"Angle of Repose" - Wallace Stegner (1971)

I found this book during my weekly perusal of the John Steinbeck section of 2nd & Charles in Augusta. I had flipped through Crossing To Safety, the book referenced on the cover, at my old job and was impressed, so I decided to invest a few dollars in a new literary adventure. For the price of a fast food meal, I purchased what turned out to be the most immersive and all-around impressive literary work I have ever taken the time to read.

The entire story is told through the eyes and mind of Lyman Ward, a wheelchair-bound grandson of a pioneer of the Western US. Confined mostly to the house that his grandmother lived in, he spends his days reading through the hundreds of letters and documents pertaining to his grandparents, Susan and Oliver Ward, and the text of this novel is made of the tape-recorded dictations of his findings. Lyman Ward doesn't just read the letters, though - he constructs an entire world for his grandparents based on the contents of the letters, and the characters, situations and locales he creates are so intimate and engaging that the reader becomes emotionally invested in each one.

Two plots co-exist in Angle of Repose, one inside the other, and Wallace Stegner's rich prose uses each to deepen and give greater meaning to the other. Lyman, so debilitated that he cannot even turn his head, shows himself to be a true descendant of his grandfather in his actions and his thoughts - if nothing else, him retrofitting his grandmother's two-story house to accommodate his wheelchair shows the tenacity and industriousness possessed by his grandfather, pioneer and mine-surveyor of the newly-founded West. The two characters are much alike but in reading the novel, the reader will find the differences between them to be a much more interesting endeavor than it might seem.

Each chapter heaves new inertia into the narrative, but the beauty of this work of literature is in the way that it combines detail with forward motion. If Charles Dickens scares you with his four-page long descriptions of landscapes, fear not - this novel combines Steinbeck-esque brevity with Stephen King-level emotion, tearing down the rough-and-tumble myths of the Wild West and instilling in their place a sense of dignity and class, blending the adventurous 1800's with the maybe-not-so-sophisticated 1970's in a way that showcases human emotion and character as an enduring, indelible facet of the Ward family tree.

Favorite Quote: "You yearned backward a good part of your life, and that produced another sort of Doppler Effect. Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished."

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 patches

Buy: BAM! /// Kindle /// Your local bookstore!

-Brian