Books in Brief: Angle of Repose

Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner (Doubleday, 569 pp., $6.95).

A very fine novel, with the courage to be unfashionable. The setting is Western, the genre historical, but unlike most Western historical period pieces, we see the past through the consciousness of a narrator who lives in the present. Lyman Ward, an aging historian crippled by bone cancer, retires to his California birthplace and attempts to reconstruct the history of his grandmother’s marriage through her letters. The intent is two-leveled: by trying to make sense of her life he attempts to understand his own. But the modern world intrudes. His son, a sociologist “born without a sense of history”; his secretary, one of those “antic maidens who yank off their blouses and dance around maypoles in People’s Park”; and the spiritual presence of a runaway wife form the contrasts and tensions which give the novel shape and complicate his quest. Although the point of view is impeccably Jamesian, critics will inevitably, because of the apology for Victorianism, the mingling of fictional and historical characters, and the variations of the might-have-been ending, compare Angle of Repose to The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Yet, I think, this is a better book. Deeper and more perceptive.

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Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner (Doubleday, 569 pp., $6.95).

A very fine novel, with the courage to be unfashionable. The setting is Western, the genre historical, but unlike most Western historical period pieces, we see the past through the consciousness of a narrator who lives in the present. Lyman Ward, an aging historian crippled by bone cancer, retires to his California birthplace and attempts to reconstruct the history of his grandmother’s marriage through her letters. The intent is two-leveled: by trying to make sense of her life he attempts to understand his own. But the modern world intrudes. His son, a sociologist “born without a sense of history”; his secretary, one of those “antic maidens who yank off their blouses and dance around maypoles in People’s Park”; and the spiritual presence of a runaway wife form the contrasts and tensions which give the novel shape and complicate his quest. Although the point of view is impeccably Jamesian, critics will inevitably, because of the apology for Victorianism, the mingling of fictional and historical characters, and the variations of the might-have-been ending, compare Angle of Repose to The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Yet, I think, this is a better book. Deeper and more perceptive.