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| Edition: | Penguin Classics (Paperback) |
| Author: | Wallace Stegner |
| Published: | December 2000 |
| Pages: | 592 |
| ISBN 10: | 0141185473 |
| New: | $8.50 (58) |
| Used: | $2.62 (85) |
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Angle of Repose is a 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Wallace Stegner about a wheelchair-bound historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. The novel is directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. Stegner's use of substantial passages of Foote's actual letters as correspondence from his fictional character Susan Burling Ward caused a continuing controversy.
Plot summary
The title is an engineering term for the angle at which soil finally settles after, for example, being dumped from a mine as tailings. It seems to describe the loose wandering of the Ward family as they try to carve a civilized existence in the west and, hopefully, return to the east as successes. The story is a series of Oliver's hopeful struggles on various mining, hydrology and construction engineering jobs, and Susan's adaptation and struggle to support him.
The book is given more complexity by having Lyman Ward narrate from his wheelchair a century after the fact. It is clear we are reading Lyman's interpretation of the story, a literary device that encourages readers to be more skeptical of what they are told. Some of the disappointments of his life, including his divorce, color his interpretation of his grandparent's story. Toward the end of the novel, he gives up on his original ambition for a complete biography of his grandmother. It is as if he picked up the disappointment from his ancestors or, perhaps, is drawn to focus more closely on his own mortality and what he can accomplish himself.
Stegner's use of Mary Hallock Foote's historical letters gives the novel's locations—Leadville, New Almaden, Idaho, and Mexico—an authentic feel one doesn't usually find in westerns; the letters also give the Wards' struggles with the environment, shady businessmen, politicians and other dangers a human feel. In Lyman's interaction with (and rantings about) 1960s culture, we get yet another historical dimension to the story (Lyman's son teaches at Berkeley and a counterculture daughter of a neighbor helps transcribe the tapes).
