Angle of Repose

I started my Stegner reading with Crossing to Safety and picked this one up recently. While I felt that the conclusion was not quite as satisfying, I was captivated by Stegner's intense realism. He creates characters so realistic one can hardly believe that they aren't real people (although I'm well aware he draws upon real life for many of his characters). I love his uncanny descriptions of human perception and use of analogy. The novel is truly one of the best I've read.

Chapter 1: I wasn't expecting to like Wallace Stevens, but so far he has me totally engaged. We'll see how I feel in 600 pages.

After 600 pages: Parts of this book are beautiful, others slow, others problematic. I wavered between wanting to give the book up and being completely captivated. It's a fascinating depiction of Western history, and overall I'm glad I read it.

I mean, you always hope that something that won a Pulitzer is going to be good. Indeed, “Angle of Repose” is. Quite. It's funny, but as I near the end of my third year out here in Utah, I really do think there's something about geographical location that lends different tones to writing. Stegner sounds somehow “Western” to me, and not just in his subject matter. His style is an inimitable one; at times very emotionally intimate (e.g., the narrator alternates between prying and gentle deference to his grandmother's privacy as he speculates on her quashed love for her female best friend), and at other times, a more detached survey of the space of the western mountain states (e.g., he gets the sun-bleached tumbleweeds and canyons that appear out of nowhere in Idaho spot-on). It's clear to me now the debt that Abbey owed Stegner; Abbey is more free-wheeling and irreverent, but nonetheless obviously cut from Stegner's cloth. Loving Abbey, I'm certainly grateful for that! At any rate, it's a captivating novel that remains relevant 40 years later. Perhaps my favorite aspect of the book is the unflinching focus on the ties that bind...a quote, as the narrator addresses his grandparent's tumultuous but decades-long marriage: “What really 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.”

Oh, what a wonderful book! I settled into the characters and the narrative and the landscape and didn't want to leave. I blogged my review over in Jacqui's Room.

Spoilers below (sort of).

And then I finished it. Huh. The ending is...disappointing. Not nearly magnificent enough to fit the rest of the book. And Stegner, whom I was holding up as my example of a writer you can trust, sweeps the rug out from under his own story with a cheap trick, and then leaves us hanging. I almost tossed the book across the room.

But the rest of it is beautiful enough to warrant reading, and to study as a writer, so I left it its five stars.