Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose. PMC 2024; 19711
A few years ago I was impressed by Wallace Stegner’s 1987 novel Crossing to Safety; for some reason I didn’t post on it here. It’s a slow-burning account of the relationships between a group of people – not much conventional plot, just perceptive and illuminating insights into what makes them do and think what they do.
Angle of Repose also takes its time (it’s a little under 600 pp. in this PMC paperback edition), but is again essentially a slowly accreting, detailed account of the loves and lives of a married couple (Susan and Oliver) in antebellum America.
He’s a talented mining engineer whose work takes him into the rugged, undeveloped west. His wife, brought up in a cultured New York/New England environment, follows him out west and struggles to adapt to this transplanted pioneer existence, appalled by the vulgarity and roughness of the life there.
Lyman Ward is a retired history professor who narrates their story. His source is a huge cache of letters written by the wife, Susan, to her Sapphic friend Augusta, another super-refined Edith Wharton type. Lyman pieces together the story of Susan and Oliver (his grandparents) by recording this correspondence and his reflections on it on to tape. All this is framed by what’s going on in Lyman’s life as he works on this project: it’s the late sixties, and youth rebellion is rife – much to the disgust of this fastidious, often grumpy academic.
Stegner is adept at conveying the frustration of Susan with what she perceives as her husband’s naivety and fecklessness. He fails again and again as his projects are stymied by the corruption or cupidity of others, and Susan sustains the growing family with income from her magazine stories and illustrations. Oliver refuses to defend himself against the venality of those who ruin him, and Susan increasingly wonders if she made a mistake in uprooting herself to be with him, and possibly ruined her chances of a conventional career as an author and artist.
There are wonderful descriptions of the rugged landscapes and ecosystems in which Oliver works and his family is forced to live. I found myself willing him to succeed, and hoping that Susan’s love for him would outweigh her longing for the refined pleasures of her world back east.
Meanwhile Lyman’s own progress towards some kind of emotional fulfilment also undergoes various trials.
It’s an unusual and engaging novel, debunking the rose-tinted, romanticised depiction more usually given of pioneer life. This is an America based on the mendacity and greed of those who stole the land from its indigenous peoples, then again from the early settlers who lacked the guile to hold on to what resources they’d managed to assemble from that land.
Apparently there was some controversy when Angle of Repose was first published, because Stegner based the 19C narrative on the real-life correspondence of an author and artist, Mary Hallock Foote. Some of her descendants took exception to what they saw as the fictional liberties he took with the source material.