Angle of Repose (1971)

While I *loved* Crossing to Safety and Beyond the 100th Meridian, have admired Stegner for decades, and have a copy of Angle on my shelf to read, this recent article gives me pause:
https://www.altaonline.com/books/fiction/a39179237/wallace-stegner-mary-hallock-...

Perhaps better to read A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote first.

“Fifteen minutes into CATS, I had some doubts, but if you stick with anything long enough it will end.”
—“I Took My 58-Year-Old Dad to See CATS. This is His Review,” Justin Kirkland

This is the book that won a Pulitzer, from the author who was so inspirational to Wendell Berry that he decided to study writing under him in graduate school. Expectations were high and unmet.
Stegner is good at description, especially pinpointing human emotion and expression in the American West in the late 19th century. His plot was cyclical and miserable: the same family, the same marriage, only slight variations on the same questions. Every fifty or hundred pages I found myself paging to the end of the book, asking how many more times we would have to watch Susan Ward face the same questions and answer them by her own miserable failure of character and personality. In choosing to focus on this, and on his present-day narrator who is described and seems to exist only in relation to the women in his life, Stegner forgoes the promise that this book could have offered. If it had been on the family rather than the marriage, it could have been a fascinating look into the reality of failed Western endeavors, into what enterprise and engineering looked like in early Idaho when they did not end in triumph. If Stegner had been a little more open and resourceful and commissioned some of the sketches and watercolors of Susan Ward by a contemporary artist, he could have illuminated his story by an interesting visual corroboration or contradiction to what he wrote.
Stegner’s narrator draws parallels between himself and the grandfather he always looked up to, but what I did get out of this book that I think the author really did intend is a much closer resemblance to his grandmother, full of aspirations and wishes and bitterness and discontent. Both Lyman and Susan Ward blame their spouse for their place in life; both would like to hold themselves to a high moral standing, would like to have everyone’s respect without any real effort on their part: a deeply privileged stance. They see their work as a kind of holy calling, to support the family or preserve history, but in reality their writing and art give them an excuse to be too busy to solve their real problems. Both are dramatically more insufferable than the steady people around them (Oliver, Ada).
If Stegner’s point or theme or whatever was that the people in the West were frequently more of a problem than the physical and geographic challenges of the West itself, he certainly demonstrated that. But surely he could have done it in fewer pages and maybe shown us a little more of the interesting stuff while he was at it. ( )

Mostly about settler colonialism and heterosexuality. Not sure why I expected otherwise. Got bored and stopped reading. ( )

Found this review of mine under an old alias. LOL

Although I enjoyed it, this book took me forever to read. I liked that it jumped back and forth between Lyman's narration and the story of the book he was writing about his grandparents. It's a very meaty book. I hope Wallace Stegner's other books are like that. -- 2010 ( )

I got this from the library as an audiobook to help pass the time on my long commute to and from work. The author is incredible in his command and use of the language. It's the pacing of the plot that did this in for me. I was afraid that if I kept listening, I'd drift off to sleep and end up in a ditch. Maybe I'll try again with the print edition.