Rating: 
Summary: Good Fiction
Review: Wallace Stegner was a mystery to me before I saw his name on that top 100 list a few months ago. I didn't even have an idea about the type of fiction he wrote. A little research on the web revealed that Stegner was quite prolific, writing both fiction and non-fiction books concerning the American West. Stegner died in 1993 in a car accident at the age of 84."Angle of Repose," written in 1971, won a Pulitzer Prize for its intense portrayal of the lives of Susan, Oliver, and Lyman Ward. Lyman, a retired historian dying of a bone disease, is researching his grandparents' lives in order to find out why the two were alienated in their later years. Through the letters of his grandmother Susan, written to her lifelong friend Augusta, Lyman pieces together Susan's life in 19th century America. Susan is a fairly successful East Coast painter and author who marries mining engineer Oliver and takes part in his life in the American West. They move from California to Colorado, to Mexico and Idaho, always living a hardscrabble life. A family tragedy that Stegner fully reveals at the end of the book has lessons for Lyman's own estrangement from his wife Ellen. I agonized over this book. There were times I found myself doing other things in order to avoid reading the book. Don't get me wrong; it's not that it's a bad book. Stegner's ability to create atmosphere is second to none. I can't remember the last time I read an author who can bring background to life as Stegner does. My biggest problem with the book is the characters. Frankly, I don't like any of them. Susan is an elitist snob who domineers her husband and is totally in the grip of her gal pal Augusta. At one point, Susan tells Augusta that see would rather have her son (Lyman's father, Ollie) be unhappy then to bother Augusta on a visit. Susan also butts into Oliver's life on a continual basis. This is NOT a likeable woman. I'm not going to go into the unlikable aspects of Lyman. It is sufficient to say that they are legion, as you will see when you read the book. What hurts so much is that, by the end of the book, Stegner does make the characters interesting. Why couldn't he have accomplished this throughout the book? There are several levels to this book. One aspect is the parallel between Lyman's life with the life of his grandparents. Another seems to be a study of America, specifically life in the late 19th century vs. the 1960's. Stegner often has Lyman preaching against the moral banality of the 1960's. Stegner's portrait of the 19th century American West is one of growth, but Lyman's age is one of stagnation. Is Stegner saying that America has reached its "angle of repose"? I don't know, but the books multi-dimensional aspects do help erase some of the disappointment over the characters. I cannot, in good conscience, give this book five stars. The depth Stegner gives the book, and the redemption of the characters in the end, does help immensely. However, I'm leery about recommending this book. You have to be in the right frame of mind to get through this one. Would I read more Stegner novels? Probably. He is an excellent writer. It's not his fault I despised the characters.
Rating: 
Summary: A Tour de Force
Review: This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel weaves past and present, and four generations of an American family into a masterful tale that combines history and geography with fascinating, psychologically complex characters. I couldn't put it down! Our narrator, historian Lyman Ward, is a sick and bitter old man. Lyman's marriage has ended and he's confined to a wheelchair. He sets out to write a history of his grandparents' story, as pioneers carving out civilization in the mining camps of the 1870s West. Says Lyman, "I am not just killing time...many things are unclear to me, including myself, and I want to sit and think. Who ever had a better opportunity?" In the end his research tells him more about his own life than he's willing to admit. As Lyman says, this is a book about a marriage. "A masculine and a feminine. A romantic and a realist. A woman who was more lady than woman, and a man who was more man than gentleman." Susan Burling is an artist from a genteel family in the East; Oliver Ward's a miner and a geologist, passionate about the West. They love each other, but in the end, their differences tear them apart. Susan wants a career and can never accept the rough life in the West as any match for the cultured life and opportunities she gave up. She feels trapped in a marriage on the wrong side of the continent. Oliver will do anything for Susan except leave the West. Neither of them are perfect people, but we sympathize with each and their struggle to understand each other. Two stories, past and present, merge. In the end, Lyman learns that achieving peace in any life's "Angle of Repose" requires the gift of forgiveness.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning
Review: Beautiful novel with rich and evocative detail, telling the story of four generations of a family. The story focuses on the tale of the narrators grandparents, early pioneers of the American West.
Rating:
Summary: Nearly great
Review: Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Angle of Repose" is one of those highly readable, but long, works that has a sort of uncomplicated depth while coming at us from a number of narrative angles. In many ways, it is a personal history of the American West - not the conquering or taming of it, but the hardscrabble give and take of a pioneering family trying to live and love each other under often impossible conditions. Lyman Ward, confined to a wheelchair, is a historian researching his grandmother's life in the West, mostly through his own need. Since he doesn't have detailed documents about every conversation, much of the book is conjecture, what he thought was said or what happened. Lyman's own spin is as interesting as the concrete documents, the letters from this not high-born but high-minded Eastern woman tied by love and convention to her simpler, earthy man, letters sent east to her skeptical best friend. Susan and Oliver Ward are all over the West, from California to Mexico to Idaho, chasing Oliver's dreams that never quite pan out. In the present, Lyman Ward is going through his own difficulties, and his research and writing tells him something about himself. Much of the book is masterful. The descriptions of the West are loving and the writing evocative. That said, the book is too long; you could lop off 80 pages with little problem, and some sections, "The Canyon" and the early part of "The Mesa", for instance, drag. Frankly, I think there should have been more about Lyman in the here and now; the extended passages about him that close the book we don't seem as well prepared for as we should have. These are minor quibbles, though. "Angle of Repose", though not truly an adventure tale, has an adventurous spirit, and would get a near-great 4.5 stars if allowed. When it was over, I found myself more moved than I expected to be, and the characters stayed with me long after I was finished reading.
Rating:
Summary: Revel in the Phrasing
Review: A retired professor, confined to a wheelchair in his family home in northern California, collects notes to write his grandmother's life story and ends up telling his own. There is no raucous action, no grand finale, no hysterical laughter. The book's strength comes not from the plot but from the way the words are set out. Many characters float in and out of this exploration of life in the West but it is Lyman Ward, the modern narrator, whose tale binds the entire work. And Lyman Ward is dying. Having sensed tragedy on several levels and enraptured by the language, I was in no hurry to finish Angle of Repose. At times I put the book down, uninterested in finding out how the characters' often miserable lives turned out. The ending is a blur. But all of those reservations are overshadowed by detailed recollections of life in the mining towns of New Almaden, Colorado, Idaho, and Grass Valley, and stunning descriptions of desolation, heartbreak, love, and trust. I loved how the story shifted from then to "now" and back again, sometimes leaving you wondering about time and space for a page or two. I grew up around many of the places Stegner includes in the book and I am grateful for his descriptions of life before the shopping centers, highways, and relatively easy living came to strip away the raw nature and risk involved in living there. Controversy surrounding Stegner's un-acknowledged use of the Foote letters as basis for Susan Ward's writings does not detract from the best parts of the book (and there are so many of them). His writing is rich and luscious beyond (my) words. Even if you don't finish it, read some of this book and revel in the phrasing.
Rating:
Summary: Take your sweet time to ponder...
Review: I really wanted to love this book that my bookstore guru gave 5 stars. I don't think I'll ever NOT like a book I've chosen to read. Afterwards I still have that curious feeling that these characters are my friends and teachers and now I have to bid a sad farewell. But I didn't really LOVE these characters, but deeply had a respect for them...well except Augusta who annoyed me because I don't warm up to Eastern Society-types. Susan made me more understanding though. I got over my initial and recurring problem that I had personally with this book. I kept wanting it to be Michener's Centennial. I wanted MORE adventure and history at the locations Susan and Oliver dwelt in, but this was Stengner NOT Michener...and this has a wealth of great descriptive prose and simile that rivaled anything I'd read. So once I disciplined myself, the book seeped into me. It wasn't tedious, but steady. It read fast only a few times for me, mostly it was something to savor and liken to oneself. This revealed the treasure it contains thematically. I liked the 4-generations compared between the lines too. Usually disruptions in the flow of a novel's base story irritate me a bit, but this had an even inspiring effect. In my GREAT imagination, I found myself "writing" my own 4-generation story as I read. My Grandparents' role in shaping the west that was something not very Victorian in morality emerged, I confess... and we're continuing the saga some of us! This book will stir you to thinking long and seriously if you let it in. For that I ought to give it another star.
Rating:
Summary: A haunting story, but...
Review: First of all, I wanted to like this book more than I did. It was the innaugural choice for a newly-formed book club of college professors here in Idaho, so with much of the book taking place in Boise, I wanted to "connect" somehow to the state I'm in.
The "historical" story between Oliver and Susan was by far the most satisfying. I didn't really appreciate the way the story was "framed" through the eyes of Lyman Ward, Oliver's grandson. Those sections of the book seemed the most tedious to me, although I do understand their relevance.
Their lives are unhappy, full of unfulfilled desires, and thus tragic. It's a haunting story that left me somewhat unsatisfied at its ending.
Overall, I would recommend it for its strongest point, a sweeping view of western life in the 1880's.
Rating:
Summary: One of the great novels about the real West
Review: One of Wallace Stegner's greatest peeves as a Western writer was the myth of the West that was promulgated in the bulk of the books about the region. The vast majority of Western novels and movies tended to perpetuate utter myths about the West, instead of grappling with the West itself. Perhaps no American writer knew the West as well as Stegner, not excepting his student Edward Abbey. An inveterate hiker and explorer, he camped or walked nearly every area in the West. He wrote innumerable books about the West and took time to visit every spot he wrote about. For instance, in writing of John Wesley Powell's trip down the Colorado, he retraced his route to gain the greatest possible grasp of what he saw. He traveled the trails that the Mormons and others took in relocating to the West. He was one of the few people to hike along Glen Canyon before Lake Powell consumed it. Moreover, he was raised in the West, spending his childhood on what remained on the frontier. Given all this, I find it utterly astonishing that a couple of reviewers should have the impression that he does not know whereof he wrote. For instance, one reviewer wrote, "Bottom line: the West has a geography, and its denizens a temperament, that demands that we write and read about it in a way that does justice to the hard realities of life in a barren place." Why he would imagine that Stegner, who was intimately familiar with the geography, was one of its denizens, and knew first hand the hard realities of the place by spending his childhood in a variety of barren places, utterly baffles me. I suspect that it is because the book writes about the REAL West and not the West of the Imagination. Lyman Ward, distinguished historian (Stegner himself, though primarily a writer of fiction, was the author of several works of history, though the character was based on former colleague of his who suffered from a physical condition precisely like Ward's) is studying family documents with an eye to writing a book detailing the story of his grandmother and grandfather. The novel is brilliant on multiple levels. It is a fascinating study of the travails of an invalid struggling with his own enormous physical sufferings. It is a vivid and accurate retelling of a story of what life war actually life in the frontier in the late nineteenth century. But primarily it is a powerful and overwhelming reflection on the nature of human frailty, love, and the healing power of forgiveness. Although Ward reflects on the marriage of his grandparents, this is actually a surrogate for confronting the tragedies in his own, and whether he will rigidly refuse to forgive his wife for her wrongs against him, or whether he will allow redemption and healing to take place. The novel has aroused considerable controversy among some feminist writers, for an interesting reason. Stegner himself was a very strong supporter of women's rights (indeed, although he was uncomfortable with the youth movements of the sixties, he remained an old school liberal all his life, with powerful convictions about toleration and acceptance of all people regardless of race, creed, or gender). Stegner became aware of the unpublished letters of the 19th century writer and painter Mary Hallock Foote. He gained permission from a family member to incorporate portions of those letters in a work of fiction, and he did so in ANGLE OF REPOSE, Foote providing the explicit model for Susan Burling Ward. The controversy has rested in whether Stegner used too much of the prose of Mary Hallock Foote in his book. Some have estimated that as much as 10% of the entire text might stem from Foote. My own take is that his use of Foote's letters was far more creative than plagiaristic. For one thing, he didn't so much take the story he tells from Foote's letters as builds a brilliant story around them. Also, some of the details of the novel of greatest import--such as the question of Susan Ward's possible adultery--were not part of Foote's story at all. Moreover, while the letters that Stegner uses are quite good, they do not match the other sections of the book where Stegner writes in his own voice. Stegner is clearly a better prose writer than Foote, and why a better writer would be thought to have need of a lesser one to generate a novel is difficult to explain. Moreover, Foote in no way contributed to the architecture of the novel as a whole, and she obviously played no role in the contemporary sections of the book. Finally, to the degree that Ms. Foote is remembered at all today, it is entirely because of Wallace Stegner. He not only included some of her work in anthologies he did earlier, but elevated part of her story to a central place in this very great novel. Given all this, I'm not sure how Stegner can be justly accused of any wrongdoing. Regardless of the controversy, this remains not merely one of the greatest novels ever written about the West, but one of the finest American novels of the second half of the twentieth century. Stegner remains a staggeringly underappreciated as a writer. He wrote in a beautiful, distinctive, gorgeous prose that not even his extremely illustrious stable of students (Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry, Ivan Doig, and many, many others) has been able to match. Edward Abbey said shortly before Stegner's death following an automobile accident that he was the only living American writer deserving of the Nobel Prize, and I believe he was right.
Rating:
Summary: Moving and Thought-Provoking
Review: I couldn't put this one down. The prose was lovely, the descriptions so vivid, the characters so complex, the narrative threads so surprising. As I watched Susan Burley's life unfold, my reading of the book became intensely personal. I found so many parallels to my own life, and loved the thematic questions Stegner seemed to be asking: What makes or breaks a marriage? And why do we hold on or give up when the going gets tough? I loved the fact that, in my opinion, Stegner ended the book with the idea that it's better to hold on to a marriage, despite its flaws, its unforgiveable errors. That's an idea you don't hear much of in this modern world. The book made me take a closer look at my own marriage and at how perception is everything in how we view and treat ourselves, our spouses, our relationships. We can hold on and make the best of things, or we can give up. I'm glad Susan held on and didn't give up. A materpiece. I want to read all of Stegner's books now.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, thoughtful, mesmerizing
Review: Angle of Repose is a commentary on marriage, what makes it work and what makes it fail. A severely disabled (wheelchair bound) professor, whose marriage has failed, researches and writes the saga of his pioneer grandparents, a couple whose marriage lasted in spite of tremendous adversity and tragedy. The professor's attendant, the woman who bathes and dresses him, gets him up each morning and to bed each night, also has a failed marriage.
Stegner won the Pulitzer for Angle of Repose; even a casual reading of the first half of the book tells you why. It's a big, long, lush, slowly progressing story that weaves the distant past with the near past with the present beautifully and seamlessly.
Superb. Read this one and savor it. Don't rush yourself.
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