Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner
Summary
Lyman Ward is fifty eight, a historian, and his body has stopped cooperating. A bone disease has taken one leg and locked his neck so that he cannot turn his head, and he lives alone in his grandparents' house in Grass Valley with a hired girl to help him and a son who wants him in a facility. What he does all day is dictate. He is writing about his grandmother.
Susan Burling Ward was an Eastern illustrator and writer of some standing who married a mining engineer in the 1870s and spent the next thirty years following him west: a quicksilver mine in California, Leadville while Leadville was booming, a Mexican hacienda, and finally an irrigation scheme in Idaho that was decades ahead of the money needed to build it.
Her letters east to her friend Augusta are Lyman's source, and Stegner lets him read them the way a historian actually does, guessing at the gaps, resenting her snobbery, defending her anyway. What Lyman circles and puts off for five hundred pages is the summer at the canal camp when a child drowned and a young engineer shot himself.
He is also circling his own wife, who left him after he fell ill, and he is not a fair witness about either woman.
Around five hundred and seventy pages, unhurried, and the finest writing anyone has done about the interior West: the work, the camps, the geology, the specific loneliness of a cultivated woman at the end of a mule track.
Best for readers who want a long book that earns its length, and who can take a narrator whose bitterness is part of the evidence.
Historical Context & Significance
Angle of Repose won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was placed eighty second on the Modern Library's list of the century's English language novels, and won a readers' poll in 1999 as the best novel of the American West. Andrew Imbrie made it into an opera for the San Francisco Opera in 1976.
The Susan Ward material is not invented. Stegner worked from the papers of Mary Hallock Foote, a real illustrator and writer whose western letters were published the following year as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, and roughly a tenth of the novel comes from them, sometimes close to word for word.
Foote's family had given permission on condition that the names be changed, and declined the offer to read the manuscript. What keeps the argument alive is that Stegner had assured the family privately that the book would contain no direct quotation, and that the adultery and the suicide at its centre have no basis in Foote's life. Scholars still disagree, and it is now the thing most readers know about the novel besides its title.