Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (review)

60 Western American Literature Reviews Angle of Repose. By Wallace Stegner. (New York: Doubleday and Com­ pany, Inc., 1971. 569 pages. $7.95.) She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his cross-hairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died of thirst. Many a novel of the American West could be called a case study of the particular disease described above by Wallace Stegner. Few novelists, however, examine the victim of the disease with anything like the knowledge and understanding that pathologist Stegner accords to Oliver Ward, whose malady, with its subsequent effects on himself, his wife, and the following generations, is the central subject of Angle of Repose. Oliver Ward’s disease runs its course through time and space, and an arresting feature of the novel is the complex virtuosity Stegner displays in ordering its temporal and geographical relationships. His narrator, Oliver’s grandson Lyman Ward, is researching the lives of his grandparents from the disadvantage point of 1970. An amputee, paralyzed and confined to a wheel­ chair in the Grass Valley home of his ancestors, he dictates onto a tape the story as he gleans it from letters, memoirs, and sundry sources. His aim: to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hear­ ing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accept­ ed, griefs borne. . . . I would like to hear [year life] as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours, The historian’s yearning for an ideal grasp of the past, the grandson’s desire not only to know his grandparents but to experience them, and the cripple’s physical confinement combine in Lyman Ward to create as well as to synthesize the narrative. Reviews 61 Lyman Ward’s own life continues. His ex-wife, who left him for his doctor; his son Rodman, a sociologist whose tunnel vision sees only the pres­ ent; his clerical assistant, a young girl of the “uninhibited” generation; the images of now (“Ruth’s Burgers and Steaks”) that are mossing over the brick walls and iron shutters of the mother-lode country; all of them intrude on Lyman Ward’s journey for the past. Present and past, interfluent, establish the novel’s rhythm, a rhythm embodied in Stegner’s central metaphor, the stability that ever seems a goal and rarely is reached, the “angle of repose.” Fluidity of past and present is absorbed in a progress through space. Symptomatic of Oliver Ward’s disease are his meanderings throughout the West. On each engineering project— mines, irrigation— he lavishes his energy, enthusiasm, optimism, and ingenuity, but the snowpeak is always somewhere else and the family moves on—New Almaden, Santa Cruz, Leadville, Michoacan , an Idaho canyon and Mesa. Stegner, who, of course, has long studied and written of the West and its terrain, is superbly capable of realizing for his reader a sense of place— what the French call with precision le génie du lieu —in each location. Descriptions are rarely presented as set pieces, but small details keep the characters closely in contact with their environs. Consider, for example, this slight encounter: The ditch was like no ditch she had ever imagined. This was as clear as water in a glass, and it shot past as if chased. When she stooped impulsively to drag her hand in it it numbed her fingers. The cross currents of space and time permit Stegner to develop char­ acters of unusual depth and complexity. Oliver Ward is seen as the charis­ matic young man moving to the West of the 1870’s, bringing his bride from the East to a cabin in New Almaden, preparing to match his energies with the exhilarating potentials of the new land. This view is contemporary; we perceive him primarily from the point of view of his wife. Later, Oliver is remembered by his grandson as a gray...