Angle of Repose

Rating:
Summary: Settling into our lives
Review: After reading Crossing to Safety I was hungry for another Stegner novel. It was for this novel he won the Pulitzer prize. While at Zion's this year Jen Nuttal proclaimed the best thing about the book was the title. While I found a lot more to like than just the title, I did find this book harder to become engrossed with than Crossing to Safety This book was not as tight a novel as the former. And a couple of things bothered me as I began reading. First was his literary device of a "modern" (1970's) grandson telling writing the history of his grandmother, where the grandson often uses letters of the grandmother directly, and other times the grandson fictionalizes or dramatizes dialogue to to tell the story. Often in the course of the dialogue the grandson breaks from dialogue and interposes his own modern voice and cuts the story short. Another thing that bothered me was how he often broke the story in what I thought awkward ways at the romantically intimate points of the story. Finally I understood Stegner needing a device to tell his story, but the modern aspects of the story initially seemed at times contrived. Interestingly Stegner addressed and resolved each concern in the course of the novel, just not when he introduces the wrinkles but much later in the story.

Despite these irritations and pacing somewhat slower than Crossing, I really came to love the story and about midway through became thoroughly entranced. Some of the highlights for me were: The richness of the relationships that Stegner writes about. The fact that 90% of the book is written in the first hand voice of a 19th century Victorian woman, quite an accomplishment for a writer. The vivid descriptions of the early west. The insight into the Victorian world view, that had never really been as approachable for me as through the eyes of Susan. Finally was the concept of the settling of a life into the Angle of Repose. This as well as Crossing really got me thinking about the winding down of life and where your at and what your doing, versus how I have lived so much of my life up till now. The innocent days of youth, the troubled turbulent teenage years, and the twenties and now thirties pushing pushing pushing up the hill so fast that I sometimes don't stop to ask where I am going. There is such a sense throughout Angle of Repose of striving for the break, waiting to arrive, wanting to prove, holding out for hope and in then end settling to an angle that while reposed was not more a compromise of two lives uneasily leaning against each other rather than comfortably living together.

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Rating:
Summary: The Wrong Angle
Review: This is one of the worst novels written about the American West. Why?

Let's start with the style It's positively Victorian, like Thackary or Hardy on a bad day. Stegner utilizes this overblown prose, presumably because he wants to de-mythologize the West by getting us to realize that people like Lyman Ward's grandmother carried their European assumptions with them and never relinquished them, to their own detriment. Forget that. Stilted prose that tries too hard to sound "cultured" doesn't capture the raw power and unforgiving extremes of Western landscapes. The novel occasionally comes close, as with its harrowing description of the approach to Leadville, but the rest doesn't deliver.

Stegner cheats with his protaganist, Lyman Ward. The guy's a cripple, so we have a built-in sympathy for him. But other than that, we have no reason to care whether he unravels the mystery of his grandparents' marriage and its subsequent denoument. I lost interest in him after the first thirty pages.

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. Stegner fails to do this, and so do his characters. Their failure might have been interesting--but unfortunately, it isn't.

Rating:
Summary: An important novel of immense pathos and depth
Review: Angle of repose, as defined in Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning work, is the angle of incline along a riverbed at which dirt and rocks will not slide. More profoundly, it serves as a permeating theme throughout this novel about an elderly amputee who is confined to a wheelchair but remains determined to pursue an independent and active existence. He is historian Lyman Ward, grandson of Susan and Oliver Ward, and through the prism of historical analysis he presents the lives of his grandparents. As he peruses his grandmother's letters to her best friend, we learn of Susan and Oliver's adventures and challenges as pioneers of America's frontier. Oliver, an engineer, dedicates himself first to mining and later to irrigation projects. Susan, an artist and writer, captures the rugged beauty of 19th century western America in her work, while struggling to maintain a marriage and a family under difficult conditions.

This novel, at its heart, is a work about personal endurance and self-discovery. As Lyman explores the hardships of his grandparents' life, he comes to learn more about his own ability to stand firm in the face of difficulty. Lyman's narrative voice is wise, objective, and admiring, at times reminiscent of Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. Through this voice Stegner has managed to capture that elusive feel of what it means to be human and to truly live. His characters ring true in all their beauty and all their flaws. And his message is a powerful one - that life can be a sedentary existence or an active one, and that it is our decision how we react to the circumstances of our environment.

Rating:
Summary: An uncommonly good book about self and place
Review: I have far more books on my shelves than I've read. This one I have read, greedily. It is as seductive as reading old letters from an attic. And essentially that is what the main character, Lyman Ward (crippled by disease, seperated from his wife), is doing, taking the voluminous letters of his grandmother's roughshod and proud experience in the West, and forming some semblance of her life, and what it means to his (which he consider's essentially over . . .). There really are two stories here, and to toggle from one to the other (from the late 1800's to the 1970's) and to say such true things about people and America, is genius on the part of Stegner.

Rating:
Summary: Solemn Reflections and Lives
Review: Not since Clarissa walked onto her steps in "The Hours," have I immediately loved a character as I did Susan Ward. The life of Susan, as told by her grandson, starts out with much vibrance and excitement. But the parallel story of her grandson's life gives the story an edge- and a glimpse into why he is in pursuit of understanding (and documenting) his grandmother.

The conclusion of these lives (to which we are privy) is not simple nor cheap. But it does stand apart from the rest of the novel. And it does not offer comfort- but rather a glimpse into a set of lives that might be more real than we'd like to admit.

Rating:
Summary: Not Easy, but well worth it
Review: I read Angle of Repose over a couple of week period when I had just recently left the West to come to DC for an internship. I'd never taken a whack at Stegner before, and found the beginning of the book a little dry and tedious.

Continuing on, Stegner leads you through a love affair with place and time, that had me longing for home in a terrible way. While at times it can be difficult to remember exactly what time it is in the book, I had no real problem following along.

The hardest part was dealing with the fact that I did not want to finish it, so I kept finding excuses to delay the ending, kept me from reading for way too long. Everyone should read this book, just don't do it away from home.

Rating:
Summary: poignant, wistful retrospective on the 19th Century
Review: This book is really two books: the primary story concerns the history of the marriage of the narrator Lymon's grandparents; the secondary story is a largely derogatory commentary on the alternative lifestyles of the early 1970's, starring Shelly,Lymon's caretaker and secretary, the sexually "liberated" Berkeley student. Not being an engineer, I'm not sure I can fully appreciate all the nuances of his grandfather's job, but in any case this in secondary to his intellectual and sophisticated Quaker grandmother's career. Moving out West after marrying his
far-less-intellectual grandfather, she chronicles the opening of the West in the late 1800's by sending back sketches and written profiles to Eastern intellectual magazines, while also keeping up a prolific correspondence with her best friend back East, Augusta. The main tension in the novel arises from the conflict between her intellectualism and his macho lifestyle, and their somewhat difficult life in California, Colorodo, Mexico, and most notably,in Idaho, where she attempts to raise her two children (a third dies young) in something approaching Eastern civility. She appears to be somewhat happy as a young bride but becomes increasingly disconsolate as time passes since her husband's schemes often fail. Further, he is the silent type, though he does try his best to provide for her. The novel focuses on the first 20 years of their marriage, culminating in an extra-marital affair of some sort by his grandmother, for which his grandfather never forgives her; but they do nevertheless live out the remaining decades of their lives together in California, somewhat uneventfully. As counterpoint to this wistfully-told story is the conflict between the narrator and the Berkeley-educated countercultural Shelly, who takes care of the narrator in his old age. Lymon, a former professor, believes in the importance of history and tradition while Shelly, as well as his own son, rebel against history, espouse the sexual revolution, and want to remake society from the ground up. Lymon's wife also leaves him after having an affair, further complicating his life, and paralleling the life of his grandmother. The novel also abounds in subtle humour particularly in reference to Lymon's self-deprecating wit regarding being confined to a wheelchair, and his relationship with Shelly.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose is simply a wonderful novel--a serious piece of fiction about a marriage and marriage itself. Lyman Ward, a fifty-something professor whose own marriage has disintegrated has returned to his childhood home to write of the marriage of his grandparents, perhaps to determine why their marriage lasted through tremendous adversity when his own could not. His grandparents, Susan and Oliver Ward met in New York the 1870s, where she was a promising illustrator and he an engineer. They marry and travel West, living in various places, California, Idaho. Susan feels that she never quite fits into this "uncivilized" place, expressing her unsettleness beautifully in her letters to her good friend Augusta, who lives the life in New York that perhaps Susan felt she was destined to live. Lyman is fascinated with his grandmother, telling her story as he discovers how it unfolds through reading these Augusta letters, adding what he remembers from his own childhood. Lyman suffers from a degenerative bone disease and must rely on young Shelly Rasmussen to help him construct this book on his grandmother. Shelly has just escaped a failed "marriage" of her own. Lyman tells the story of his grandmother while also telling us both his and Shelly's stories seamlessly. Stegner's writing is beautiful and evocative. Angle of Repose is a big, beautiful, unique novel. Stegner's method of weaving the stories together works marvelously and so many of his sentences are simply perfect. Susan Ward's life(and Lyman's and Shelly's) is the believable story of a flawed human being--it's not picture perfect--there are no rosy endings for us here. However, the novel is very satisfying. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: quite lovely . . .
Review: Angle of Repose is a rather dull book. The events are often detailed to the point of inertia and the particular focus of much of the narrative could honestly be said to appeal to a rather specialized audience . . .

This notwithstanding I absolutely adored this beautiful novel. It is gorgeously written--gorgeously!--and describes the base encampments and the procedures for digging mines and irrigating fresh land with a painstaking, lovely composed sense of human understanding. The characters begin as almost secondary concerns, people of mild interest and slightly extraordinary significance who faded into the dusk of America expanding weatward and were in fact consumed by the great glory that was beyond them.

Wallace Stegner can make you love the land--even a cynical urbanite (such as myself) and put you in place with the slowly building blocks of a union and a nation, taking it all apart piece by piece with loving slow-motion until the emotional pay-offs creep up on you, overwhelm you and plant you in the isolated depths of individual shame and regret, of guilt not to be forgiven and life soon-to-be-ending.

Stegner's writing puts me in mind of Peter Taylor, another regionalist with a gentle approach to gritty, sometimes brutal stories of selfhood and the effects of singular ambition on the periphery made up of all of us.

A wonderful reading experience, do not allow the slow, sometimes dripping pace of this wonderful novel to distract you from the interest in what you must somehow suspect might be coming. It is also a terrific, satirical take on the bias and prejudice that historians and editors exhibit when compiling the details of someone else's life.

Rating:
Summary: Loved it for all the reasons everyone else hated it!
Review: Maybe I might be missing the point here, but all the weaknesses that others found in the book seamed to me to be intently placed. First off Stegner is typically classified as a non-fiction writer himself. This seamed to me to be the key point of this novel. It was a satiric comment on his own profession. It seems to me to be a loving look but anti sentimental look at non-fiction writing. This is why there is a groping for something substantial in the historical narrative. Imagine writing a story about your relatives. Would they be interesting characters? How would you feel about finding not so glamorous undertones to you're family story? So of course the characterizations is bland, if this book were a page-turner full of memorable charachters how true to he process. So in conclusion I want to add a note to those who have not read the book yet: Don't read it expecting a page turner with characters you hold dear, read it through the interplay between the sections as man and his work, it will make more sense I hope.

I could be completely wrong about this analysis, but it actually made this book a page turner/memorable character book in a off handed sort of way through reading it in the above mentioned manner...