Angle of Repose

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.”