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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Wallace Stegner
Genre : Historical Fiction
Some time ago, I read most of Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner’s books. Angle of Repose is by far my favorite. I so enjoy when the title is carried into the story and has meaning in the story. The angle of repose is an engineering term which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling.
The story begins with Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history, who is recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease. Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience.
“I’m not writing a book about Western History. I’m writing about something else, I guess. A marriage. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Bowling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward, the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What interests me is how two 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.”
“There must be some other possibility than death or life-long penance. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.”
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