Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose was published in 1972 and won the Pulitzer prize for that year and is still considered by many to be the best “western” book. The book is big (and tight, not rambling) and quiet. It is structurally divided into two stories, which is at first incredibly irritating. In the end, the irritatingly interrupting narrator's contemporary story is in some sense the most interesting. The narrator's story is one of old age, disability and the power of remembering and reconstructing (what is reconstructed is the life story of his grandmother, a book illustrator and artist married to a mining engineer, who spends her adult life in a variety of spare, contemplative, challenging western spaces (canyons, mesas, deserts, etc), making home after home out of nothing). Laudably, the novel refuses to be nice, about anything or anybody, any of the characters, past or present, any of the landscapes. The people in the book are wounded and unlikeable at least half of the time. Which is good. The book is both romantic and not romantic, perceptive and blind about its characters and the west. The complexity of the author's and the character's viewpoint is startlingly well done. The grandmother's story was based on A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West by Mary Halleck Foote published for the first time in 1972 from the manuscript at the Huntington. The Zodiac cottage was based on the North Star House designed by California architect Julia Morgan for the Foote's in 1905 located NE of Sacramento outside of Grass Valley. Until very recently the house was abandoned and in ruins. It is slowly being restored.