Angle of Repose

By Wallace Stegner

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1972.

Lyman Ward is a disabled older man, who, in order to occupy his time and also to help him understand himself and his family better, writes the life of his pioneering grandmother Susan. Lyman is divorced, his wife left him shortly after his surgery to removed his diseased leg. His wife left him for his surgeon and Lyman is understandably bitter. His son thinks Lyman should forgive and let the ex back into his life if for no other reason than that Lyman needs someone to look after him.
The grandmother, Susan, is a gentlewoman, raised on the East Coast and planning on a career as an artist/illustrator in the 19th century. She falls for an engineer from the far West, Oliver. Her friends fear she is throwing herself away when she marries Oliver Ward. Too bad for Susan that she enters her marriage with an unrealistic expectation of what their lives together will be. Susan thinks that she and Oliver will have to spend, at the most, ten years in the west, while Oliver makes his fortune. Then, as she sees it, they will move back east and take their place in the East Coast artistic, genteel society that Susan craves. But that doesn't happen.
Oliver goes from job to job, location to location, always chasing after the success that continually eludes him. At first, Susan goes happily along, but as the years pass she loses confidence in her husband. Her feelings become even more bleak as Oliver turns to alcohol to ease his disappointment and frustration. Feeling miserable, Susan becomes involved with her husband's friend and assistant, Frank.
The story weaves between that of Susan and her trials and that of her grandson, Lyman and his problems. Lyman looks at his grandmother's unhappiness and mistakes and tries to figure out what went wrong in his own marriage

The "angle of repose"is a geologic term, referring to the place where moving rock stops sliding downward, like in a rockslide. It is usually a precarious position, that the least change may cause to deteriorate. In Stegner's story it not only refers to a place of rest in the Ward's marriage, but also to the place of rest reached by Lyman in his slide downward in his life, his marriage and his illness. This is an interesting tale of two marriages in two different centuries, but concentrating mainly on Susan Ward. It is a rather long story but well worth the time it takes to read. Stegner based his story on the real life pioneer, Mary Hallock Foote. In fact, the letters in the story are taken from Foote's letters. Reading her letters made me want to read about her. Makes me wonder how closely Stegner's Susan Ward's life matched Foote's.

For two other reviews see ReadingGroupGuides and Grandpoohbah.

New Words:

Epicene: effeminate. "In the 1870s he was gentle, thoughtful, amusing, a spirit that glowed through a frail, almost epicene body.
Madrone: a plant, the arbutus. "In the night she may have heard the wind sighing under the eaves and creaking the stiff oaks and madrones on the hillside behind."
Charivari: shivaree. "'There was some talk about a charivari,' Oliver said. 'I gave them money for a couple barrels of beer. So now I'm going to take Sue home and barricade the doors.'"
Theodolite: a surveying instrument. "She could not bear to think of him down there in the blackness, dropping his thousand-foot plumb lines, gluing his eye to the theodolite eyepiece while an assistant held a candle close, and while the bob, suspended in water to make its motion minimal, moved in its deep orbit hundreds of feet below and the wire which was all he had to measure by shifted its hairbreadth left or right."
Tommyknockers: Welsh or Cornish version of a brownie or leprechaun. They live underground and wear miner's garb and are mischievous. "'Tommyknockers. Little people who go through the mine tapping at the timbering to make sure it's sound.'"
Wobblies: a Wobbly is a member of a union, the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. "I suggested the I.W.W. parallel to Ada, who being a miner's daughter knew about the Wobblies."
Argillaceous: soils which are predominantly clay or abounding in clays or claylike materials. "Decades later, over the mountain at Permanente, not too far from New Almaden, Henry Kaiser would make a very good thing indeed out of the argillaceous and calcareous that Oliver Ward forced into an insoluble marriage in the winter of 1877."
Proud flesh: the swollen tissue around a healing wound or ulcer. "Slack's, at the end of the steel, was as ugly as proud flesh, a gulch of shacks and tents and derailed cars, its one street a continuous mudhole, every square foot of flat ground cluttered with piles of ties, rails, logs, rusty Fresno scrapers, wagonbeds, spare wheels, barrels, lumber, coal."
Lacunae: gaps, blank spaces. "Mice have gnawed Grandmother's Leadville letters and created some historical lacunae."
Attenuated: weakened. "Anyway I'm not sure I could stand being attenuated in Mr. James's fashion. I was half glad he didn't appear, isn't it awful?"
Democrat wagon: a high, lightweight, horse-drawn wagon, usually having two seats. "Oliver met us with a democrat wagon at Kuna, the end of the line."
Meeching: Hiding; skulking; cowardly. "Vexed by the unpleasantness of her own laugh as much as by Mrs. Briscoe's absence, she looked over her shoulder, afraid that meeching pig-like presence might be behind her."
Fourierist phalansteries: Fourierism is a system for social reform advocated by Charles Fourier in the early 19th century, proposing that society be organized into small self-sustaining communal groups or phalanges. A phalanstery was the building designed by Fourier to house the community. See Wikipedia. "'Plato,' I said. 'In his fashion. Sir Thomas More, in his way. Coleridge, Melville, Samuel Butler, D.H. Lawrence, in their ways. Brook Farm and all the other Fourierist phalansteries. New Harmony, whether under the Rappites or the Owenites. The Icarians. Amana. Homestead. The Mennonites. The Amish. The Hutterites. The Shakers. The United Order of Zion. The Oneida Colony. Especially the Oneida Colony.'"