Review: THE ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner

From the outset I was seduced by the tone and voice of Lyman Ward, the key narrator of this novel. In his late 50s and almost wheelchair-bound due to a partially amputated leg, Lyman has set up home in the rural area he grew up in, looked after by an aging neighbour and her family, and frowned on by his ex-wife and son Rodman. To occupy his time Lyman sets himself the task of writing the biography of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, and hence also his grandfather Oliver Ward, using the correspondence and writings and drawings that survive. They are two pioneers of the mining West.

I don’t have any sound knowledge of the history of this time, but I felt a strong pull to the tough lives of these characters and their fellows who worked with them in an unforgiving terrain, with financiers and investors repeatedly letting them down and leaving them in the lurch, poorer and more poverty stricken as the story progresses, and the Wards move from place to place, project to project, hope being sparked and snuffed with each exile. What begins for Susan as an adventure, she is on some levels an early feminist perhaps, yet still constrained quite tightly by Victorian mores, following her husband begins as something she desires, but gradually spirals down and deeper into bitterness with the relentless failure.

The novel is layered and rich, and among other things is about the tension between the lives of the cultured (Susan is from a highly cultured and literate society, an artist and writer), and the life of action and practicality – her husband’s life as an engineer and that of his colleagues and workers. At the outset Susan believes this tension can thrive and grow, but with increasingly fewer people to share her passions, the tautness becomes unsustainable.

As well as Lyman’s voice, he also permits Susan to tell her own story in her letters to her cherished friend the increasingly famous Augusta, long married to the poet Thomas Hudson, who may have once made a husband for Susan, and who sustains her at a distance with creative contracts to draw and write. Through Lyman, the novel addresses the difficulty of writing biography, and of how that difficulty is complicated when the biographer is related to the subject. Other subjects emerge including community, unrequited love, blame and the sometimes destructiveness of expectation.

The ‘angle of repose’ is an engineering term for the angle of rest. Lyman’s name itself, may be a play on the term. Lyman doesn’t want to give in to his disability, but at the end of the novel he wonders if he himself could be a bigger man than his grandfather in being able himself to let go into repose. His grandparents never could.

There is often a debate about whether a writer can write authentically in the voice of the opposite sex, Stegner proves that he undoubtedly can.

A Passion for Essays - 1

I simply love essays, I barely care what they are about. There is something about the form that I find truly satisfying. It doesn’t matter whether it is a baggy appreciation of something, or a tight, beautifully honed piece. More than anything essays are likely to send me off to find out more about whatever their subject is. And I’m not just talking about literary subjects here (although most practitioners are writers – well, there’s a given really!). I think it is because essays tend most often to be about things that are passions of the writer, and passion communicated is extremely alluring.

I have read several volumes of essays this year, including Virginia Woolf’s Common Room: Series One and wallowed around in her eclectic mind: Elizabethan literature, Boswell, Johnson, Addison to name but a few subjects. The latter I knew nothing about and ended up going on a hunt for some of his essays – fortunately on holiday where there were a number of delicious secondhand bookshops I was successful.

Other volumes of essays read this year were by Graham Swift and Joyce Carol Oates. I think essays are a very interesting barometer of what interests and engages a culture, and often a good describer of that culture. Oates’s essays were incisive and broad ranging, and I felt told me something of America, as well as of the essence of Oates.

Last night I read the first essay in Zadie Smith's new volume, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, and was very quickly seduced into moving its subject, Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes were Watching God’ nearer the top of a ‘to be read’ pile (more of the TBR another time) – I read the Hurston novel in the 1980s and was very much moved by its language, and so, soon, I shall be moved again I hope. I am also looking forward to the next essays in Smith’s volume.

Review: THE YEARS (Virginia Woolf)

Published in 1937 The Years was the title that Virginia Woolf settled on for this generational novel which begins in the 1800s and concludes in the 1900’s, between the wars. As its title suggests, it is a novel very much about time passing. Lives moving forward (and backward in memory). The Years was only one of a number of possible titles that Virginia considered, the other key possibility was ‘The Pargiters’, but on many levels this would have inferred a very different novel. A novel specific to its characters, whereas The Years communicates its universality.

This is the second time I have read this novel – as I have said in other posts, for writers like Virginia Woolf I tend to read them several times before they begin to make their full impact on me. And Woolf is one writer who for me definitely prospers from the time given to re-reading. Her writing in my opinion is like pure essence. You are subsumed in the era and the atmosphere of the world she is writing about, and this essence is as much internal, the minds – both conscious and sub-conscious of her characters. And like real people you meet, you cannot know them fully in one meeting, or perhaps fully, even in a lifetime. For me Woolf captures that conundrum. And you see it in the relationships between her characters, who, meeting years later realise how different people are or have become.

Woolf’s voices, spoken and internal are powerfully authentic, felt through her inner and spoken dialogue. She is acutely atuned to her characters, who experience the specific personal, and universal sensations.

The beginning of the novel has some of its most powerful moments for me. The character Delia who is waiting for her mother to die. She wants her mother, who is terminally ill, to get on with it and die, because life as it is, is in abeyance. Stultified and suspended Delia is locked into a moment she wants to pass. And as harsh as it seems, if you have ever had to watch someone die, you will understand how she feels. I think that there is a mother and daughter issue here as well.

She is also the character through whom you see the performances that people undertake in life. As Shakespeare says,

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”,

(As You Like It)

Delia, although young, is very aware of how people are required to act, or sense they are acting/performing in relation to each other.

For me the weakness of the novel is that after her early appearance, Delia disappears almost until the party at the end of the novel, and this is the part of the novel I was least engaged in during both readings of the book. That’s not to say that it will always be so, but somehow, when I read the last part of the novel I found my engagement somehow dissipating, like the skein’s of a fistful of unravelled wool. Moments retained the powerful sensations evoked earlier in the novel, but somehow, although in a natural way, I felt all the characters had been shoved into one room and made to tie up all the messy endings. Or to fail to.

BOOK REVIEWS

I may be on my own with this one. But on the whole I don’t like to read full reviews before reading a book. If it is a new, current book being reviewed I tend to read the first and second paragraph, and the penultimate paragraph, and then if I expect to read the book, put the review aside to read after I’ve read the book.

That said, as my average time for getting to a book, if I haven’t read it within the first six months of purchase, is 12 years, often the review has been binned by then. I read about 4 books I have had for 12 years in the past 18 months!

For novels, I don’t like reviews to give too much of the story away. I may be a re-reader, but the first time I read a novel I like to be surprised by its twists and turns.

After I have read a book though, I love seeing if my feelings are shared by others, what people liked and didn’t, what they picked up that I missed etc. I write reviews more as a means of reminding myself in the future what I felt about the book, and exploring my feelings about it – teasing out ideas that wiggled in my minds eye, and capturing sentences that stood out. A review as a means of recommendation for others I tend to think of as a by-product of the above.

This however applies less for books that might have been totally off my radar, either older books (I read the literary journal ‘Slightly Foxed’– see link under publications) from cover to cover each quarter), or when I am reading the review magazines to generally see what’s out there and come upon a book I may not necessarily have discovered otherwise. Then I will read a review more fully. It also ceases to apply with books like Susan Hill’s ‘Howards End is on the Landing’ a book about her library and reading habits.

THE JOY OF RE-READING

I have always been a re-reader. Of course most children begin as re-readers, or demanders of re-reads from their parents. But so often I hear readers say they haven’t got time to re-read, as there are so many books out there they haven’t read. However I never feel re-reading is reading the same book again, you rarely absorb everything in a book first time. Attention focuses on particular aspects perhaps, there is some simpatico with a particular character or subject being described. Re-reading may draw your attention to something you only saw out of the side of your eye before, or something you missed altogether.

I have read The Great Gatsby 20+ times and still I will come upon a line I think I have never read before. Of course I have read it, but it didn’t resonate with me in the same way that other lines, other moments did. But for some reason on this occasion, that line stood out. And then of course your life’s experience may have changed your response to the book drawing you further into it, possibly even alienated you from it for some reason – some reason worth pondering upon perhaps.

With writers such as Virginia Woolf, for example, the multi-layered quality of her work takes at least 3 reads for me before I want to give a proper opinion of it. I know I will see things I missed before, but also the tone and momentum is what I am seeking.

Books become alternative ‘homes’ for their tone and momentum for me. A moment in my life demands a certain sensation that can be filled by a particular book, and if you have never read it before, you can’t guarantee you have the right home for yourself at that time. The right voice whispering in your ear. The right adventure, then the book may become my boat. Journeys require special companions.