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.
Retired historian Lyman Ward lives in his grandparents' home in Grass Valley, California. A horrific bone disease consumes him and the ruins of an amputated leg-stump remind him that he is an invalid severed from his family and his past. Lyman hates his ex-wife who cheated on him almost as much as he hates the culture of the sixties, and he must decide whether to accept the ex-wife’s remorseful overtures of reconciliation.During his confinement surrounded by his grandparents' possessions and papers, Lyman writes the history of his grandparents--mining engineer Oliver Ward and writer/artist Susan Ward. "My antecedents support me here as the old wisteria at the corner supports the house." (15) As Lyman reconstructs his grandparents’ lives, he begins to understand his own. History still has a few more lessons to teach this old-school historian.“Angle of Repose” won the Pulitzer Prize and was ranked by the Modern Library at one of the 100 Best English Language Novels of the 20th Century. (Wallace Stegner was a mentor and friend to one of my new favorite authors, Wendell Berry.) Stegner uses evocative language of the sparse and majestic western landscape, and the point of view and the narrative shift between Lyman in the first-person present (1970’s) and grandmother’s present (19th Century). Grandfather Oliver Ward was an optimistic and capable engineer, perfectly suited to the rigors of the west. He was tough, determined, taciturn and generous, and we follow the failures of his careers in mining, irrigation and land development. Grandmother Susan Ward, on the other hand, was an artistic and refined Easterner who followed Oliver out west but grew to resent him for the years of deprivation, disappointment, and dislocation. (Though not settled conclusively, there are strong hints that Susan was a secret lesbian who settled too quickly on Oliver when her heart’s desire married a man.)The grandparents’ story moves from Grass Valley, California, to the mining camps in the Santa Clara Valley and Santa Cruz, and then to Colorado, Mexico, Idaho, and then back to Grass Valley. Most of the settings where the story unfolds are hardscrabble mining towns without much culture or refinement. There are issues of fidelity and forgiveness and sexual repression in the grandparents’ lives that Lyman learns and that gradually give him insight into how he should handle his own messy family problems. As he works through these problems, Lyman plays the curmudgeon against the spirit of the times. “Soft-headedness irritates me... “beautiful thinking” ignores history and human nature: Look. I like privacy. I don’t like crowds. I don’t like noise. I don’t like anarchy. I don’t even like discussion all that much. I prefer study…. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild without confusing itself with it…. I’m put off by irresponsibility. I never liked Whitman. The civilization of men who lived lives of quiet desperation was stronger than Thoreau was and maybe righter. It outvoted him and swallowed him….and was nourished by him.… 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…. Civilizations grow and change and decline—they aren’t remade. (518-19) Lyman’s mother died when he was an infant, and he was raised by his grandmother: She saw in me a … chance to raise up an ideal gentleman. Rough and dangerous play, adventures into old mine shafts, long hikes and rides, those her life in the West led her to accept and even encourage: Let me be tried in manliness. But honesty, uprightness, courtesy, consideration for others…sensibility to poetry and nature those she took as her personal obligation. (313) As in the grandparent marriage, which combines the scientific and the artistic-- Stegner appropriates scientific concepts to explain emotional relationship of the characters, which mirror the marriage between a scientific man and an artistic woman. These terms include “the angle of repose” and “the doppler effect.” Angle of Repose. The title, “angle of repose,” is an engineering term, describing the angle at which dirt and debris stop sliding down a slope and come to rest. "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." (211) At the angle of repose there is a meeting, some intersection of lines 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. (568) [A keystone is the wedge-shaped stone piece at the apex of an arch, which is the final piece placed during construction and locks all the stones into position, allowing the arch to bear weight.]To me, Angle of Repose connotes a certain surface rest (serenity) that coexists with the precarious instability of landslide (tension). It also mirrors the vertical intersections and competing forces of strength and civility; science and art; the virtues of the masculine and the feminine. Doppler Effect. Another recurring theme in “Angle of Repose is the concept of the Doppler Effect, the shift in sound emanating from a moving object. The narrator describes his grandmother as experiencing a sort of reverse Doppler Effect, "yearning backward [hearing] the receding sound of what you had relinquished." "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."(25)Conclusion. This is a novel of the American West and a novel of marriage that gives us perspective from which to evaluate our own relationships. As for me, the duality in the marriage of Oliver and Susan reflects my own divided self—within which competes a storm of conflicting forces. I know all of Stegner’s characters because I am like each of them in some way. I appreciate Stegner’s insight into how these warring factions within me might peacefully coexist in an angle of repose that prevents a landslide. Civilization needs balanced people who preserve and build on the past rather than destroy. November 6, 2012
What do You think about Angle Of Repose (1992)?
4.5 stars.I was trying to think of a quote from this book which might sum it up best. I think I've narrowed it down to this:I suppose in a way we deserve the people we marry.(p. 204)Now, I'm just trying to figure if I agree with that statement and to what extent.There were so many beautiful (achingly so) sections in this book, I lamented the fact that it wasn't mine to highlight and mark up (yes, library, I was good to your book).To spare you, I will limit myself to three: 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. It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood. I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually--and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure.A powerfully quiet book about the realities of marriage, work, unrealized hopes and dreams, unmet expectations, disappointments and joys-- and how we, ultimately, cope with all of them. What we will choose to do, how we will respond.
—Gloria
I read this book based largely on the Goodreads reviews. Maybe I'm not as smart as other reviewers, or maybe other reviewers give it high praise because it was a Pulitzer Prize winner and they didn't want to look dumb (something to which I have no aversion), or maybe this was just a fluke, but I didn't think this book was worth reading. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I started the book about 4 or 5 times, and when I finally did slog through it, it was in 5 and 10 page increments. I just couldn't get rolling with it. My bottom-line, four word review is: This book is boring.Not to say that it didn't have good points. There were two real strengths, in my opinion. (1) As others have pointed out, Stegner has an extraordinary way with words. His descriptive prose is remarkable. It flows like poetry from line to line to line, and definitely sets a scene. (2) This is the only Pulitzer Prize winning book that I have read that contains the phrase, "I felt a hot erection rising from my mutilated lap." Ah, memories of seventh grade algebra.But those don't make up for the bad. NOTHING HAPPENS. Maybe I should put a spoiler alert there (or here), but nothing happens. The book has no plot. They go from place to place to place. He's unsuccessful. She is a pouting snob. They wait for their break. They move. Lather, rinse, repeat. Don't get me wrong, I can enjoy books about relationships and internal strife and family struggles. I don't need hermaphrodite crack dealers racing jet skis through burning buildings while cheating on their KGB spy/stripper girlfriends or anything. But I do need some plot. Also, the main character, the narrator's grandmother, is one of the more annoying characters that I have ever come across. I spent the majority of the book hoping that she'd step in front of a train. Alas, she doesn't. It took me 550 arduous pages to learn this.
—BT
i give it two stars for the gentle, thorough, and consistently engaging prose, which drew me in despite my growing qualms about the book as i read. (although i should note that this praise doesn't hold for the final chapter, which felt like an incongruous cop-out). stegner explores the potentially fascinating intersections of several themes--manifest destiny, history, individualism, pride and gender roles, to name a few--but he does so with the painfully dated social conservatism of his narrator's voice (the book was first published in 1970). while stegner's storytelling takes a slightly more critical bent than its narrator and principal characters ever do, nonetheless the book reads a bit too much like a wistful eulogy for the good ol' US institutions of marriage, pioneers, capitalist exploitation, gentility, land removal and racism.
—Emma
