The characters in the story are people I could relate to in today’s terms – and their world was comprehensible to me as not fundamentally different from my own, though very different on the surface. The momentum in Angle of Repose builds right up to the last chapter and the last page. But unlike a great meal, it does not climax toward the end and finish on a soft note with a satisfied sigh and a sweet dish “dessert” as an epilogue. Like a great meal, it starts out a bit slow, and then builds in momentum, with each course adding to the last, each course bringing a new dimension and new depth to the meal. The book is presented in 9 parts and as such, it is a 9 course feast. It moves from the the refined center of Brahmin culture in upper class New York City, to the raw and unrefined version of American culture that was emerging in the American West in the late 19th century.
A very well developed writing style, and a very creative approach to weaving stories of courage and resilience, cultural change, love, marriage, anger and forgiveness, into a story that opens the door to understanding how American culture evolved. This is part of what I believe makes Angle of Repose truly great literature. I keep reflecting on it, and how and why it had such an impact on me. But the story is also about the history professor and his impressions of what he learns about his grandparents, his guesses and assumptions about what is left out of the letters and what all that might mean to him, dealing with his own challenges in 1970. It is fascinating that Stegner used as the model for the fictional grandmother a real woman, Mary Hallock Foote, whose letters he had obtained from her family, and from which he quoted liberally – so Angle of Repose is indeed part biography of the experiences of a real “gentlewoman” and her family, who lived in some very untamed and not-yet-civilized circumstances in the West. Summary in 3 Sentences: The “story” is of a wheelchair-bound retired history professor researching and writing a biography of his grandmother who had raised him, based on her letters to her close friend back east after moving to the west in the 1870s with her new husband, the history professor’s grandfather. Indeed Angle of Repose had won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1972 and was ranked one of the top 100 novels in the English language in the 20th century. So I did a bit of research, was intrigued, and pressed my literature reading group to select it – noting that though it is la bit longer (630 pages) than our normal selection, it was time to again read a book of substance. Why this book: I recently began hearing or reading references to this book – and I’d never heard of it.
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