Stegner's "Angel of Repose" Brilliant from Every Angle

The Pulitzer Prize & Nat'l Book Award winning author Wallace Stegner is called the Dean of Western Writers.  ANGLE OF REPOSE tells the story of Susan Ward, an artist/writer in the late 19th C.  Born & raised in gentility in the east whose marriage to Oliver Ward, a mining engineer, takes her to the rough frontier of the unsettled west.  Her life's story is being chronicled by her grandson, Lyman Ward, a writer/historian mainly through the large body of letters Susan wrote to her beloved friend Augusta, and her husband Thomas.  Her candid, detail letters portray the hardships & isolation on the western frontier.  There is great adventure & majesty captured in Susan's letters & illustrations.  She also depicts life's adversities & the dissolution of faith & love in her marriage.   Lyman is emeshed in his grandmother's life at a time when his own marriage has unraveled after many years.  There are many prominent themes in this panoramic novel:  western expansion & adventure, social class, proprieties and unconventional behaviors, generational divides.  All these threads undergird the fulcrum of the novel.  Stegner's interest lies with how couples' relationships come to rest.  Lyman questions his grandparents' marriage, "How two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose."  ANGLE OF REPOSE, from every slant, is storytelling at its most gratifying and fulfilling.