Book Review: ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"What's an angle of repose?" I asked my engineer/math teacher brother before voting. It turns out that my picking this book to accompany me at the polls was, again, a weird twist of literary destiny, for the book had much to say about the need for a sense of history ("We need it to know what real injustice looks like."), about despair ("Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition."), about perseverance ("It is worth any amount of unhappiness to be given the opportunity to learn and grow and become something good and true, perhaps even noble."), about how a people shape a nation ("A benchmark in the nation's understanding of itself") and looking at the future with hope ("Well just look at this with the eye of faith.")

Not to worry, Stegner provides at least 3 descriptions of what an angle of repose is, but my favorite was "the angle at which 2 lines prop each other up."

They say Monday's election showed a split in our society. To extend the geometry metaphor, it is as if there are two separate groups living in two parallel realities, two vertical lines that do not connect... but in truth, we need each other to build this country back up from the depths it has fallen.

"What though the world be lost?
All is not lost.
Honor is not lost."

I fell in love with Stegner's CROSSING TO SAFETY, and was grateful when a secondhand copy of ANGLE OF REPOSE became available! Basing it on the real life of Mary Hallock Foote, Stegner's frame narrative is that of a crippled historian writing a book on his grandparents, and ultimately finding the meaning of his life by unearthing that of his ancestors.

The Pulitzer is very much deserved, as reading this novel reminded me of what I felt while reading Steinbeck's EAST OF EDEN: that intense absorption into a work so complete, so thrillingly ALIVE, that one's soul is crushed and uplifted, and one can't do anything except smile tearfully, gratefully, upon the book's closing.

The greater the pain, the sweeter the joy. The darker our night, the brighter our tomorrow. I will be re-reading Stegner throughout the next six years, and more.

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