Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner June 24, 2006

This book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 and deserves it because Stegner writes beautifully. One review I read calls his description "visual poetry" which is dead on. One of my favorites: "It is a place where silence closes about you after the bustle of the train, where a soft, dry wind from great distances hums through the telephone wires and a stage road goes out of sight in one direction and a new railroad track in another. There is not a tree, nothing but sage. As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens. Not a house, windmill, hill, only that jade-gray plain with lilac mountains on every distant horizon." Early on, Stegner discusses the Doppler Effect in mentally talking with his dead grandmother: "The sound of anything coming at you--a train say, or the future--has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. " The book is written like the Doppler Effect, taking a long time to reach its pitch (you can feel the tension building) and then falling away in one or two chapters to the end. However, the book is a long, slow read and I didn't particularly like the characters. The one I found most interesting is the narrator, the historian grandson; and Stegner doesn't devote as much time to developing him. In mining terms, the angle of repose is where the ore finally comes to rest within the surrounding dirt. The reader learns how Oliver and Susan reach their angle of repose and if their grandson's angle will be changed by their history. A final quote: " Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything--though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept."I don't see myself reading this book again, but I'm keeping it so I can re-read the "visual poetry." In a few years, I will try another book by Stegner.
Rating 3.75