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Ted's Reviews > Angle of Repose
Angle of Repose
by
by
It's perfectly clear to me that if a writer is born to write one story, this is my story.
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), born in Lake Mills Iowa, died in Santa Fe. Historian, novelist, short story writer, environmentalist. Jackson Benson, in his Introduction to this edition, identifies the “major strands of his career� as his love of the land, his concern for history, his advocacy of cooperation, his antagonism toward rugged individualism, and his dedication to writing. Some of his best known books include The Angle of Repose (awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and voted by readers of the San Francisco Chronicle the number one novel written about the American West), The Big Rock Candy Mountain, The Spectator Bird and Beyond the Hundredth Meridian - the latter a biography of the naturalist John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), a multifaceted man known for the 1869 expedition he led into the Southwest, a cartographic and scientific endeavor which included a raft trip down the Colorado River, the first documented passage by non-Native Americans through the Grand Canyon.
The title, the story behind the story
The angle of repose
Perhaps this is the place to mention how I heard of this novel. My wife and I had ventured to Arizona for a hiking trip, a year or two after the trip that I’ve shown pictures from in THIS review.
Well, we’d arranged to meet and have lunch with one of the guides we’d had on that previous trip, before embarking on the new adventure. So we met this fellow at a restaurant he’d told us how to get to, somewhere up there in northern Arizona. We got to talking books, and he mentioned the one we’re talking about here. “Have you ever read The Angle of Repose?�, he asked. ”Never heard of it.� “Best book I’ve ever read.� [then some other back and forth, and] “Do you know what the angle of repose is?� “No�, I admitted.
So he picks up a pretty full salt shaker, unscrews the top, dumps it out onto the table, points, and says, “That’s the angle of repose.�
(As our waitress goes past, she laughs, and he says, “She knows me.� With a grin.)
from Wiki ^^vv
“The angle of repose of a granular material is the steepest angle, relative to the horizontal, to which the material can be piled without slumping. At this angle, the material on the slope face is on the verge of sliding.�
There’s a great picture illustrating the angle of repose on the cover of the Penguin edition I have.
Eliot Porter. Window in Tin Wall, Eureka Colorado
Mary Hallock Foote
Mary Hallock Foote - if it’s not too strong a word, the inspiration behind the main character in the novel. Foote was born in Milton NY in 1847, died in Grass Valley CA in 1938.
Foote studied at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women, and by her early twenties was being employed as an illustrator by magazines. In 1876, just married, she followed her husband, reluctantly, to the American West; however, once there she found herself fascinated with the people and places she saw, and soon became something of a literary and artistic darling to those in the East who celebrated such things. For three decades she wrote novels and stories, and sent drawings, and wood engravings made from them, to various publications in the East. During all this time she corresponded with a dear female friend of hers back East (“Augusta� in the novel), whom she apparently envied to a great extent because Augusta’s life - immersed in the artistic milieu of the time, visiting Europe, knowing popular writers � was the life that Mary had once envisioned for herself.
The setting and telling of the story
Characters
Lyman Ward
- the narrator, 58 years old, retired history professor, wheelchair bound with a debilitating disease. Lyman is engaged in a study of � well, of his grandparents for sure, and beyond that, of time, or rather of people as they move through time. He is writing a narrative of the life of his grandmother and grandfather. His actual recollections of them are based on times he spent, as a child, at the “Zodiac cottage�, where the grandparents came to rest in their mutual slide, where they found their personal angle of repose.
Lyman’s son Rodman (and Rodman’s wife) doubt that he should be living as he does. He has a caretaker who comes daily, but still, they essentially want him in a nursing home. So Lyman himself is struggling to NOT find his angle of repose, desperately trying to keep on sliding, so as to avoid coming to rest.
Susan Burling Ward
- Lyman’s grandmother. The fictional character that is a version of Mary Hallock Foote. Her journey through life shares many correspondences with Foote’s journey � growing up in the east, marrying an engineer and moving west, her artistic capabilities, her friendship with a woman back East. The western locations in which Susan Ward lives follow a similar geographic path as Foote’s did (see below, Place.
Oliver Ward
- Lyman’s grandfather, Susan Burling Ward’s husband. The man who brings her to the West, in pursuit of his own dreams and ambitions. This character cannot be based too closely on Mary Hallock Foote’s own husband, because not too much is known about that real person, beyond the places that he and Mary moved to. The relationship between Susan and Oliver ward is pretty much made up, though there are clues, perhaps somewhat more than clues, in Mary’s correspondence. Actually seems to be quite a bit of Wallace Stegner’s own father mixed into his portrayal of Oliver Ward. This man, George Stegner, “was what his son later called a ‘boomer�, a man looking to find a fortune in the West and who, not finding it in one place, went to another.� This too could be said of the fictional Oliver Ward, but with qualification. Oliver not so much interested in making a fortune as in making a mark, a contribution to the development of the West, a contribution for which he would be remunerated only fairly, and a contribution which would be acknowledged by others. None of these modest goals were ever won by Oliver Ward. And modest they were, given the dedication, never-faltering effort, and engineering talent that he brought to the projects he worked on.
The narrative - Place and Time
Stegner’s story (that is, Lyman Ward’s story) relates to us Susan Ward’s and Oliver Ward’s life together, his engineering efforts, his constant care that she should have everything she needs and wants (at least those needs and wants which he has some conception of, though her inner life of harking back east to the world of Augusta, of publishing, art, books is oh so dim to Oliver, barely discernible in the world of the West that he perceives), and she frequently making drawings of the workers, the Mexican laborers, the miners. And then absorbed in the story, page after page, the reader is suddenly jolted by a passage that transports her out of the story and into the landscape, a passage which describes the beauty of a land sometimes harsh but always mysteriously beautiful � and at times the beautiful because of that harshness.
But first, a few words about �
Time
Lyman Ward’s narrative, when it’s situated in his own present, is often addressed to his grandmother, whose history he is attempting to resurrect. And he speculates on the differences produced by their respective places in time, musing on the Doppler Effect as humans may experience it over the train of extended years.
Place
But as moving as I found the author’s views of the former, it is, of course, the primacy of place which asserts itself in the novel.
The place being the series of those parts of (North) America’s West, in the 18th century, which host his protagonists, each one following the last. This illustrates the fact that one of Stegner’s main interests was the history of the West as it unfolded in the 19th century, as his own parents took part in that history.
He has divided his novel into 9 parts. The first and sixth take part in the East; the last is rooted in the Zodiac cottage of the narrator’s grandparents.
The other parts parallel (loosely) those places where Mary Hallock Foote moved to in her journey across this part of the earth.
The titles of these parts of the novel are:
Part II. New Almaden (in the mountains east of San Francisco)
Part III. Santa Cruz [Chapter 2 of this part is masterful, a telling of the scenery, the conversations of his protagonists, which reveal the different perspectives have of the locale, the people that surround them, and the place they are in on their journey.]
Part IV. Leadville (Colorado)
Part V. Michoacan (Mexico)
Part VII. The Canyon (Boise Idaho)
Part VIII. The Mesa (not fron from Boise)
Wiki tells us that Mary Hallock Foote, in her movements across that West with her husband Arthur Foote, lived at ”the New Almaden mine near San Jose, California; � Leadville, Colorado; Deadwood, South Dakota; Boise, Idaho; � Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico; finally Grass Valley, California, where Arthur advanced to managing the North Star mine." Not exactly the same geographic path as Susan Ward, but quite similar.
But it isn’t the trail of stations pulled into by Susan Ward that is so evocative of place. It is Stegner’s description of these places that was so deeply moving to me.
(New Almaden) Unending summer. It was hotter at the end of September than it had been in July. But the heat was more seen than felt, more hallucination than discomfort. It turned illusory even the things on which she had fixed in the attempt to make the strange world real. From her temperate veranda she now saw only void where the valley used to be � a gray, smoky void into which she peered, hunting distance and relief from the mirage of mountains that quivered around her with visible heat.
(Santa Cruz) � the casement opened on fog s white and blind as sleep. Beyond the wet shingles whose edge was overflowed by the ghost of a climbing rose, there were no shapes, solidities, directions, or distances� There was a slow, dignified dripping� “I love it,� Susan said. “In a way, I love it. It scares me a little. It’s as if every morning the world had to create itself all new. Everything’s still to do, the word isn’t yet spoken…�
(Leadville) She was at the edge of a meadow miles long, not a tree in it except for the wiggling line that marked the course of the Lake Fork. Stirrup-high grass flowed and flawed in the wind, and its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks and splashes of flowers � rust of paintbrush, blue of pentstemon, yellow of buttercups, scarlet of gilia, blue-tinged white of columbines� The air was that high blue mountain kind that fizzes in the lungs. Rising in her stirrup to get her face and chest full of it, she gave, as it were, a standing ovation to the rim cut out against the blue. From a thousand places in the grass little gems of unevaporated water winked back the sun.
(Michoacan) Nothing could have appealed to Grandmother’s romantic medievalism more than those houses. They arrived like knights errant, a seneschal swung open the gates, at the inner gate the lord met them � Vassals led away the lady’s palfrey and unbuckled the knight’s spurs � They dined at feudal boards with retainers clustered below the salt, while outside in courts lighted by torches there was minstrelsy on the guitar.
Fairyland, a storybook country of antique courtesy and feudal grandeur, with a passionate concentration of the picturesque on which Susan Ward throve. She left every great house with reluctance. As they jingled and shuffled along a road through some sun-baked high valley � she may have thought� that if Oliver’s report were only going to be different, they might still become part of that world.
(The Canyon) When they moved to the canyon camp, they expected to stay only through the summer. They stayed five years�
While they lived there it was hopeful struggle, not lost cause, and for a while it was a little corner of Eden.
Eden had three stories. The upper one ran from the canyon rim up high sage slopes toward the aspen groves, pines, mountain meadows, and cold lakes and streams of the high country. The middle story was the rounding flat in the side gulch where a spring broke out and where their buildings and garden were. The lowest story was the river beach� Even in low water the rapid below was a steady rush and mutter on the air.
(The Mesa) She let her weight down, heavy and tired, into the hammock. Bats wove back and forth, utterly soundless, across the openings between the piazza pillars. At first she could see them against the sky, erratic and flickering and swift; then she couldn’t be sure whether she still saw them or whether she only sensed them as movement across the dusk. The house behind her was as dark and empty as herself. Her eyes were fixed on the framed view of mesa, black hills, saffron sky. The last brightness of already-gone day burned darkly on a cloud that went slate-color as she watched. She saw a star, then another.
Utterly cut off, sunk into the West, cut off behind arid hills, she lay thinking backward to another piazza and the smell of other roses.
I’m indebted to my salt-shaker spilling friend who introduced me to this Pulitzer prize winning novel. A very dense novel, a masterpiece. Now that I’ve finally fulfilled a five-year attempt at reviewing it, I’m ready to read it again.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Previous review: What if? Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions
Next review: The Unwinding An Inner History of the New America
Older review: The Hundred Days
Previous library review: Nine Stories Salinger
Next library review: East of Eden Steinbeck
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), born in Lake Mills Iowa, died in Santa Fe. Historian, novelist, short story writer, environmentalist. Jackson Benson, in his Introduction to this edition, identifies the “major strands of his career� as his love of the land, his concern for history, his advocacy of cooperation, his antagonism toward rugged individualism, and his dedication to writing. Some of his best known books include The Angle of Repose (awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and voted by readers of the San Francisco Chronicle the number one novel written about the American West), The Big Rock Candy Mountain, The Spectator Bird and Beyond the Hundredth Meridian - the latter a biography of the naturalist John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), a multifaceted man known for the 1869 expedition he led into the Southwest, a cartographic and scientific endeavor which included a raft trip down the Colorado River, the first documented passage by non-Native Americans through the Grand Canyon.
The title, the story behind the story
The angle of repose
Perhaps this is the place to mention how I heard of this novel. My wife and I had ventured to Arizona for a hiking trip, a year or two after the trip that I’ve shown pictures from in THIS review.
Well, we’d arranged to meet and have lunch with one of the guides we’d had on that previous trip, before embarking on the new adventure. So we met this fellow at a restaurant he’d told us how to get to, somewhere up there in northern Arizona. We got to talking books, and he mentioned the one we’re talking about here. “Have you ever read The Angle of Repose?�, he asked. ”Never heard of it.� “Best book I’ve ever read.� [then some other back and forth, and] “Do you know what the angle of repose is?� “No�, I admitted.
So he picks up a pretty full salt shaker, unscrews the top, dumps it out onto the table, points, and says, “That’s the angle of repose.�
(As our waitress goes past, she laughs, and he says, “She knows me.� With a grin.)
from Wiki ^^vv
“The angle of repose of a granular material is the steepest angle, relative to the horizontal, to which the material can be piled without slumping. At this angle, the material on the slope face is on the verge of sliding.�
There’s a great picture illustrating the angle of repose on the cover of the Penguin edition I have.
Eliot Porter. Window in Tin Wall, Eureka Colorado
Mary Hallock Foote
Mary Hallock Foote - if it’s not too strong a word, the inspiration behind the main character in the novel. Foote was born in Milton NY in 1847, died in Grass Valley CA in 1938.
Foote studied at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women, and by her early twenties was being employed as an illustrator by magazines. In 1876, just married, she followed her husband, reluctantly, to the American West; however, once there she found herself fascinated with the people and places she saw, and soon became something of a literary and artistic darling to those in the East who celebrated such things. For three decades she wrote novels and stories, and sent drawings, and wood engravings made from them, to various publications in the East. During all this time she corresponded with a dear female friend of hers back East (“Augusta� in the novel), whom she apparently envied to a great extent because Augusta’s life - immersed in the artistic milieu of the time, visiting Europe, knowing popular writers � was the life that Mary had once envisioned for herself.
The setting and telling of the story
Characters
Lyman Ward
- the narrator, 58 years old, retired history professor, wheelchair bound with a debilitating disease. Lyman is engaged in a study of � well, of his grandparents for sure, and beyond that, of time, or rather of people as they move through time. He is writing a narrative of the life of his grandmother and grandfather. His actual recollections of them are based on times he spent, as a child, at the “Zodiac cottage�, where the grandparents came to rest in their mutual slide, where they found their personal angle of repose.
Lyman’s son Rodman (and Rodman’s wife) doubt that he should be living as he does. He has a caretaker who comes daily, but still, they essentially want him in a nursing home. So Lyman himself is struggling to NOT find his angle of repose, desperately trying to keep on sliding, so as to avoid coming to rest.
Susan Burling Ward
- Lyman’s grandmother. The fictional character that is a version of Mary Hallock Foote. Her journey through life shares many correspondences with Foote’s journey � growing up in the east, marrying an engineer and moving west, her artistic capabilities, her friendship with a woman back East. The western locations in which Susan Ward lives follow a similar geographic path as Foote’s did (see below, Place.
Oliver Ward
- Lyman’s grandfather, Susan Burling Ward’s husband. The man who brings her to the West, in pursuit of his own dreams and ambitions. This character cannot be based too closely on Mary Hallock Foote’s own husband, because not too much is known about that real person, beyond the places that he and Mary moved to. The relationship between Susan and Oliver ward is pretty much made up, though there are clues, perhaps somewhat more than clues, in Mary’s correspondence. Actually seems to be quite a bit of Wallace Stegner’s own father mixed into his portrayal of Oliver Ward. This man, George Stegner, “was what his son later called a ‘boomer�, a man looking to find a fortune in the West and who, not finding it in one place, went to another.� This too could be said of the fictional Oliver Ward, but with qualification. Oliver not so much interested in making a fortune as in making a mark, a contribution to the development of the West, a contribution for which he would be remunerated only fairly, and a contribution which would be acknowledged by others. None of these modest goals were ever won by Oliver Ward. And modest they were, given the dedication, never-faltering effort, and engineering talent that he brought to the projects he worked on.
The narrative - Place and Time
Stegner’s story (that is, Lyman Ward’s story) relates to us Susan Ward’s and Oliver Ward’s life together, his engineering efforts, his constant care that she should have everything she needs and wants (at least those needs and wants which he has some conception of, though her inner life of harking back east to the world of Augusta, of publishing, art, books is oh so dim to Oliver, barely discernible in the world of the West that he perceives), and she frequently making drawings of the workers, the Mexican laborers, the miners. And then absorbed in the story, page after page, the reader is suddenly jolted by a passage that transports her out of the story and into the landscape, a passage which describes the beauty of a land sometimes harsh but always mysteriously beautiful � and at times the beautiful because of that harshness.
But first, a few words about �
Time
Lyman Ward’s narrative, when it’s situated in his own present, is often addressed to his grandmother, whose history he is attempting to resurrect. And he speculates on the differences produced by their respective places in time, musing on the Doppler Effect as humans may experience it over the train of extended years.
I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne� I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn’t I look forward to yours?And later, as he tells of a New Year which determined, not immediately but only in the future, the course of Susan Ward’s life �
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. It came to you secondhand in the letters of Augusta Hudson. You lived vicariously in her, dined with the literary great �
Governors Island, as I imagine that last day of December, would have floated like dirty ice out in the bay; the Jersey shore would have fumed with slow smokes.
The Doppler Effect is very apparent in my imagining of that afternoon. I hear it as it was now and as it is then. Nemesis in a wheelchair, I could roll into that party and astonish and appall the company with the things I know. The future is inexorable for all of them; for some it is set like a trap� So many things I know.
Place
But as moving as I found the author’s views of the former, it is, of course, the primacy of place which asserts itself in the novel.
The place being the series of those parts of (North) America’s West, in the 18th century, which host his protagonists, each one following the last. This illustrates the fact that one of Stegner’s main interests was the history of the West as it unfolded in the 19th century, as his own parents took part in that history.
He has divided his novel into 9 parts. The first and sixth take part in the East; the last is rooted in the Zodiac cottage of the narrator’s grandparents.
The other parts parallel (loosely) those places where Mary Hallock Foote moved to in her journey across this part of the earth.
The titles of these parts of the novel are:
Part II. New Almaden (in the mountains east of San Francisco)
Part III. Santa Cruz [Chapter 2 of this part is masterful, a telling of the scenery, the conversations of his protagonists, which reveal the different perspectives have of the locale, the people that surround them, and the place they are in on their journey.]
Part IV. Leadville (Colorado)
Part V. Michoacan (Mexico)
Part VII. The Canyon (Boise Idaho)
Part VIII. The Mesa (not fron from Boise)
Wiki tells us that Mary Hallock Foote, in her movements across that West with her husband Arthur Foote, lived at ”the New Almaden mine near San Jose, California; � Leadville, Colorado; Deadwood, South Dakota; Boise, Idaho; � Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico; finally Grass Valley, California, where Arthur advanced to managing the North Star mine." Not exactly the same geographic path as Susan Ward, but quite similar.
But it isn’t the trail of stations pulled into by Susan Ward that is so evocative of place. It is Stegner’s description of these places that was so deeply moving to me.
(New Almaden) Unending summer. It was hotter at the end of September than it had been in July. But the heat was more seen than felt, more hallucination than discomfort. It turned illusory even the things on which she had fixed in the attempt to make the strange world real. From her temperate veranda she now saw only void where the valley used to be � a gray, smoky void into which she peered, hunting distance and relief from the mirage of mountains that quivered around her with visible heat.
(Santa Cruz) � the casement opened on fog s white and blind as sleep. Beyond the wet shingles whose edge was overflowed by the ghost of a climbing rose, there were no shapes, solidities, directions, or distances� There was a slow, dignified dripping� “I love it,� Susan said. “In a way, I love it. It scares me a little. It’s as if every morning the world had to create itself all new. Everything’s still to do, the word isn’t yet spoken…�
(Leadville) She was at the edge of a meadow miles long, not a tree in it except for the wiggling line that marked the course of the Lake Fork. Stirrup-high grass flowed and flawed in the wind, and its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks and splashes of flowers � rust of paintbrush, blue of pentstemon, yellow of buttercups, scarlet of gilia, blue-tinged white of columbines� The air was that high blue mountain kind that fizzes in the lungs. Rising in her stirrup to get her face and chest full of it, she gave, as it were, a standing ovation to the rim cut out against the blue. From a thousand places in the grass little gems of unevaporated water winked back the sun.
(Michoacan) Nothing could have appealed to Grandmother’s romantic medievalism more than those houses. They arrived like knights errant, a seneschal swung open the gates, at the inner gate the lord met them � Vassals led away the lady’s palfrey and unbuckled the knight’s spurs � They dined at feudal boards with retainers clustered below the salt, while outside in courts lighted by torches there was minstrelsy on the guitar.
Fairyland, a storybook country of antique courtesy and feudal grandeur, with a passionate concentration of the picturesque on which Susan Ward throve. She left every great house with reluctance. As they jingled and shuffled along a road through some sun-baked high valley � she may have thought� that if Oliver’s report were only going to be different, they might still become part of that world.
(The Canyon) When they moved to the canyon camp, they expected to stay only through the summer. They stayed five years�
While they lived there it was hopeful struggle, not lost cause, and for a while it was a little corner of Eden.
Eden had three stories. The upper one ran from the canyon rim up high sage slopes toward the aspen groves, pines, mountain meadows, and cold lakes and streams of the high country. The middle story was the rounding flat in the side gulch where a spring broke out and where their buildings and garden were. The lowest story was the river beach� Even in low water the rapid below was a steady rush and mutter on the air.
(The Mesa) She let her weight down, heavy and tired, into the hammock. Bats wove back and forth, utterly soundless, across the openings between the piazza pillars. At first she could see them against the sky, erratic and flickering and swift; then she couldn’t be sure whether she still saw them or whether she only sensed them as movement across the dusk. The house behind her was as dark and empty as herself. Her eyes were fixed on the framed view of mesa, black hills, saffron sky. The last brightness of already-gone day burned darkly on a cloud that went slate-color as she watched. She saw a star, then another.
Utterly cut off, sunk into the West, cut off behind arid hills, she lay thinking backward to another piazza and the smell of other roses.
I’m indebted to my salt-shaker spilling friend who introduced me to this Pulitzer prize winning novel. A very dense novel, a masterpiece. Now that I’ve finally fulfilled a five-year attempt at reviewing it, I’m ready to read it again.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Previous review: What if? Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions
Next review: The Unwinding An Inner History of the New America
Older review: The Hundred Days
Previous library review: Nine Stories Salinger
Next library review: East of Eden Steinbeck
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Reading Progress
April 4, 2012
– Shelved
April 4, 2012
– Shelved as:
lit-american
September 9, 2012
–
Started Reading
December 26, 2012
–
86.18%
"His grandmother loses faith in his grandfather, and imagines that he has lost faith in her. But true to the West, they endure."
page
480
May 2, 2013
–
Finished Reading
July 6, 2013
– Shelved as:
beach-mixed
September 5, 2013
– Shelved as:
have
June 11, 2017
– Shelved as:
reviews-liked
October 13, 2017
– Shelved as:
americana
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rated it 4 stars
Apr 04, 2012 05:53PM
I am pretty sure I read this in my freshman seminar on Western Literature at Amherst. I think I had to read it over Thanksgiving break! Luckily I remember enjoying it, though I don't remember much else about it! I also remember that I thought it was a completely true story and I was sad when I realized it was not!
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I can't recall ever hearing of it, but it was recommended by our friend Mike Young when we saw him in Prescott AZ a couple weeks ago on our way up to GC Village. He demonstrated to us what the "angle of repose" is by dumping salt on the table where we were having lunch.
I'm so glad you loved this, Ted. It's a brilliant novel. Looking forward to your review. :)
I recently listened to the audiobook but wish I had read it. I have the book on my shelves and think I should read at least some of it to get a better sense of the prose.
Let's see. A couple days has stretched to over three years. Don't give up! (I say to myself.)
Barbara wrote: "I recently listened to the audiobook but wish I had read it. I have the book on my shelves and think I should read at least some of it to get a better sense of the prose."Was the audiobook by a noted actor? The worst, since they often exaggerate voices etc. The best aloudbook reader I recall (beside people I've known) was a radio guy, Bill Cavness I think, who read on Albany, NY radio (and maybe Boston) in the 70s. He would read obscure novels and they were always wonderful.
Alan wrote: "Barbara wrote: "I recently listened to the audiobook but wish I had read it. I have the book on my shelves and think I should read at least some of it to get a better sense of the prose."Was the ..."
Great advice! I am learning to avoid some narrators. I get my audiobooks on Audible.
David wrote: "Lovely, Ted!"Hey, thanks much, David!
A wonderful review, Ted. Stegner is a truly great writer.
Terrific review, Ted."The Big Rock Candy Mountain" and "Angle of Repose" rank as not only my favorite Stegner novels, but as two of my all-time favorite novels, period.
"Big Rock" is based on Stegner's family and gives the reader insight into his somewhat unhappy, but interesting, childhood. I highly recommend it.
Howard wrote: "Terrific review, Ted."The Big Rock Candy Mountain" and "Angle of Repose" rank as not only my favorite Stegner novels, but as two of my all-time favorite novels, period.
"Big Rock" is based on S..."
Thanks Howard! By the way, that quote at the top of the review comes from the Intro to my edition, written by Jackson J. Benson. What comes before the quote is this:
When asked by an interviewer if the life of Mary Hallock Foote ... had reminded him of the life of Elsa Mason, the mother in the semiautobiographical The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Stegner said,Oh, and I have "Big Rock". All I have to do now is get to it. It's on my list of top next reads - but I'd be embarrassed to say how many other books are on the list. 8 (
"Not consciously. It never occurred to me that there was any relation between [the two novels] till after I had finished writing [Angle]. Then I saw that there were all kinds of connections. There was the wandering husband and the nesting woman, and the whole business reproduced in many ways in somewhat more cultivated terms and in different places what ["Big Rock"] was about... [Then follows directly what I quoted]
Thanks very much, Marita!
Thank you again, Ted, for a thorough and creative review.I'm glad you took the time to let the book sort itself thru
Your experience and to give us so clear a review. Truly a pleasure! I will now read it again..... After many years.....
Mary Ann wrote: "Thank you again, Ted, for a thorough and creative review.I'm glad you took the time to let the book sort itself thru
Your experience and to give us so clear a review. Truly a pleasure! I will now ..."
Thanks Mary Ann. It hasn't been that long since I read it, but I would enjoy a re-read, I'm sure.
Great and exhaustive discussion of this book, Ted! I really look forward to reading this one day. “Crossing to Safety� was one of the best novels I ever read, and his essays were great!
Michael wrote: "Great and exhaustive discussion of this book, Ted! I really look forward to reading this one day. “Crossing to Safety� was one of the best novels I ever read, and his essays were great!"Thanks Michael. I've yet to read anything else by Stegner, but I've seen many comments by others (like you) raving about various of his writings.
Michael wrote: "“Crossing to Safety� was one of the best novels I ever read, and his essays were great!"I'll second that. I enjoyed Angle of Repose, but I thought it somewhat flawed, while Crossing to Safety was very different, but flawless.
I am indebted to your self spilling friend as well. Twenty pages in and still finding my rhythm your wonderful review highlights the complex nuances of Stegner who I have struggled with in the past. It feels like this may be another precipice that open new literary plaines as Haruf did.
