Angle of Repose is a 1972 novel by Wallace Stegner
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It's a novel about life in West. It takes place in two different time frames. The first time frame occurs in late '60s Bay Area California, and consists of a wheelchair-bound historian, Lyman Ward. Lyman is wheelchair-bound because he has a degenerative bone disease, one which has already cost him a lower leg. Also, Lyman's wife left him after he became ill. Lyman is, all in all, pretty bitter.
Lyman, needing something to occupy himself, is researching and writing a biography of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward. Susan's story takes place beginning in the latter-half of the 19th century. She's a cultivated Eastern artist and writer who marries on a whim to escape a love affair gone wrong. Oliver, her husband, is a dutiful husband and father, and an expert mine engineer who lacks the benefit of a college degree. He's very principled, which results in some lost advancement opportunities and jobs. Even despite the hardships she faces in the West – which, Stegner wishes to show us, was never as "wild" as in the American pop-cultural imagination – she stays loyal to her increasingly emotionally distant, physically absent and world-weary husband, and also to her own creative principles. Susan's story is, to a very great extent, based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, which Stegner was researching at the time.
This novel provides examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: Lyman Ward is afflicted with a pretty terrible bone disease which has limited his ability to move and has already cost him an amputated lower leg.
- Ask a Stupid Question...: Oliver is telling Susan about a hair-raising incident in which he was riding in a coach, that was trying to ford a river. A flash flood forced him to jump out of the coach and grab a horse.Susan: But you made it.
Oliver: No. I was drowned in the Old Woman Fork at the age of twenty-nine. Body never found. - Crushing Handshake: Rodman carelessly gives one to Lyman, who can't take it because of his bone disease.
- Death of a Child: Susan and Oliver's youngest child, Agnes, drowns in Oliver's canal at the age of four. This happens at the end of the novel and forms the emotional climax. Lyman notes that apparently Oliver never forgave Susan for this (he blamed Susan, who may have been having a rendezvous with her lover) and wonders if he can be bigger than his grandfather and forgive his ex-wife.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Susan, writing her friends back east, talks about her Ethnic Menial Labor Chinese cook, Wan. She says that she used to find the very sight of a "Chinaman" disturbing, but now Wan is part of the family.
- Driven to Suicide: Four days after little Agnes drowns in the canal, Frank kills himself. Lyman believes it's because he and Susan were meeting, and possibly canoodling, and that Susan got distracted which allowed Agnes to fall in the canal.
- Drowning My Sorrows: After five years of trying to raise capital to build a dam in Idaho ends in nothing but poverty and failure, Oliver takes to drink. This is a major negative turning point in his marriage with Susan.
- Framing Device: Lyman Ward, telling the story of his grandmother Susan. In the framing device, Lyman is dealing with a degenerative bone disease, and still bitterly resenting his ex-wife, who left him for his doctor.
- The Generation Gap: One of the themes, as Lyman is a cranky old man who has nothing but contempt for the spirit of the 1960s, hippies and free love and such. His caretaker's daughter Shelley irritates him with her use of phrases like "having sex" (instead of "making love"), and her ridicule of old-timey Victorian values.
- Grief-Induced Split: Susan and Oliver's relationship never recovers after the death of their youngest daughter Agnes, who drowned in the river while Susan was rendezvousing with her lover, Oliver's friend Frank. Oliver never forgave his wife for Agnes's death.
- Historical Domain Character: Many. Susan meets Clarence King, a surveyor who had just made a name for himself by exposing a discovery of diamonds in Colorado as a hoax.
- Homoerotic Subtext: In-Universe, Lyman reads the letters that her grandmother exchanged with her old school friend Augusta, and detects a hint of buried lesbian attraction, at least on Augusta's part.
- Love Triangle:
- One develops in Susan's youth between herself, her friend Augusta, and Thomas Hudson the magazine editor. But it's a confused one, as Augusta, the one who eventually marries Thomas, seems to be more attracted to Susan.
- A second one later on, as Susan, more and more disillusioned as her husband's professional career goes downhill, finds herself attracted to Frank Sargent, one of Oliver's fellow engineers.
- Nostalgic Narrator: Lyman Ward is nostalgic for a more serious, more humane, more 'real' world to escape the confusing social changes of the late '60s; he finds this in his grandmother's artistic inheritance (papers, documents, pictures, paintings, drawings, etc.). This provides the Framing Device for the primary narrative of the grandmother.
- A Party, Also Known as an Orgy: In yet another effort to shock Lyman, young Shelley tells him about how she was at a party that turned into a gang-bang. Lyman is not impressed.
- Phantom Limb Pain: Lyman is bothered by persistent pain in the foot and ankle that he no longer has.
- Prospector: While Oliver is an experienced mining engineer who usually works with very large corporations, he does have to do prospecty things, like guarding his claim with guns.
- Rebellious Spirit: Both the grandfather (Oliver) and grandson (Lyman) embody this.
- Samaritan Relationship Starter: While not explicitly an act of kindness, what brings Oliver and Susan together is a sense of his dutiful nature.
- Settling the Frontier: The main story is about the people involved in developing and exploiting the West through railroads, business, industry, education, laws, cartography, science, etc.
- Sexy Sweater Girl: Shelly, Ada's sexy daughter, who spends the summer helping Lyman type up his research. Lyman notes repeatedly that she wears tight sweaters without a bra; he is frustrated by the fact that he feels sexual desire for her but he's a cripple in a wheelchair who can't do anything about it.Her breasts were very live under her thin pullover, her erect nipples made dents and dimples, appeared and disappeared again as flesh met cloth.
- Speech Impediment: Lyman's friend Al Sutton has had a lisp his whole life due to a wart on his tongue. Lyman wonders why Al has never had the wart removed.
- The Stoic: Both the grandfather and the grandson are emotionally distant, Stoic figures who have a strong sense of duty and personal responsibility that they are always struggling to fulfill – and, which, ultimately, trips them up time and time again.
- Stopped Caring: Lyman displays this through his reclusiveness and his disconnect from his son.
- Title Drop: As explained in the opening chapter, "angle of repose" means the maximum angle that any granular substance can be piled at before it starts sliding down—loose dirt dug out from gold mining will pile no steeper than 30 degrees. Lyman also uses a more metaphorical description of his grandmother's "angle of repose", and how content or not content she was to follow her husband around mining camps of the West rather than living in the New York literary scene.
- Train-Station Goodbye: A standard one, with Oliver chasing after the train while Susan cries and waves, when Susan leaves him behind in Deadwood to go visit her friends back east in 1878.
- A True Story in My Universe: The in-universe historian is researching his grandmother's letters ostensibly to write a book on them.
- Twilight of the Old West: Arguably, the central thrust of the book. How did we come from Big Men mining stuff and Big Women writing stuff at the edge of the continent to a bunch of hippy-pansy speed freaks protesting just to get cred with all the activist chicks in Berkeley?
