Reading of Lyman Ward's distraction of writing of his grandparents life, with his personal struggles interposed created a sympathy within my heart that I don't think will ever fade. So much of our internal lives is informed by the humans who raised us - and the echoes of their life experiences end out consequentially denting our childhoods, scarring our souls and shaping our habitual thinking in ways we often never realize or recognize until those players are long gone. I've always felt this about my life, my growing up and history - and here it is so clearly delineated in Stegner's captivating narrative.

I read it slowly, book in hand, pacing myself, pondering and enjoying every word. How I missed this in my life, I can't even explain. I've read a number of his books, but all were non-fiction. Last year I read The Preacher and the Slave which opened a new line of interest and curiosity for me, and I found more WS books - physical copies. I will be working my way through them, because I am arrested, stopped mid-thought, both sides of my heart clasped hard.

Highly recommended.

Update.... geeeezzz Marie!!! Another $1.99 Kindle gem this morning- ( I bought it myself) ... and I own an old paper copy!
It’s true I never wrote a review- read it before I did such foolish things ... haha..
But if readers have not read this book yet - TIMELESS ( and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner... also TIMELESS)... you’re missing two wonderful books. Two of my all time favorites!!!!

I’m sure you can find more detailed reviews either here on Goodreads or Amazon -

Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize.
- some of the location takes place near where I live and trails I hike.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!



OH MY GOSH ....

Here is another book I never wrote a review ---

Its sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


One of my all favorite books!

"The Dean of Western Writers" won the Pulitzer in 1972 and National Book Award in 1977 with his creative writing skills in Angle of Repose. Based on the unpublished letters of Mary Hallock Foote is an exploration told through Lyman, a historian himself, whose personal life has disintegrated. He returns home to write of his Grandparents trip, consisting of living in various uncivilized places and whose marriage survived through serious difficulty, misfortune and adversity. Susan's letters to her friend Augusta expresses her desire to live a different life than the one she is experiencing. These letters enthralls Lyman with the mixing his own memories to the point that he is charmed even more by his Grandmother.

Lyman struggles with the why's of Ellen's actions. He finds no forgiveness for her treatment of him, with their now severed marriage, which happens to be the same response Oliver gives Susan after the death of his daughter, no forgiveness. The symbol of the rose bushes puts a strain on their relationship, more so now. Their inability to communicate leaves the marriage at the point of "angle of repose" a slump, strained and slipping away. Failing to love the one they married and incapable to ignore unimportant annoying issues and eventually not to choose love or love the choice they made by breaking the vows of marriage. Does Lyman learn from the mistakes of his Grandparents?

Beautifully written landscape:
'They came out onto a plateau and passed through aspens still leafless, with drifts deep among the trunks, then through a scattering of alpine firs that grew runty and gnarled and gave way to brown grass that showed the faintest tint of green on the southward slopes and disappeared under deep snowbanks on the northward ones. The whole high upland glittered with light.'

Stegner's writing is breathtaking and enlightening.
A perfection in moral instruction with the current morals of marriage and the ability to forgive with unconditional love. He is remarkable in his skill to write about how I would perceive the way west really was and the challenges that came with that life. The novel "is old-fashioned...deliberately, conscientiously old-fashioned" and beautiful so.

Wallace Stegner’s 1971 novel Angle of Repose was a beautifully written, masterfully crafted, touchingly and ponderously enjoyable to read.

The dictionary tells us that an angle of repose means “the steepest angle at which a sloping surface formed of a particular loose material is stable”. A fitting enough title for a story that had a lot to do with mining and engineering, but in Stegner’s capable hands it comes to mean much more.

Telling the story of his Victorian grandparents as they helped to settle and make civilized the Wild West, retired historian Lyman Ward researches his grandmother’s old letters and recreates not just a biography and more even that a documentary of a family’s progression, but also a journey into what it means to be civil and what marriage and family ties can mean.

Interestingly, Stegner breaches the fourth wall and has Lyman as narrator also explore the world as he sees it. Crippled by an odd disease, broken by a failed marriage and scarred by damaging family relationship, the wheelchair bound Ward finds more interest in the Victorian times of his grandparents than in the free love and unrestrained mores of his own 1970s. But Stegner’s composition is a study in complexity, both in the grandmother’s tale and in Lyman’s own. Family means different things to different people in different times and Stegner’s gift of dialogue and characterization were frequently breathtaking.

I enjoyed this book immensely but I did not love it. It was too long and mostly depressing. But I very much respect Stegner’s skill and accomplishment. His mastery of English prose is matched by few and his subtle wordplay reminded me of Nabokov.

A very, very good book and I recommend it.

Researched and documented in detail, how Stegner's plagiarism was flat out theft. Non-writers don't seem to get it. What if you came home from vacation to find your house, cars, and everything gone? But plagiarism is even worse because the writing is the artist's personal creation and someone with a lack of ideas and no talent is taking it as their own.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...

===============

Definition of plagiarism. Given what's explained above, three out of the four bullet points would apply.

https://www.plagiarism.org/article/wh...

========

"I respected (Uncle) John Steinbeck for never jumping through all the hoops at Stanford, even if he kept going back and letting people like Wallace Stegner tell him what The Great American Novel ought to be. Uncle John could write rings around any of them."

-Ursula Le Guin

========

A more detailed account of how Stegner went about it. Makes me despise him even more. Total fraud.

https://www.altaonline.com/books/fict...

=========

Another fraud, disgusting....

https://lithub.com/australian-novelis...

It's perfectly clear to me that if a writer is born to write one story, this is my story.
Wallace Stegner




Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), born in Lake Mills Iowa, died in Santa Fe. Historian, novelist, short story writer, environmentalist. Jackson Benson, in his Introduction to this edition, identifies the “major strands of his career” as his love of the land, his concern for history, his advocacy of cooperation, his antagonism toward rugged individualism, and his dedication to writing. Some of his best known books include The Angle of Repose (awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and voted by readers of the San Francisco Chronicle the number one novel written about the American West), The Big Rock Candy Mountain, The Spectator Bird and Beyond the Hundredth Meridian - the latter a biography of the naturalist John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), a multifaceted man known for the 1869 expedition he led into the Southwest, a cartographic and scientific endeavor which included a raft trip down the Colorado River, the first documented passage by non-Native Americans through the Grand Canyon.

The title, the story behind the story

The angle of repose

Perhaps this is the place to mention how I heard of this novel. My wife and I had ventured to Arizona for a hiking trip, a year or two after the trip that I’ve shown pictures from in THIS review.

Well, we’d arranged to meet and have lunch with one of the guides we’d had on that previous trip, before embarking on the new adventure. So we met this fellow at a restaurant he’d told us how to get to, somewhere up there in northern Arizona. We got to talking books, and he mentioned the one we’re talking about here. “Have you ever read The Angle of Repose?”, he asked. ”Never heard of it.” “Best book I’ve ever read.” [then some other back and forth, and] “Do you know what the angle of repose is?” “No”, I admitted.

So he picks up a pretty full salt shaker, unscrews the top, dumps it out onto the table, points, and says, “That’s the angle of repose.”

(As our waitress goes past, she laughs, and he says, “She knows me.” With a grin.)





from Wiki ^^vv

“The angle of repose of a granular material is the steepest angle, relative to the horizontal, to which the material can be piled without slumping. At this angle, the material on the slope face is on the verge of sliding.”

There’s a great picture illustrating the angle of repose on the cover of the Penguin edition I have.






Eliot Porter. Window in Tin Wall, Eureka Colorado


Mary Hallock Foote






Mary Hallock Foote - if it’s not too strong a word, the inspiration behind the main character in the novel. Foote was born in Milton NY in 1847, died in Grass Valley CA in 1938.

Foote studied at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women, and by her early twenties was being employed as an illustrator by magazines. In 1876, just married, she followed her husband, reluctantly, to the American West; however, once there she found herself fascinated with the people and places she saw, and soon became something of a literary and artistic darling to those in the East who celebrated such things. For three decades she wrote novels and stories, and sent drawings, and wood engravings made from them, to various publications in the East. During all this time she corresponded with a dear female friend of hers back East (“Augusta” in the novel), whom she apparently envied to a great extent because Augusta’s life - immersed in the artistic milieu of the time, visiting Europe, knowing popular writers – was the life that Mary had once envisioned for herself.



The setting and telling of the story


Characters

Lyman Ward
- the narrator, 58 years old, retired history professor, wheelchair bound with a debilitating disease. Lyman is engaged in a study of – well, of his grandparents for sure, and beyond that, of time, or rather of people as they move through time. He is writing a narrative of the life of his grandmother and grandfather. His actual recollections of them are based on times he spent, as a child, at the “Zodiac cottage”, where the grandparents came to rest in their mutual slide, where they found their personal angle of repose.

Lyman’s son Rodman (and Rodman’s wife) doubt that he should be living as he does. He has a caretaker who comes daily, but still, they essentially want him in a nursing home. So Lyman himself is struggling to NOT find his angle of repose, desperately trying to keep on sliding, so as to avoid coming to rest.

Susan Burling Ward
- Lyman’s grandmother. The fictional character that is a version of Mary Hallock Foote. Her journey through life shares many correspondences with Foote’s journey – growing up in the east, marrying an engineer and moving west, her artistic capabilities, her friendship with a woman back East. The western locations in which Susan Ward lives follow a similar geographic path as Foote’s did (see below, Place.

Oliver Ward
- Lyman’s grandfather, Susan Burling Ward’s husband. The man who brings her to the West, in pursuit of his own dreams and ambitions. This character cannot be based too closely on Mary Hallock Foote’s own husband, because not too much is known about that real person, beyond the places that he and Mary moved to. The relationship between Susan and Oliver ward is pretty much made up, though there are clues, perhaps somewhat more than clues, in Mary’s correspondence. Actually seems to be quite a bit of Wallace Stegner’s own father mixed into his portrayal of Oliver Ward. This man, George Stegner, “was what his son later called a ‘boomer’, a man looking to find a fortune in the West and who, not finding it in one place, went to another.” This too could be said of the fictional Oliver Ward, but with qualification. Oliver not so much interested in making a fortune as in making a mark, a contribution to the development of the West, a contribution for which he would be remunerated only fairly, and a contribution which would be acknowledged by others. None of these modest goals were ever won by Oliver Ward. And modest they were, given the dedication, never-faltering effort, and engineering talent that he brought to the projects he worked on.



The narrative - Place and Time

Stegner’s story (that is, Lyman Ward’s story) relates to us Susan Ward’s and Oliver Ward’s life together, his engineering efforts, his constant care that she should have everything she needs and wants (at least those needs and wants which he has some conception of, though her inner life of harking back east to the world of Augusta, of publishing, art, books is oh so dim to Oliver, barely discernible in the world of the West that he perceives), and she frequently making drawings of the workers, the Mexican laborers, the miners. And then absorbed in the story, page after page, the reader is suddenly jolted by a passage that transports her out of the story and into the landscape, a passage which describes the beauty of a land sometimes harsh but always mysteriously beautiful … and at times the beautiful because of that harshness.

But first, a few words about …


Time

Lyman Ward’s narrative, when it’s situated in his own present, is often addressed to his grandmother, whose history he is attempting to resurrect. And he speculates on the differences produced by their respective places in time, musing on the Doppler Effect as humans may experience it over the train of extended years.

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 would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn’t I look forward to yours?

You yearned backward a good part of your life, and that produced another sort of Doppler Effect. Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished. It came to you secondhand in the letters of Augusta Hudson. You lived vicariously in her, dined with the literary great …

And later, as he tells of a New Year which determined, not immediately but only in the future, the course of Susan Ward’s life …

Governors Island, as I imagine that last day of December, would have floated like dirty ice out in the bay; the Jersey shore would have fumed with slow smokes.

The Doppler Effect is very apparent in my imagining of that afternoon. I hear it as it was now and as it is then. Nemesis in a wheelchair, I could roll into that party and astonish and appall the company with the things I know. The future is inexorable for all of them; for some it is set like a trap… So many things I know.

Place

But as moving as I found the author’s views of the former, it is, of course, the primacy of place which asserts itself in the novel.

The place being the series of those parts of (North) America’s West, in the 18th century, which host his protagonists, each one following the last. This illustrates the fact that one of Stegner’s main interests was the history of the West as it unfolded in the 19th century, as his own parents took part in that history.

He has divided his novel into 9 parts. The first and sixth take part in the East; the last is rooted in the Zodiac cottage of the narrator’s grandparents.

The other parts parallel (loosely) those places where Mary Hallock Foote moved to in her journey across this part of the earth.

The titles of these parts of the novel are:

Part II. New Almaden (in the mountains east of San Francisco)
Part III. Santa Cruz [Chapter 2 of this part is masterful, a telling of the scenery, the conversations of his protagonists, which reveal the different perspectives have of the locale, the people that surround them, and the place they are in on their journey.]
Part IV. Leadville (Colorado)
Part V. Michoacan (Mexico)
Part VII. The Canyon (Boise Idaho)
Part VIII. The Mesa (not fron from Boise)

Wiki tells us that Mary Hallock Foote, in her movements across that West with her husband Arthur Foote, lived at ”the New Almaden mine near San Jose, California; … Leadville, Colorado; Deadwood, South Dakota; Boise, Idaho; … Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico; finally Grass Valley, California, where Arthur advanced to managing the North Star mine." Not exactly the same geographic path as Susan Ward, but quite similar.

But it isn’t the trail of stations pulled into by Susan Ward that is so evocative of place. It is Stegner’s description of these places that was so deeply moving to me.

(New Almaden) Unending summer. It was hotter at the end of September than it had been in July. But the heat was more seen than felt, more hallucination than discomfort. It turned illusory even the things on which she had fixed in the attempt to make the strange world real. From her temperate veranda she now saw only void where the valley used to be – a gray, smoky void into which she peered, hunting distance and relief from the mirage of mountains that quivered around her with visible heat.

(Santa Cruz) … the casement opened on fog s white and blind as sleep. Beyond the wet shingles whose edge was overflowed by the ghost of a climbing rose, there were no shapes, solidities, directions, or distances… There was a slow, dignified dripping… “I love it,” Susan said. “In a way, I love it. It scares me a little. 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…”

(Leadville) She was at the edge of a meadow miles long, not a tree in it except for the wiggling line that marked the course of the Lake Fork. Stirrup-high grass flowed and flawed in the wind, and its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks and splashes of flowers – rust of paintbrush, blue of pentstemon, yellow of buttercups, scarlet of gilia, blue-tinged white of columbines… The air was that high blue mountain kind that fizzes in the lungs. Rising in her stirrup to get her face and chest full of it, she gave, as it were, a standing ovation to the rim cut out against the blue. From a thousand places in the grass little gems of unevaporated water winked back the sun.

(Michoacan) Nothing could have appealed to Grandmother’s romantic medievalism more than those houses. They arrived like knights errant, a seneschal swung open the gates, at the inner gate the lord met them … Vassals led away the lady’s palfrey and unbuckled the knight’s spurs … They dined at feudal boards with retainers clustered below the salt, while outside in courts lighted by torches there was minstrelsy on the guitar.
Fairyland, a storybook country of antique courtesy and feudal grandeur, with a passionate concentration of the picturesque on which Susan Ward throve. She left every great house with reluctance. As they jingled and shuffled along a road through some sun-baked high valley … she may have thought… that if Oliver’s report were only going to be different, they might still become part of that world.

(The Canyon) When they moved to the canyon camp, they expected to stay only through the summer. They stayed five years…
While they lived there it was hopeful struggle, not lost cause, and for a while it was a little corner of Eden.
Eden had three stories. The upper one ran from the canyon rim up high sage slopes toward the aspen groves, pines, mountain meadows, and cold lakes and streams of the high country. The middle story was the rounding flat in the side gulch where a spring broke out and where their buildings and garden were. The lowest story was the river beach… Even in low water the rapid below was a steady rush and mutter on the air.

(The Mesa) She let her weight down, heavy and tired, into the hammock. Bats wove back and forth, utterly soundless, across the openings between the piazza pillars. At first she could see them against the sky, erratic and flickering and swift; then she couldn’t be sure whether she still saw them or whether she only sensed them as movement across the dusk. The house behind her was as dark and empty as herself. Her eyes were fixed on the framed view of mesa, black hills, saffron sky. The last brightness of already-gone day burned darkly on a cloud that went slate-color as she watched. She saw a star, then another.
Utterly cut off, sunk into the West, cut off behind arid hills, she lay thinking backward to another piazza and the smell of other roses.



I’m indebted to my salt-shaker spilling friend who introduced me to this Pulitzer prize winning novel. A very dense novel, a masterpiece. Now that I’ve finally fulfilled a five-year attempt at reviewing it, I’m ready to read it again.



- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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Next review: The Unwinding An Inner History of the New America
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Previous library review: Nine Stories Salinger
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Having just finished this book, it will take me a while to "digest" this outstanding novel. At first, you think you are reading a book about the settling of the American West written by the grandson of one of the pioneers. That alone would make this a fascinating read. However, as you get further into the story, you begin to realize that the novel is as much about the teller of the tale (the grandson) as it is about his pioneering grandparents. It is a story about love, betrayal, self-sacrifice, and human frailty. Anyone interested in an absorbing human story that also incorporates American history should read this book. It's quite lengthy (almost 600 pages), but absolutely worth it!

I know I'm in the minority here and understand this is an award winning novel but I couldn't finish this book. It was boring, the characters seemed one-dimensional and the prose difficult to follow. No matter how hard I tried to finish I could not get through it. I even went out on a boat with my husband in the middle of a lake for two hours without distraction and ended up watching my husband fish as it was more enjoyable.

This is one of the few books (less than five in my lifetime) I was unable to finish. Kudos to those that did and enjoyed it. It wasn't for me and I tried hard to get there.

I have struck gold with this novel.

There has been a while since I have felt, when immersing myself in a book, so completely transported into its wide vistas. In this case it implied piercing through a double zoom, both in time and distance, for the tunnel vision created by the opened book took me to the wilderness of the American Far and Mid-West, with its imposing mountains and endless prairies, while it also transferred me back in time to the last quarter of the 19th Century.

This latter zooming back, however, was brought into a very disconcerting high relief as, in parallel to this novel, I was also reading Zola’s Nana, published in 1880 – the same period to which Angle of Repose was transposing me. Both worlds so different!!

And this sense of mental travel flying on the conjured images and enrapturing story surprised me every time I sat and opened Stegner’s book. An instant before I felt well-grounded in my world, but as soon as the facing pages faced me and I had begun reading just a few sentences, there I went off again, so rapidly that I did not even have time to say goodbye to my real surroundings.

This is the magic of reading.

But it was not just a process of blissed alienation. Apart from the many riches offered by this book, such as the story itself (a lesson in human ingenuity), the meditation on the play of destiny when it colludes with human will, the multifaceted characters, the play of history, the role of ‘educated’ culture, I was also fascinated by the exploration of the role of the writer of fiction.

For here we have a man (invented) who is a historian (therefore knows how to handle ‘truth’ out of documents and how to repress his own subjectivity when confronted to external events) but who sets to write a novel (invented) based on the documents such as letters and paper clippings that are real (but that they are real is also invented - or may be not) which will be however a biography (supposedly true) of his beloved grandmother (person known directly but subjectivity comes in). In the process he has to juggle (more room for subjectivity) with his (real) material – the documents – with his personal view of the character (family emotions - personal and subjective impressions) with his own imagination to fill in the gaps (such as the feelings and thoughts saturating someone else’s mind - again the realm of the subject).

But this is not all. There is an additional level. Wallace Stegner, the author, not the narrator above, based himself on actual documentation of a person who did live but who was not his grandmother. The person behind the character Susan Burling Ward, was the real Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938), a woman now, sadly, mostly forgotten. And controversy there was. Stegner obtained permissions from Foote’s family to use her private letters and documents (so these were true after all). But the use of truth and its mixture with fiction dissatisfied many. Some thought it was too truthful (without sufficient acknowledgements) while others found the fictional aspects disparaging.

Fiction and reality just never resolve - there is no Angle of Repose for them.




Mary Hallock Foote in her Grass Valley House, California.

Stegner is almost unheard of outside the U.S, and even in his home country he seems to remain at the periphery of the collective literary consciousness. For the life of me I cannot work out why. Apparently, even after winning the Pulitzer, the New York Times refused to review this novel.

The first point to note about Stegner is that he is a master of prose, a craftsman of great skill and control. Reading his work is a pleasure, pure and simple. There is perhaps something of the lyrical, or the Romantic, in his evocation of landscape and his love of the West but it never becomes overbearing. It is realism, of course, and (as unfashionable as that remains) is almost defiantly un-postmodern.

Nevertheless, the novel’s structure is interestingly complex. The narrator, a retired historian suffering from degenerative arthritis, attempts to distract himself from the unpleasantness of his present by writing a biography of his grandparents. This second level of narrative takes up the majority of the book and is drawn from the real life accounts of Arthur and Mary Hallock Foote. Indeed, some of Mary’s letters appear unedited in the text (totally unfounded and idiotic plagiarism accusations were made against Stegner, but he is always clear about his sources and his desire to create a fictional novel from such historical detritus).

Susan Burling, the narrator’s grandmother and focus of the novel, is a displaced, educated woman from the East coast who falls in love with an idealistic engineer seeking his fortune in the West. The conflict between the Idea and the Real, the imagined West and the brutal, tedious, dirty reality of frontier life, makes for a dynamic and dramatic narrative.

It is also a book about love, about what a marriage can mean, about betrayal and forgiveness and the stumbling truths of our lives. It is also, at times, simply beautiful.

“Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”

This was the first of his I read, and led me to read pretty much everything else he has written. I would not hesitate to recommend every single one of them. He is a true American master of the novel and deserves recognition as such.

Thank you Mr Stegner for opening a window to another world, for transporting me to another time and place and allowing me to experience a life of discovery, adventure, hardship, love and loss.

I try to keep a certain personal distance away from reviews and yet it becomes impossible when you read a book like this because in my circumstances as a sufferer of long term health issues which have been particularly difficult in recent weeks that confines me to bed for a good deal of the day, I felt I have been given a gift in reading this book. Every time I opened the pages of this epic adventure, I forgot about myself and travelled the world with Susan Ward on a rollercoaster of emotions.

I wrote the above part of my review with 100 pages to go and now having finished it I feel completely shaken and numb and yes heartbroken. I began to wonder if Oliver would ever find success and I was living in anticipation with Susan that perhaps the next venture would be the one, only to be disappointed all over again. But I still believed there would be a ‘happy ever after’ finale. I felt Lyman’s anxiety with 100 pages to go and another 50 years of a life to cover, for I wished it could go on and on, and then……. a tragedy so unimaginable and the realisation hit me, as it must have hit Lyman that there was no happy ending, it was Susan’s life that became so real for me and I don’t regret the time invested despite the pain I felt for these characters for I know that I have had the privilege to read a true masterpiece.

The two timelines were seamlessly woven together and I did not find myself jolted back and forth between stories as I do with most duel-time novels.
Every review I have read about Stegner’s works from GR friends has been positive but I think it is impossible to convey exactly how accomplished he is as a writer until you read a book such as this for yourself and he is without doubt a writer I wish to return to time and time again.

Complex story about a complex subject: marriage! It really got under my skin!