Angle of Repose
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Angle of Repose

4.22 of 5 stars 4.22  ·  rating details  ·  11,960 ratings  ·  1,735 reviews
Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel--the magnificent story of four generations in the life of an American family. A wheelchair-bound retired historian embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now long dead. The unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the tone for Stegner's masterpiece.
Paperback, 576 pages
Published May 28th 1992 by Penguin (first published 1971)
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Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 17,901)
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BT
BT rated it 2 of 5 stars
Recommends it for: Nobody
Recommended to BT by: Goodreads reviewers
I read this book based largely on the Goodreads reviews. Maybe I'm not as smart as other reviewers, or maybe other reviewers give it high praise because it was a Pulitzer Prize winner and they didn't want to look dumb (something to which I have no aversion), or maybe this was just a fluke, but I didn't think this book was worth reading. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I started the book about 4 or 5 times, and when I finally did slog through it, it was in 5 and 10 page increments. I just ...more
Elizabeth (Alaska)
As I read this, I thought, "this is about a 4 star read." So why did I give it 5 stars? It is such a beautiful book, that's why. There were many parts that didn't seem to move along, which is why I thought I would be stingy, but I'm so very glad the author took his time. And I felt myself talking to the characters, mostly Susan. "Don't be so removed from your life - how many do you get?" Could I be so involved with a story and not give it 5 stars?
Joy
This is easily one of my favorite novels of the books I've read in the past 5 years. It's lauded as Stegner's masterpiece and I completely agree.

Stegner tells the story of a man who has a disease that is crippling him. He's living in his ancestral home, being taken care of by an old, old, family friend. He's a historian and feels compelled to research his paternal grandmother using the journals and keepsakes that are at the house. Stegner weaves the life story of the grandmothe...more
Beth
Beth rated it 5 of 5 stars
I have read this book twice so far. The first time, I was a single college student. The second time, I had been married about five years. I'm sure I will read it again a few more times. And I'm sure that the more years of marriage I've logged, the more I will get out of this book.

Marriage, and what it takes -- and takes out of you -- to make it work is the main theme of this book. Stegner has some profound things to say about it. But even before I could personally relate to the stor...more
Maureen
Maureen rated it 3 of 5 stars
Shelves: 2012
it doesn't surprise that this book won the pulitzer prize. it's an ambitious novel, cleverly constructed, effectively blending life and fiction, containing some beautiful sentences.

this is the story of lyman ward, a historian who has gone into retirement, afflicted by a bone disease that has resulted in the amputation of his right leg, living alone in the house that was his grandparents, and it is also about his grandmother, susan burling ward, an artist and writer, who moved from t...more
Kristin
The next review is for Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. This was our latest book club read for the month of February. It is a beautifully written, eloquent, descriptive book. It has been highly, highly recommended to me by several people...readers who I respect. Most of them have said that it was the best book they have ever read. Wow! That is saying a lot. This book is a very long and epic tale of a husband and wife who move to the west in the late 1800's to settle. This was good news to me....more
Julie
Julie rated it 5 of 5 stars
Shelves: faves-to-re-read
Wow, I really enjoyed reading this book! It was such a sad, sad story and just when you think it couldn't get worse, it did - maybe I enjoy unhappy endings... Nevertheless, Stegner is so deliciously descriptive and Lyman's narration was sometimes amusing and (very) frank.
In some ways I sympathized with Susan and understood how she may have felt leaving a life she loved behind and braving the unknown. I think that's what marriage is in general. (It also helped that she mentioned places lik...more
Linda
Linda rated it 2 of 5 stars
Recommends it for: History Lovers who seek depression
Recommended to Linda by: Pulitzer Prize Novels List
Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972 for this book. Goes to show you that you should disregard my reviews! Absolutely no taste, whatsoever. This book took me over two months to read because I kept putting it down. Down being the operative word here. It was not only a "downer", but lacked the skill of a good editor. In today's publishing world, Stegner wouldn't have gotten away with such a ponderous, heavy book. This was written in the "old way," with the author ...more
Trin
Trin rated it 2 of 5 stars
Shelves: fiction, american-lit
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Erica
The characters here seem hopeful in the beginning, ready to find success in the American West as well as their own lives at the end of the 19th century. Stegner captures the slow seep of hope away from them in a way that's probably realistic for many who start out life with plans and time, but watch them both fall away. At nearly 600 pages, it still feels a little unfinished and maybe a little unsatisfying. I found the narrator and his grandmother to be just a little annoying at times, but it...more
Bobbi
This was Wallace Stegner's masterpiece and that it is! One of my all-time favorites. His prose is flawless. A story about settling the American West from the view of Susan Ward through her letters, which are actually those of Mary Hallock Foote, one of the finest illustrators of the 19th century. Read and read again.
Jennifer
I thought I was going to hate this book, and for the first few chapters I did. I had a hard time with the present-day sections of the book. Even right after I finished the book, I wasn't quite sure how much I liked it.

In the weeks after I read the book I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Really, I think that Stegner gives us the most accurate and thought-provoking portrayal of the modern woman that I have seen out of a male writer.

The main character in this book is...more
Stephen Gallup
Three or four years ago I read where somebody thought Angle of Repose was probably the greatest American novel of the 20th century. That bothered me, because I'd never heard of it. I bought a copy, got about 100 pages into it, and bogged down.

I'm proud to say I've finally read it all (parts of it several times). It is indeed a great novel, and more ambitious than some of the others one might think of as the best. But I'm giving it only four stars because of the length and the sustain...more
Lori
Lori rated it 5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for: anyone
Recommended to Lori by: Allegra Hakim
A poetic story with rich prose and thought provoking metaphors.....perfect for Book Club discussion. It's on my all time favorite book list. I was amazed at the author's attention to details with such accuracy and percision from the historical Western frontier life down to the very flowers in bloom. This book is a treasure.

The marriage between Oliver and Susan Ward was filled with adversity, love, disappointments, devotion, temptation, and tragedy. Both characters were morally ...more
Teresa
Such a complex (though readable) novel with so many themes that it's hard to know where to start. The wheelchair-bound narrator tells us this is a story of a marriage (that of his grandparents whom he knew until their deaths at advanced ages), but it's also the story of his wondering at his own (failed) marriage and why his wife left him when she did. Is he escaping into his grandmother's life to escape his own, or is he doing so to figure his own life out? The path to his insights is long (a...more
Rick
I just finished a wonderful short story by Alice Munro in the most recent New Yorker. And the first adjective that occurred to me about Angle of Repose was one it shared with the Munro story, patience. There is no hurry and no waste in either work. Lyman Ward, one of two main characters in Angle of Repose, a novel rich in characters—the other main character is Ward’s grandmother Susan Burling Ward—is in late middle-age with a failing body and a distressed life. His wife is gone. One of his legs ...more
Lucy
Lucy rated it 5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for: every single person who breathes
I loved this book even more the second time around. In my opinion, this is the perfect novel. I don't have the expertise to identify the exact narration technique, but to have the narrator, Lyman Ward, not only share his beloved grandparent's 100 year-old history from his 20th century perch, providing both redemptive hindsight and worrisome foreshadowing when needed, but also his own story as an amputee with a debilitating bone disease bitterly protecting his lonely independence, furnishing th...more
Gail
Gail rated it 4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for: anyone
This is a wonderful novel about a marriage in the late 1800S. The wife's career, and indeed her entire life is--surprise!--subordinated to her husband's. These two people couldn't be more unlike: she very "refined" from a cultured eastern background, a writer and an artist; the husband an extrememly talented but impractical engineer who has great difficulty expressing his feelings or innermost thoughts. Although I don't usually like books with a western setting, "Angle of Repose"...more
Katherine
At the time I read Angle of Repose, I was reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy, who has a profoundly different view of the West than Stegner does. So by contrast, Angle of Repose, the story of a disabled and dying historian chronicling his great-grandparents' marriage amidst ore mines and pioneer camps, seemed somehow hollow and false. It took a few months before I was able to appreciate it on its own merits.

It's cliche to say that the characters come alive, but I can't think of any othe...more
Casandria
I read this book for a book club and I will be forever grateful to the person who introduced it to me. This is also one of the top 3 books I have ever read.

Angle of Repose follows Lyman Ward's historical research into the lives of his great-grandparents. His great-grandmother had been an educated, genteel Eastern woman and his great-grandfather a rough engineer, who brings her out to build up the American West in the 1800's. The descriptions of the places they lived and what the...more
Emma
Emma rated it 2 of 5 stars
i give it two stars for the gentle, thorough, and consistently engaging prose, which drew me in despite my growing qualms about the book as i read. (although i should note that this praise doesn't hold for the final chapter, which felt like an incongruous cop-out). stegner explores the potentially fascinating intersections of several themes--manifest destiny, history, individualism, pride and gender roles, to name a few--but he does so with the painfully dated social conservatism of his narrator...more
Kirsten
Kirsten rated it 5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for: soulful humorists
Recommended to Kirsten by: very dear friends
This book. This book has altered the course of my reading tendencies. It pretends to be plainspoken but it is supremely eloquent. The plot description is deceptively talk-show-esque, but the story is bracing. I might even be so bold as to say it is the least pretentious work of literary fiction ever to have consumed my attention.

It's difficult not to sound like an over-zealous book jacket blurb when I try to explain what I liked most about Angle of Repose. It provides a subtle depic...more
Sande
Sande rated it 4 of 5 stars
This book was recommended to me by two friends, so although I considered putting it down a few times, I plodded along. Although the last chapter was bizarre, it was worth the 569 pages to experience Wallace Stegner’s writing. I enjoyed Lyman Ward as a character immensely. His cynical narrative was the highlight of the story. At times, I worried that Susan Burling Ward’s use of the Quaker “thee” was going to make me run screaming out of the library, but I managed to control myself. I wouldn'...more
Pat
Pat rated it 5 of 5 stars
Stegner was a giant of literature of the American west, and this was, I think, his masterpiece. A family homesteads, mines, farms as they move westward, all the while hiding their private dissappointments. Everyone seeks 'an angle of repose,' a place or space or frame of mind in which to finally settle, where the soul can rest. Rugged and beautiful.
Claire
I read this book in high school, so it is definitely past-due for a reread. However, it's stuck with me, and I still find myself thinking about it. At the end, I remember desperately turning the pages that were blank, contained a biography of the author, and advertized the new and exiting titles by the publisher, hoping for an extra chapter, an epilogue, or a promise of a sequel. I really never wanted it to end, and I still wish it hadn't. More than worthy of a read and a re-read, especially...more
Maura
Maura rated it 5 of 5 stars
A book about marriage and the people we love and keep as companions. The book takes place in the west in the mid- to late-1800s, centered around a woman following her husband from mining job to mining job while she tries to make a family. The story is told by her grandson, who in the 1970s, is writing her story. I enjoyed the storytelling and the time and place of this book, as well as the interweaving of the past and present. I'm still digesting Stegner's themes and what I think he's trying...more
Deborah Kovacs
Deborah Kovacs rated it 5 of 5 stars
Recommended to Deborah by: Sandy of course
Sandy told me this was her favorite book of all time. (And she probably had as many favorite books as she had best friends.) Why I love this book so much, and I think why she did, is because it gives a fascinating, up-close picture of the settling of the west, from the perspective of a talented artist and writer who marries a mining engineer in the late 19th century and spends her life moving from camp to camp, sending her impressions of her experiences back to the then-new Atlantic Monthly maga...more
Zeke
Zeke rated it 4 of 5 stars
Shelves: fiction, favorites, west
In a Salon article by Laura Miller article about recommending books, Nancy Pearl lists three books that have universal appeal: To Kill a Mockingbird, Lonesome Dove and this one, Angle of Repose. I decided to try it. Later, I found out that readers of the San Francisco Chronicle rated 100 "Best Western fiction" books in 1999; Angle of Repose came in first. Another one by Stegner came in 2nd in the nonfiction list.

I'm still mulling over this book. It was a difficult book for me and I'm ...more
Miranda
"This book was the January Read from the Book Lust Calendar and although I wasn't immediately taken in by the description, once I started the book I was totally engrossed. The story weaves back and forth between Lymon's life and his grandmothers life, and although there is almost 100 years between them, the transition is seemless. This could be classified as a historical novel and the glimpse of life in the western mining towns was fascinating, and many of the issues that arose between mini...more
Mike
Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars
An author I knew little about when I plucked this title off a bookstore shelf. Quite an impressive novel, made very true to life by his employing the texts of actual letters he borrowed from a family to use as a foundation for his story. Though somewhat controversial at the time, Stegner produced a Pulitzer prize-worthy original. Lyman Ward is a wheel-chair bound writer dealing with present-day meddling by, and dependency upon, family members. He uncovers letters written by his grandmother to a...more
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Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909—April 13, 1993) was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist. Some call him "The Dean of Western Writers."
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