Finding an Angle of Repose

"I may not know who I am, but I know where I'm from."
~Wallace Stegner

"Wisdom...is knowing what you have to accept."
~Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose


Reading and writing and living take us on all sorts of enjoyable and not-so-enjoyable tangents. As un undergraduate student at Anderson, I took an interest in the writing, speaking, and lifestyle of Shane Claiborne, who started The Simple Way in Philadelphia. In interacting with him on a visit, he kept mentioning this guy named Wendell Berry. So I began to read Berry and could not get enough of him. The vision he offers of living in the contemporary world is the best I have found. But his literary mentor, a former professor at Stanford University, was a guy named Wallace Stegner. So I figured I should pick him up. And so I read Angle of Repose, a Western novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

Call me crazy, but I have, in fact, read the 500-plus-page novel twice in the last six months. The first time I read it to read it, the second time I read it more closely to include in some research I was doing for English graduate school essays. Now, I admit it, many of you out there would hate probably hate it. A good friend friend who is perhaps more of an avid reader of than I am has tried and failed to read it twice. It is admittedly slow and long: the story itself offers painful disappointment after painful disappointment to the main characters. The New York Times showed its rebellion against the Pulitzer decision by hardly mentioning the novel or its author.

An angle of repose is an angle at which a rock stops rolling down a hill. Stegner uses that as a metaphor throughout the novel to represent the period in one's life or even in a marriage when one reaches a spot that he or she (or perhaps both) stop moving forward, a place in which one accepts the limitations of life or love or work. Today's world might call this "settling," but I'm not sure that fully explains what Stegner had in mind.

Like the much later Freedom and The Poisonwood Bible--from Jonathan Franzen and Barbara Kingsolver, respectively--Angle of Repose weaves in and out of different voices. Stegner received some criticism for his use of real letters from Mary Hallock Foote. The main voice of the novel, the narrator's, is that of Lyman Ward, a disabled scholar who is researching his artist and writer grandmother to, in some ways, make sense of his own life and marriage, and especially a wife that left him for another man. Foote's letters are used as the letters from Lyman's grandmother, Susan Ward, to her best friend, Augusta, in which she often laments the "failures" of her husband, Oliver, who Augusta warned her not to marry, and the slow, painful realization that she will never return to the intellectual life of the East Coast, instead destined for further "exile" in mining camps spanning from the Dakotas to Colorado and Idaho and even down to Mexico.

Through and in that pain, she is drawn to her husband's best friend and co-worker, Frank: younger than her but a hard worker and skilled conversationalist who returns her affection. Lyman pieces together the evidence, and speculates that something happened, although he is not sure what, and he knows that Susan felt shame about the relationship. It is her and Oliver's "angle of repose" that saves the marriage; Lyman can only hope to find such an angle if he is to accept his wife back.

It is the complex, nuanced maneuvering of these big life decisions that pains Lyman, his assistant Shelly, Susan, Oliver, and Frank from 1870 to 1970, and it is not too different for us today. Where to live? What work to pursue? Who to marry? If or when to procreate? How committed will be to family? Will we settle in to an angle of repose or continue on our pleasure-seeking excursions? These decisions both stress us to our wit's end and also (sometimes) provide us with some of the comfort we seek.

As much as we would love life to be about any number of sexier things, in the end, there really isn't anything sexier.