Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner
Buy on AmazonWallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.
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"I’m just astounded by the scope and magnitude of the novel, and the landscape described. It’s the story of an ailing professor near the end of his life. He’s in a wheelchair and he’s becoming a bitter man. He’s writing his family history, and he goes back generations to the movement west. Meanwhile there is this fore-story going on, which is this great generational battle between himself, an older white male gentleman, and this young, strong-headed, hippy caregiver. It’s just amazing. It’s one of the 20 best American novels ever written. Yes, he’s in north-central California. A lot of it takes place further east of the Sierra Nevada. His home is where they finally settled, but the book moves west. It’s been a while since I’ve read some of these books. I chose them because they still cast a shadow. Totally. It was part of a larger movement culturally that was going on in America at that time. You had the revisionist Westerns in cinema too. A lot of people in the 1960s and 70s were looking at the traditional myths and questioning them. Now, the literary world is so rife with the Southern Gothics, the Cormac McCarthys and the like, I almost feel that to subvert it now you have to go back in the other direction."
The American West · fivebooks.com