Angle of Repose in Never too Late to Read Classics

May 05, 2015 Sara rated it it was amazing

Shelves: american-classics, pulitzer-prize-winners, favorites

Staggering. Riveting. Perceptive. Penetrating. Wallace Stegner knows how to get inside a marriage and pull at it and prod at it, until it settles down into what it cannot help becoming and finds its angle of repose. This story is the saddest kind of story possible, because it is about the loss of opportunity, the loss of happiness, and the loss of what might have been. It wrenches and tears and tatters the reader. I was gasping from the injustice, the cross-purposes, the lack of communication an Staggering. Riveting. Perceptive. Penetrating. Wallace Stegner knows how to get inside a marriage and pull at it and prod at it, until it settles down into what it cannot help becoming and finds its angle of repose. This story is the saddest kind of story possible, because it is about the loss of opportunity, the loss of happiness, and the loss of what might have been. It wrenches and tears and tatters the reader. I was gasping from the injustice, the cross-purposes, the lack of communication and the sorrow of characters wanting the wrong things.

Stegner’s prose is poetry. His descriptions are revealing in a way that cuts to the heart of both his external and his internal subject matter. He grabbed me by the throat early on and I was hooked in almost the first paragraph:

I believe in time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.

As he plumbs the life of his grandparents, Lyman Ward plumbs the depths of what it is to live connected and disconnected from those around us. What it is to love a life, a friend, a man or woman, a place, a child and an idea; and what it is to betray the trust of others or your own needs and desires. This book is packed with combustible materials, that spark and hiss and finally fly apart in a deafening explosion of emotional release.

Each of the main characters is fleshy and real. Lyman, who might initially seem pitiable in his handicapped condition, proves to be strong and intelligent. Susan and Oliver are, if anything, too strong and independent for their own good. They are the sterner stuff that the West was forged from, but they maintain their sensibilities and weaknesses--the flaws that make them all too human.

I have been married for 35 years to a man I both love and respect. At times it has been amazingly easy to be married, at times it has been equally difficult, and there have been moments of “what if” and “I might have” for both of us. It is unrealistic to think that any one person can or should live his life in a measured sync with you. Marriage is work, with compromise and obstacles, and if you throw in the difficulties of life in the late 1800s and settling the West, understandably challenging. If you have ever packed up and left your home for parts unknown (and I have), you can recognize how well Stegner understands the pain of lost family, lost worlds and lost dreams.

When reviewing a book like this one, I have almost uncontrollable desires to “talk” about it. I want to delve into the specifics, reflect on all the lessons to be learned, revel and roll in the astute revelations that the author has shared. At the same time, I want to allow others to read and enjoy it as I have without a single spoiler to be had anywhere. So, I will not say anything more about what this book is “about”, except to say it is about us, whomever we are, because it is about what it is to be human and vulnerable and to succeed and to fail and to endure.

I hope everyone reads it and enjoys it as I have. I am so glad to have come to Wallace Stegner at last and feel a bit put out that he has been waiting for me for over forty years. Thank you, Mr. Stegner for your gift and forgive me for being so late in accepting it.

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