“Angle of Repose” is Wallace Stegner’s final novel and
his most ambitious fictional work. It is
the story of an artistic and cultivated woman, Susan Burling Ward, who gives up
her budding career as a literary illustrator in the East to become the wife of
a young mining engineer, moving into the American West of the 1880’s. Published
and honored in 1972 with the Pulitzer Prize, it seems even more relevant today
in its depiction of a gifted young woman, wife and mother, who struggles
against the prevailing notion of her time to allow her dreams to be secondary
to those of her husband’s, to follow, not lead, in their relationship. To
complicate this relationship even further, she becomes the love/adoration
object of a younger would-be suitor, who is her husband Oliver’s chief
assistant. The story takes place over Susan Ward’s entire mature lifetime, but
it concentrates heavily on the earlier years of her marriage, told mostly in
letters to her Eastern lifelong friend, Augusta.
Actually, this is a story within a story. The narrator,
Lyman Ward, ex-professor of history, now retired to the family home in Southern
California with a permanent leg injury, is Susan’s grandson, reconstructing
her story through her letters, art work, newspaper clippings, and other
memorabilia of her era. Lyman is a sharp-tongued, tough old guy, who stands in
stark contrast to his lovely, artistic grandmother and the artsy, literary
friends she has left behind in the East. He is also evidently much more like
his taciturn father and non-expressive grandfather, Oliver Ward—an engineering genius ahead of his time, though obviously rarely in tune with his
highly expressive wife. This was clearly a marriage and attraction of
opposites, and therein lies much of the conflict and tension within the story,
though it is slow to build.
I would say this is one of the problematic areas of this
novel: it takes us from place to place to place, all beautifully and authentically
rendered, but redundant in story telling: Oliver gets a promising job in the
West, Susan reluctantly follows him, hopeful and ambitious for them, but
something inevitably goes wrong, so they must start all over again in a new
location, foretelling again the same essential story, ultimately for about
seven or eight times. The only real blip in all this is Susan’s admirer and
would-be suitor, Frank, though there is a time, earlier in the story, when the
reader could posit a romance of sorts between herself and her best friend,
Augusta. We have approximately five hundred pages of this before the story
takes off like an out-of-control locomotive engine that crashes to a tragic
denouement. I could write an entire article on the last chapter, which, in my
opinion, is a mess, but I won’t.
This is an important and worthwhile book by a fine
writer, and should you choose to read it, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you!
