Angle of Repose (Contemporary American Fiction)
Angle of Repose (Contemporary American Fiction) Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery–personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents’ remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America’s western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he’s willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.
Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward’s investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. The result is a deeply moving novel that, through the prism of one family, illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past.
Customer Review: Wallace Stegner’s Perfect ‘Angle’ on Marriage.
I’m an avid reader. Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose is always the first book I think of whenever anyone asks me, “What’s your favorite novel?” Based on the correspondence of Mary Hallock Foote (later published as a memoir, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote), Stegner’s 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning novel tells the story of a wheelchair-bound historian, Lyman Ward, who is determined to dictate a biography of his frontier-era grandmother, Susan Burling Ward. Lyman is a retired history professor, divorced, and estranged from his son, a teacher at Berkeley, and family. In dictating his grandparents’ biography, we learn tha that, much like Mary Hallock Foote, Susan Burling Ward was a gifted New York City writer and artist. After marrying Oliver Ward, she abandoned her artistic career in New York to move west with her new husband, a mining engineer, whose never-ending pursuit of work that led him to Colorado, California, Mexico and Idaho. (Stegner draws extensively from Foote’s letters without credit to describe the novel’s primitive settings in Leadville, New Almaden, Idaho, and Mexico. To give his novel a sense of historic authenticity, he also introduces many actual mining engineers of the 1800s into his narrative.) In examining grandparents’ life together, Lyman Ward is not only forced to confront his own life, but his failed marriage, as well. In addition to the novel’s historical realism, this is precisely what makes Angle of Repose such a profound experience in literature. The novel resonates with emotional depth and brilliant insights. As its title suggests, Stegner’s novel is ultimately a meditation on the resting point of marriage no longer subject to collapse. Highly recommended.
G. Merritt
Customer Review: Slow at first then couldn’t put it down.
I have sort of a rule on 400 plus page novels to read at least 100 pages before giving up on it. I’m glad I followed that rule on Angle of Repose. I had to work to get page 100 but then I was hooked. Give this book a chance you’ll be glad you did.
Tags: Cheap Fiction book, Fiction book, Cheap Literature book, Literature book, Literature and Fiction book
