Angle of Repose

Usually, when I hear the phrase, “Western literature,” I have visions of sagebrush, haggard, craggy-faced women in unflattering calico dresses husking corn on their front stoop, and simple God fearin’ folk singin’ hymns. So last week when I picked up Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, I automatically assumed I was entering the world of buffalo chips and butter churns. 

Sometimes, I’m such an ignoramus. This book was brilliant (the Pulitzer Prize committee also thought so in 1974). My notions of what a “Western” writer is have been turned upside down. With compelling and complex relationships between characters and poetic and elegant prose, Wallace Stegner is the Henry James of the West. Here’s an example of the richness of his writing: 

"In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up. All across the top of the world the sun dragged its feet, but as soon as it was hidden behind Midsummer Mountain it raced like a child in a game to surprise you in the east before you were quite aware it was gone from the west. One summer out of four, when the moon was nearing or at or just past the full, there was hardly anything that could be called night at all."

What is this story about? I'm too lazy to summarize for myself, so I'll let my book jacket do it:

"Angle of Repose tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need, Ward is nonetheless embarking on a search of monumental proportions - to rediscover his grandmother, now long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier."

The story flips back and forth between Lyman, with his difficult relationships and realizations about himself and his ancestors, to a narrative on Susan Ward's (his grandmother) life. This narration is furthered by interspersing letters that his grandmother wrote to her cultured friend back East. His grandmother is an artist and her husband, Oliver, an engineer and the clashing of their temperaments and desires is juxtaposed against the varied landscapes of New York, Colorado, Mexico, Idaho, and California. 

Stegner made me realize that despite that harsh realities of Western life, cultured people who thought there was more to life than just eking out an existence, didn’t just exist in the East. I love reading novels set in sprawling English estates teeming with aristocrats, butlers and maids, but suddenly the West has captured my imagination with a grace and honesty that makes the glitter of chandeliers and the gleam of polished silver seem dull by comparison.