Angle of Repose by
Wallace Stegner
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
I first read this in college, before I got married, and right before I dated a cowboy (perhaps not coincidentally). It wasn't quite the novel I remember, the ending climax so shocking to me then it seemed to be the center of the book and I would have told you it was solely about that one incident. It is, as Lyman Ward, the fictitious narrator, put it, a history of a marriage. It is how Susan Ward followed her engineering husband into the "wild" west and tried to keep a hold on who she was and where she came from. It is how a man tries to keep his integrity in a lawless land. It is about the sacrifices they make to keep their family together, and the dreams they have both individually and together. The memorable tragedy of the novel could be laid at the foot of Susan, of her pride and her selfishness and her longing for something more than the life her husband offered her. But Lyman is more compassionate toward her than he is his own wife, and through his eyes we see someone desperately trying to make peace with the life she led rather than the life she dreamed about. ("Is this the life you chose yourself/Or just how it ended up?" The Killers). The fact that Susan and Oliver end up in an "angle of repose", a place of "lying down", a place of acceptance or appeasement, which for them was a "separate line that did not intersect", is perhaps the true tragedy.
I wondered back then why Stegner used Lyman Ward particularly as the narrator/ historian. The intro in my copy says it was a way to embody the idea of time being lived in the past and present simultaneously that occurs when working on historical works. I think, too, having Lyman Ward be as helpless as he was allows him to understand the confinement, dependence, and desperation Susan, as a woman had, especially in that era.
Having read this novel again after being married for 30+ years, I find it even more intricate and nuanced than I did the first time around. Our marriage also included several moves, several dreams that changed, several sacrifices and choices for our family. I am gratified that our angle of repose seems to be rolling closer together, but can relate to some of the feelings and frustrations of Susan and feel the full effects of the tragedy must have been for Susan after having children of my own (
(both the loss of one, and the loss of the respect from the other)[ both the loss of one, and the loss of the respect from the other (hide spoiler)]). Stegner writes these emotions as beautifully as he describes the west--both its beauty and its barrenness. His landscapes are the perfect backdrop for this marriage that struggles to survive in the elements, each not quite comprehending what the other needs.
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I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to , and we cannot afford all these abandonings.
the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you--a train, say, or the future--has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away.
who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates.
But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hoped deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.
Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother's emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.
Don't you know how we lose the sense of your own individuality when there is nothing to reflect it back upon us?
What really interests me is how tow such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.
What made that union of opposites home them?
It was what she had deliberately chosen.
Something must have told her, as they dragged over the summit and down to English George's that character as well as mountains had to strip for the skies.
For that sort of pioneer, the West was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced.
Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.
I only know that passion and guilt happened, in some form. In their world, their time, their circumstances, and given their respective characters, there could have been no passion without guilt, no kisses without tears, no embrace without despair.
He had to be himself--nothing spectacular, nothing gorgeous or picturesque. Just, as she had more than once said in her letters to Augusta, her plain boy. But it was on his sill and judgement that everything hung. Having doubted him thought the picturesque hour of departure, she no saw him go with a quick, strong rush of love and pride.
Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.
She mined and irrigated every slightest incident, she wrote and drew her life instead of living it.
"You married me," his look said. "Maybe that was a mistake. But you didn't marry what you could make out of me. I wouldn't be much good remodeled."
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
