A controversial novel of the American frontier
ANGLE OF REPOSE WALLACE STEGNER 596pp. Penguin Modern Classics. Paperback, £12.99.
TO BEGIN with the assertion that Angle of Repose is a great novel of the American frontier is to go looking for trouble. Wallace Stegner’s story, set largely on the last unsettled territories of the West, was first published in 1971. It moves forwards by way of two parallel narratives, one taking place around the time of the novel’s composition, the other a century earlier – not unlike the plan John Fowles devised for The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1969.
Both halves are captivating, though in different ways. The modern tale is told in the first person by Lyman Ward, a grumpy, retired professor of history who is investigating the lives of his pioneering grandparents. He relates their adventures while reflecting on the best way to put them into book form. They feature a young nineteenth-century illustrator and writer, Susan Burling, and her husband, Oliver Ward, a mining engineer. Susan has emerged from the refined society of Milton, New York, the sort of milieu that would fit comfortably into an early novel by Henry James (who features in drawing-room conversation). Oliver is at first glance not her type: a man who carries a “great wooden-handled revolver” to one of their courting assignations in the presence of Susan’s parents, laying it on the dresser, “which had never seen anything rougher than a Quaker bonnet or a book of poems in limp leather”. He is no roughneck, but no aesthete either. That quality is found in Susan’s former hope, Thomas Hudson, soon to be the editor of Scribner’s Magazine and after that The Century. And just as soon to be the husband of Susan’s best friend, Augusta. “Poems dropped from him as blossoms blew off the apple trees in a spring breeze”, Lyman writes. Oliver’s natural territory, by contrast, is the camp, the mine, the tunnel, the bridge where there was no bridge, and, when horizons darken, the saloon bar.
To Augusta’s horror, Susan commits herself to following Oliver wherever his boomtime work will lead. The fundamental task is to turn the plains less plain, to force the ubiquitous dust to lie down, and to introduce the element that makes civilized what has seemed irredeemably primitive: water. They are married in February 1876 and five months later arrive at the cottage in Grass Valley, California that Oliver has previously prepared on a reconnaissance expedition. He hangs his bowie knife and sixshooter on the wall and turns to Susan. “The homey touch.” Neighbouring one-horse towns have names like Deadwood and Tombstone. Susan is able to let go of her need for East Coast comforts, but not her snobbery. She hates them all and has no wish to mingle with their deniz
