written by Stegner, some say it's his best novel, so, of course, I had to read it. The copy I bought has a very small print, so I opted to listen to the audiobook, which was splendidly narrated by Mark Bramhall.

The truth is that Wallace Stegner's writing beguiles me and keeps me in a constant state of awe. Each sentence is crafted to perfection. There's playfulness and musicality to his sentence structure. And the descriptions, oh, the descriptions ... Sure, his writing, especially by today's standards, could be accused of being too writerly (is that a word?) I don't care, I love it.
I also thought the novel's focus and its structure were brilliant.

Lyam Ward, a retired history professor, confined to a wheelchair due to crippling bone disease, decides to write his grandmother's biography. Susan Burling Ward was a writer and an artist. Her five-decade-long correspondence with her best friend, Augusta Hudson, provides a good picture of who his grandmother was. Of course, there's more to a person than it transpires from letters. Lyam Ward is given to imagining and wondering and filling in the gaps. I loved how unjudgemental and understanding he was, it's as if he understood women, amazing, right? :-)

Ward's recent divorce, which took him by surprise, makes him wonder about his grandmother's marriage to Oliver Ward, the very kind, determined, unsophisticated and laconic engineer, who brought her to live in the West, where she had to do without the luxuries and the type of company she was used to in New York.

This tome didn't feel long, I didn't want it to end.

I think even the title is perfect. The angle of repose refers to the angle at which granular materials can be piled without slumping. It means that in this novel, but also so much more.

A story as big as North America and the lives of three character's that fill it. Two stories actually. It is set in Northern California, New York's Hudson River Valley, Leadville Colorado, Central Mexico, and Central Idaho during the later half of the 19th Century and 1969. The portrait of the American West Stegner portrays is realistic yet breaks all stereotypes. The portrait of 1969 is classic.

In the frame story, a disabled, distinguished professor emeritus of history lives in Northern California in a cabin built by his grandfather in the last years of the Nineteenth Century. He is surrounded by his paternal grandmother's letters, documents and pictures. He is in the midst of organizing this material and using his research to write a book about his grandparent's marriage. The frame story is told in chapter's placed at different intervals within the main story

The grandparent's marriage is an unlikely one. Grandmother, a child of well-off parents, develops into an accomplished writer and literary artist. She meets and becomes a part of elite literary society of the latter half of the 1800's. Her best friends are Thomas and Augustus Hudson. These characters are based on American Poet and Editor Richard Watson Gilder and his wife, Helena deKay. The letters between grandmother and Augusta are a principle device to tell grandmother's story. Grandfather is a mining engineer of modest background.

The marriage is an unlikely one, but sucessful. Grandfather moves from engineering project to project. Grandmother follows when the local living conditions allow. She returns, with her children, to her parent's home during transition periods. As she moves from place to place she writes short stories and sketches which she submits to Thomas' prestigious literary magazine. She also provides sketches for books authored by the most notable writers of the second half of the 19th Century. Thier marriage is the focus the main story. While there is love, this is not a conventional romance. It is the saga of three lives, the gandparent's and narrator's. Their lives encompass experiences on both sides of conventional marriage vows.

The frame story takes up about a third of the novel. About halfway through I began to notice that the aspects of the narrator's life that he was disclosing paralleled the fortunes of his grandparent's lives. As the stories continued, metafictional devices began to appear to weave the stories closer and closer together. Finally, in the last section, Stegner masterfully uses a kaleidoscope of metafiction to bring great stylistic pressure to bear and smash both stories together with great drama and suspense. The result? A new story of one sentence that dissapears into the period at the end. Magnificent!

It is not often that I stumble across a "Great American Novel" that I have never heard of. This is one of the great finds of my reading life. Delightfully, Stegner has written a number of other novels that I can look foward to.

Highly recommend as is the excellent Audiobook.

This is easily one of my favorite novels of the books I've read in the past 5 years. It's lauded as Stegner's masterpiece and I completely agree.

Stegner tells the story of a man who has a disease that is crippling him. He's living in his ancestral home, being taken care of by an old, old, family friend. He's a historian and feels compelled to research his paternal grandmother using the journals and keepsakes that are at the house. Stegner weaves the life story of the grandmother (and grandfather) and the story of the historian together. As the protagonist is making realizations and grudgingly realizing the two may be compared--the reader is also--and making his/her revelations about the story. What unfolds is a breathtaking piece about marital/familial relationships. A novel that will suck you in, you'll almost smell the rooms, imagine the places that the novel took place in.

Wow, I really enjoyed reading this book! It was such a sad, sad story and just when you think it couldn't get worse, it did - maybe I enjoy unhappy endings... Nevertheless, Stegner is so deliciously descriptive and Lyman's narration was sometimes amusing and (very) frank.
In some ways I sympathized with Susan and understood how she may have felt leaving a life she loved behind and braving the unknown. I think that's what marriage is in general. (It also helped that she mentioned places like Pougkeepsie and Dutchess County, NY, where I grew up and dearly miss!) I'm not saying that my husband led me off to western mining camps or that I moved in elite society in NY - far from it! I grew up with a cornfield around my house! I just think that marriage and motherhood require former lives or dreams to be left behind.
I couldn't always agree with Susan though - she may have looked like a "captive, bound and masked" to Mexican passers-by, but like Lyman said, "in a way, we deserve the people we marry." And "wisdom is knowing what you have to accept" - so suck it up, basically. One thing I did agree with Susan though was that she wanted her "son to grow up, as she had, knowing some loved place down to the last woodchuck hole." I can't think of anything better that knowing a place to call "home".

Fellow Goodreaders know that feeling of exhilaration when a new entrant pushes its way onto a top-ten-of-all-time list. Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize winner from 1972 is my most recent example. Of course, Goodreads reviewers also know the pressure involved in justifying the choice. So what makes this one so good? As befits a top ten inclusion, here are ten factors that come to mind.

1. A Damn Good Story

Lyman Ward is a former professor of history with a bone disease that put him in a wheelchair. He moved into his grandparents’ house in California where he’d spent much of his boyhood. With a strong personal interest and a research historian’s skills, he studied the lives of his grandmother, Susan, and his grandfather, Oliver. She was an artist and later a writer transplanted from her genteel life in New York to be with her husband, the earnest engineer, out West. He specialized in big projects: mines, irrigation canals, etc. His integrity prevented the material success he would have liked as a source of comfort for Susan. She created what culture she could in mining towns, and had become known for her illustrations and magazine articles about life in the West. Stegner had permission to use real letters of a writer and painter from that era, lending the narrative an authentic voice. As their family dramas unfolded, Lyman had a few related episodes of self-discovery, all very cleverly done.

2. Complex Characters

What book could ever be considered great without an interesting cast? These players were decidedly not stick figures – more like Rubenesque (actually, that’s not the exact opposite I was going for, but you know what I mean). Starting out, Lyman seemed like a stock character – the crusty recluse – but he becomes more central and more nuanced as the book goes on. The way we see his grandparents through his eyes tells us a lot about him. To be honest, early in his narration I was put off by his invented dialog and false omniscience, but later, after he copped to this as a way to make them more real, I actually liked the device. All the characters, the ones on the periphery included, seemed very credible, with emotions that rang true and unexpected depths that only a first-rate writer could have imagined.

3. Interesting History

It’s an impressive laundry list of things the curious reader can learn more about: technology of the time (from Oliver’s various engineering projects), culture (the arts community in NY, pioneer life in the West, the opulent part of Mexico where Susan and Oliver almost stayed for a job), and manners (subtle social conventions, shady business dealings, dirty politics). Lyman, with his background in history, was a very knowledgeable narrator. He had remarkable tunnel vision (literally, since his disease prevented him from turning his head) trained on his subjects.

4. Conflict

Clashes were easy to come by when the refined East (civilized society) met the rough-and-tumble West (opportunity). Tightrope walks were performed between desire and moral responsibility, the practical and the romantic, and in the case of Lyman and a curvy young assistant, the stodgy academic and the free-spirited hippie. There was conflict in Lyman’s concept of himself, too. Was he more like his grandmother or grandfather? It turned out to be a key question.

5. Blissful(?) Institutions

The give-and-take of a marriage was a central theme. Susan was described as “more lady than woman” and Oliver was “more man than gentleman.” This made for some tension. As Stegner himself said in a Paris Review interview:

Susan is more talented in many ways than Oliver. She shows off better. But while I wrote that book, thinking that I was writing about her as a heroine, I came to the end of it thinking maybe he is the hero because there is a flaw in her, a flaw of snobbery. She doesn’t adequately appreciate the kind of person he is, or the kind of work he does. That’s a story not about either men or women, but about a relationship, a novel about a marriage.

On top of this, Lyman reflected on his own former marriage. Would he forgive his ex-wife for what she did to him? Should he have done more to prevent it from happening in the first place? More good questions both for him and for us.

6. Metaphorical Resonance

“Angle of repose” is an engineering term referring to the angle at which rocks and soil settle when tumbling down off a slope before coming to a stop. Lyman’s goal was to see “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.” Another way to think of it may be as the point at which the slights that we suffer lose their animating force and finally give way to acceptance.

Stegner spells out a second metaphor so well that I’m willing to risk further attention-squelching length to include it.

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.

7. Powerful Descriptions

What was clever here was how natural it was for Susan, the artist, to describe and even embellish the new sights she would see out West. Her eye for detail never got tedious. Of course, we know to credit Stegner for excluding any word that didn’t pull its weight. There were countless little analogies, too, that made for a pleasant experience. For example: “Bunion footed, wearing her look of a supposedly house-broken dog which is called upon to explain a puddle on the floor, Mrs. Briscoe labored toward them.”

8. Organic Philosophy

I like reading bigger thoughts, but less so when they’re without context. If they appear as natural outgrowths of a story or a character profile, I’m all in. With A of R I’m spoiled for choice looking for examples. Here are a few, ranging from aphorism and homily:

It is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.

9. Awfully Good Writing

I may have made my case already with the examples I’ve included, but let me add that this is more than just pretty language we’re talking about here. There’s plenty of substance to it, too. To my mind, Stegner is a true master of the craft. Every sentence has heft, yet never at the expense of flow. Early on I thought Stegner is like a grown-up when so many others are mere children in comparison. His candle-power shines brightly on every page.

10. Opportunities for Growth

Hokeyness aside, how many books do you read and wonder, “Gee willikers, am I possibly becoming a better person?” If you’re drawn to intelligence, please give Lyman, his grandparents, and most of all Stegner a try. If cumulative insight into human experience floats your boat, ships ahoy.

I finished the book almost three weeks ago, but then I got caught in the day job with overtimes and in the year end parties,
I hope I will get back here and give it the consideration and attention it deserves.
For now, let me just say that it is worthy of using caps, as in Great American Novel.
----------------
[update]

Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, immobilized in a wheelchair by a bone disease that has left his body twisted, his vertebrae fused so that his neck is unable to turn, so he can only look in one direction. Lyman decides that the best use of his last years of life is to cast this fixed look back into the past, throwing himself with dogged determination into the study of the papers, mostly letters, left behind by his grandmother: Susan Burling Ward.

In writing down the history of his grandmother, Lyman offers us a comprehensive look at how “the West was won”, as Susan Wards leaves behind a comfortable and socially rewarding artistic career in New York in the 1890’s to follow her husband, engineer Oliver Ward, into the untamed, rough territories of California, Colorado, Mexico and Idaho. A small part of the decision to write down he history of the Ward family comes from Lyman’s grumpy complaints at how Hollywood and the younger generation (represented by his son Rodman) are misrepresenting the subject:

Rodman, like most sociologists and most of his generation, was born without a sense of history. . He would much better like that his father wrote about:

Lola Montez, say, that wild girl from an Irish peat bog who became the mistress of half the celebrities of Europe, including Franz Liszt and Dumas, pere or fils or both, before taking up with King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who made her Countess of Landsfeld. And from there, in 1856, to San Francisco, where she danced the spider dance for miners and fortune hunters, and from there to Grass Valley to live for two years with a tame bear who couldn’t have been much of an improvement on Ludwig.
That’s Rodman’s idea of history. Every fourth-rate antiquarian in the West has panned Lola’s poor little gravel. My grandparents are a deep vein that has never been dug. They were ‘people’.

Another quote addresses the same revisionist and distorted writing of history that Lyman feels the need to correct. In his choice of the main character, Susan Burling Ward, Lyman repeatedly stresses her upper class upbringing, her Quaker background and her Victorian morals. Reading through the preface, it is also important to note that Stengler had been inspired by a real 19 century lady whose letters he quotes word for word in parts of the text:

There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fisted bosses. Another is that it was rough, ready, and unkempt, and ribald about anything not as unkempt as itself, whereas in fact there was never a time or place where gentility, especially female gentility, was more respected.

The motivation of Lyman though, and through him that of Stengler himself, is not the objective study of history, but the subjective investigation of his own life. For Lyman, the past must hold the answers to why his own marriage has failed, why he feels enstanged from his children, why he cannot find rest in his own mind. According to an interview cited in the preface, Stengler’s declared goal is “to discover a usable continuity between the past and present “, a theme that is reinforced and reiterated throughout the novel. apparently this theme is present in other novels from the author, and the study of family history directly addresses his own childhood and the tensions between his adventurous father and his nest building mother:

Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you or Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were – inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.

The title of the novel itself is a superb metaphor of this search for identity and for companionship, a term borrowed from technical manuals (I was actually teaching some class last month about the importance of this value when digging trenches) that likens the marriage of two completely different personalities to a play of tensions and continuous struggles, until, maybe, they can find a stable position that allows them to live together peacefully. Lyman addresses his grandmother directly in this:

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. There was a time up there in Idaho when everything was wrong; your husband’s career, your marriage, your sense of yourself, your confidence, all came unglued together. Did you come down out of that into some restful 30 degrees angle and live happily ever after?

If the meaning was not clear enough already, Lyman returns to it in another chapter:

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 what the meaning will be if I find any. [...]
What held him and Grandmother together for more than sixty years? Passion? Integrity? Culture? Convention? Inviolability of contract? Notions of possession? By some standards they weren’t even married, they just had a paper signed by some witnesses. The first dozen years they knew each other, they were more apart than together. These days, that marriage wouldn’t have lasted any longer than one of these hippie weddings with homemade rituals. What made that union of opposites hold them?

The novel itself alternates between the 1890’s and the 1970’s, between the life of Oliver and Susan Ward, and the present struggles of Lyman, who finds much to complain about the “now” generation, about the hippie movement and its casual atitudes to sex and marriage, about the young people’s “antihistoricism, intolerance and hypocrisies”. Stengler uses the character of Shelly, a young lady who assists Lyman in his research, as a literary device to introduce the debate of modern versus traditional values:

Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything – though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough, as far as Shelly’s crowd carries it, that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she’s a long way from wise.

Shelly is a college dropout and a former member of a hippie commune, occassional drug consumer and self declared free spirit. In his crankiness and anti-modern rants, Lyman reminds me of another subjective historian, Ebenezer le Page, but I like most of all how each of them is a reflection of the places where they grew up, Ebenezer on Guernsey and Lyman in the West, and yet they come pretty close in atitudes:

If I were a modern writing about a modern young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail. The custom of the country and the times would demand a description, preferably ‘comic’, of foreplay, lubrication, penetration, and climax, and in deference to the accepted opinions about Victorian love, I would have to abort the climax and end the wedding night in tears and desolate comfortings. But I don’t know. I have a good deal of confidence in both Susan Burling and the man she married. I imagine they worked it out without the need of any scientific lubricity and with even less need to make their privacies public.

The novel is a long one, and the pace is often crawling like a snail though minute details of everyday life events and concerns, but I was fascinated by the glimpse into the early days of mercury mining at Almaden and silver at Leadville or in Mexico, about the struggle to bring water to the quasy desert lands of Idaho. Most of all I was intrigued and enchanted by Susan Ward, by her intelligent and daring eye cast upon the majestic landscapes and colourful people of the frontier, by her determination to maintain the proprieties and the gentility she was accustomed to on the East Coast, even when living in precarious, even dangerous conditions. I will leave out most of the informations about her difficult relationship with Oliver, because this is the true key of the novel, and best learned at the pace the author sets, but I have a couple of quotes I think illustrate her personality:

Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.
---
She had the terrier temperament, and she was interested in everything that moved. Through the black silk face mask that Emelita had given her as protection against the muy fuerte Mexican sun, her eyes were very busy. Her pencil was always out.
---
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. We have been as fascinated as children who build forts or snowhouses, and it has made us the tightest little society in all the West.
---
Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

If Susan is the artist and the homesteader in the story, the one who seeks intellectual and social satisfactions and safety, comfort and peace in her house, Oliver is the embodiment of the pioneer spirit, of the restlessness, idealism and inventivity that tamed the wilderness and brought prosperity to the country, sacrifing personal life for the good of the community. If Susan is represented by her graphic illustrations and the novels she wrote, Oliver heritage is in the spurs, bowie knife and revolver that are hanged on the wall of the house he built with his own hands, a reminder that the West was also a harsh and unforgiving place.

Stengler is a calculated and analytical writer, but in writing about the country he grew up in he turns lyrical and passionate. My favorite passages are the descriptions of the mountains and deserts I have seen so often in Western movies, the high country where ““the air was that high blue mountain kind that fizzes in the lungs”. Humour is used sparely, and often with a bitter aftertaste, especially in the contemporary passages, but I have saved a gem from Oliver, referring to the Colorado mining camp in Leadville:

The only way you could avoid a view up there is to go undergound

The final chapters are painfully intimate and sad, the historian giving way in all instances to the lonely man captive inside a twisted body, to literary references ranging from Thoreau’s escapism to Thomas Wolfe homecoming, to meditations that transcend the individual fate of Susan and Oliver Ward and the geographical constraints of one country. I believe the final quotes speak for themselves:

It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Is it love or sympathy that makes me think myself capable of reconstructing these lives, or am I, Nemesis in a wheelchair, bent on proving something – perhaps that not even gentility and integrity are proof against the corrosions of human weakness, human treachery, human disappointment, human inability to forget?

Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they’re a side issue. Quiet deperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can’t remodel a society by day after tomorrow – haven’t the wisdom to and shouldn’t be permitted to – I’d have more respect for them. Revolutionaries and sociologists. God, those sociologists! They’re always trying to reclaim a tropical jungle with a sprinkling can full of weed killer. Civilizations grow and change and decline – they aren’t remade.

They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at the absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.
There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, the woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

Angle of Repose is a book I intend to re-read and recommend in the future to all my friends, as one of the best examples of modern writing and one of the most powerful histories of family drama and redemption.

I am going to let a review of this one slide. I will let the 5 Stars say it all for me, I’m not gifted enough to do this one justice. The writing is wonderful, the characters are all memorable. The story is complex and presented perfectly.