Angle of Repose, for which Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, was written from 1968 to 1970, a turbulent period in U.S. history. Without directly discussing the Vietnam War, the cause for much of the turbulence, Stegner addresses the unrest of the times by weaving together a complicated web of social and political history, geography, and personal experience.

His narrator, Lyman Ward, is a retired historian with a degenerative bone disease, which has led to the amputation of his leg. He is separated from his wife and estranged from his son, Rodman. Seeking truths for his own life in his family history, Lyman sorts through letters and documents left by his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, a genteel eastern lady who settled in the American West at the end of the 19th century. Ada Hawkes, faithful family employee, cares for Lyman’s physical needs; her daughter Shelly, in the midst of a marital crisis herself, becomes Lyman’s secretary and sometime psychologist.

The plot is straightforward, but the structure is complex. The novel is marked by a double narrative, with Lyman’s story interrupting Susan’s story, three marriage plots, and the constant shifting between the epistolary and first-person formats. It addresses themes concerning the mythology versus the reality of the West, the influences of the East and West Coasts upon one another, and the necessity of finding the proper balance between individualism and cooperation, freedom and domestic happiness, art and life, and justice and mercy.

The overlay of modern structural complexity and postmodern alternative readings upon the Victorian material may disturb the casual reader; but Angle of Repose merits more than a casual read.

Classism and many other elitist attitudes, including race prejudice, follow Susan Burling to the West, where she meets and marries Oliver Ward, an adventurer and inventor who is charmed by her eastern airs. In fact, Lyman believes that his grandmother’s snobbishness—her dedication to the Hudson River School of art, her devotion to wealthy eastern friends and their styles of dress and conversation, and her frequent denigration of her husband’s practical talents—is the key to her personality and to her later fall from grace.

Wallace Stegner

The West, the narrator insists, was settled by easterners such as she, who depended on eastern capital and brought with them eastern values. Not all of those values were destructive. Lyman sympathizes with his grandmother’s desire to make a home.

Stegner’s biographer, Jackson Benson, points out that “the boomer husband and the nesting wife” were staples of the author’s fiction (Benson, 48), noting that Stegner drew on his own childhood with a restless bootlegger father and a nurturing mother for this material. Yet while “nesting” civilized the Wild West, it sometimes also prevented society from moving forward.

Oliver Ward is by nature a visionary, but Susan, always wanting stability for her children, keeps him from reaching his full potential. She also continually apologizes to her eastern friend Augusta about what she perceives as Oliver’s inadequacies. She confesses to a “failure of faith” in her husband and his projects. A nonverbal, pragmatic man who works as a mining and irrigation engineer, Oliver believes he is inferior to his wife, and he eventually begins to drink.

Susan supports the family with her artwork and sentimental stories about the West, which she sends to eastern literary magazines. She is Stegner’s model, in many ways, for the liberated woman. However, she suffers from too much confidence in language. With the modernist’s self-reflexive doubt, Stegner portrays Susan as substituting art for life. Remaining aloof from her community, the narrator says, “She mined and irrigated every slightest incident, she wrote and drew her life instead of living it” (399).

Susan also flirts with Frank Sargent, Oliver’s assistant. Her isolation from family and community has caused her to rely on him for protection and companionship. Tragedy results when the two begin to meet secretly, violating Oliver’s trust. Susan and Oliver’s third child, Agnes, drowns in the irrigation ditch built by her father when Susan and Frank let her roam near its banks while they converse.

Frank commits suicide, Oliver never forgives Susan, who suffers extreme guilt, and the couple’s son Ollie refuses to see his mother for ten years.

When Lyman discovers (or imagines) this tragedy, he realizes why his grandparents lived in “an angle of repose” with each other. They propped one another up, he believes, but he never saw them touch. An “angle of repose” is the slant required in construction to avoid a cave-in. The banks in this case did not cave in, but they destroyed a child, a friend, and a marriage.

Lyman, heretofore “a justice man, not a mercy man” (443), hopes now to be “a bigger man than [his] grandfather” and considers forgiving his own wife, who left him after he lost his leg (569).

Since Stegner disdained Americans’ “contempt for all history, including our own” (“Twilight,” 191), he bases Angle of Repose upon actual historical documents: the letters, drawings, and fiction of Mary Hallock Foote. (Note: See Benson for a discussion of the controversy surrounding Stegner’s use of her family history, for which he assumed he had permission.)

But the “angle” whose possibilities of “repose” he explores in Lyman’s dream at the end of that novel exceeds by several degrees the width of the “angle” for which his grandparents settle. Stegner addresses future possibilities for change with his characteristic western “optimism about the possible” (“Twilight,” 212). In doing so, he also seeks to offer “repose” to a society troubled by the discord of the 1960s and to provide a vision of the American identity interpreted through the artist’s imagination.

Sources
Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose. New York: Penguin, 1971.
———. “The Twilight of Self-Reliance.” In Marking the Sparrow’s Fall, edited by Page Stegner. New York: Holt, 1998.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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