Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital + Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
This is a difficult book to describe without spoiling the entire story. There are two plot lines at work: the narrator, a severely disabled and reclusive scholar writing a history of his literary grandmother, and the life of that grandmother, her husband, and children, eking out a difficult life in 19th-century American West.
Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.
Stegner is a favorite writer of mine, and I trusted him through the first 500 pages that all this story would transcend the descriptions of an untamed West and the travails of unlucky pioneers.
My patience was rewarded by a spectacular ending, though any other writer might have lost me long before I turned that final page.
I’ve now read four of Stegner’s novels, saving this one, his Pulitzer Prize winner, for the last. I thought Crossing to Safety was his best, and Big Rock Candy Mountain absolutely gutted me. Still, I think this one will stick with me for a long time.
Highlights
I am neither dead nor inert. My head still works. Many things are unclear to me, including myself, and I want to sit and think. Who ever had a better opportunity?
Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.
Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.
“What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose’?” “I don’t know what it meant for her. I’ve been trying to make out. She said it was too good a phrase for mere dirt. But I know what it means for me.” “What?” “Horizontal. Permanently.”
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.
Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.
