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.
