Wallace Stegner’s pulitzer prize winning novel, Angle of Repose, is a story told from the vantage point of Lyman Ward, a fifty-eight year old former history professor crippled by a degenerative bone condition. The novel presents as a collection of his voice recordings about a season in his life where he is dedicated to telling the story of his grandmother Susan Ward and her husband Oliver.
Susan Ward is an artist and author who gains some notoriety for cataloging her adventures in the west with her husband Oliver. Oliver, an engineer, bounces from one remote late nineteenth century western location to the next attempting to find work. Throughout the novel, Oliver is described as a quiet and honest man; he’s honest to a fault seemingly unperturbed by the modern world and its degrading tendency, but also never civilized or cultivated to the tastes of his wife Susan. With her immense talent, Susan could have earned a place among the literary elite in the east alongside her childhood friends Augusta and Thomas, but her life becomes an exile away from civilization because of her Quaker influenced commitment to her husband.
As the story progresses, Susan’s resentments of her husband’s failure to provide her the life that she wishes grows despite his honesty and the purity of his intentions. In the shadow of her resentment, lurks Oliver’s best friend and sidekick Frank Sargent. The story of Susan climaxes as she capitulates to her bitterness and takes solace in Frank who has professed his undying love for her. Lyman Ward speculates that while Susan and Frank were together was when Oliver and Susan’s youngest daughter Agnus drowned. The next day Frank killed himself and Oliver retaliated against Susan by ripping up all of her rose bushes.
This story is stitched together by Lyman’s reflections on his own life. As the book careens towards its end, I realized that Lyman’s own life is in many ways illustrated by the story of Susan and Oliver. Lyman’s wife Ellen had left Lyman when he was diagnosed with his condition to be with his surgeon who mysteriously disappeared later. Lyman carries a deep resentment and bitterness for a betrayal that he could never have imagined.
The book ends with wild dream sequence where Lyman imagines his wife returning to make peace with him, but he’s attacked by his assistant because Ada has fallen ill. Lyman reflects on the dream as the book closes imagining whether he will ever be able to forgive his wife Ellen or if he should to merely have the contact.
The book is ambitious in how it paints a portrait of the western frontier through the eyes of a woman through the eyes of her grandson. The picture painted is bleak, but visceral. The emotional dynamics are similar; bleak, but visceral. In characteristic Stegner fashion, there’s a sequence in the book where Shelly tells Lyman that she plans to move to a hippy commune. Lyman sounds off on the inanity of hippy ideologies. A common theme for Stegner he finds the pseudo-romantic notions of the hippies offensive to people who have deeply thought about the flaws and faults of the modern west.
Angle of Repose is the angle at which dirt no longer rolls. It’s a metaphor for the body that’s lying prone because it’s dead or dying. But Lyman’s closing reflection is that it is only a matter of perspective. The angle of repose is death to one person, but seen vertically it’s the posture of someone who is standing straight despite the pain of life.
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