Angle Of Repose
Wallace Stegner
Read March-April 2009
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Public Library, White Bear Lake branch
Essay written Saturnday, May 2nd, 2009
When I finished reading the last few pages of this a few weeks ago and put the completed book on the coffee table I said to my wife: "I won't read another book that good this year." That stands.
I haven't had much luck with Pulitzer Prize winners. Some have been spectacular, like To Kill A Mockingbird and The Shipping News,
but most have been laborious.
Actually, ignore what I said in that last paragraph. (Not the part about To Kill A Mockingbird and The Shipping News being spectacular. Those books are spectacular. Ignore the part about most Pulitzer Prize winners being laborious, in my opinion.) I just look at the list and found that actually most of the winners that I've read have been just fine, or great. My impression of Pulitzer Prize winners has been tainted by a few books that I just didn't like at all. American Pastoral. The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love. Basically, that's it. House Made Of Dawn I didn't care for, but that has a lot to do with the fact that I had just gotten home from Kaua'i when I read it, and so my mind wasn't in it. I take responsibility.
Angle Of Repose was a marvelous book. Hardly do I ever read a 500+ page book and get sad when I get to the end, because I'm sorry to have to let it go. But that's what happened here. I should be glad it was as long as it was instead of only 300.
What made it so extraordinary? This is where these little essays of mine turn to suck. I don't know why I liked it so much. I can't articulate it, and that's enormously frustrating.
It just took me there, that's all. Rural mountainous California; Leadville, Colorado; Michoacán, Mexico; the wastes of southern Idaho. I was there. And the characters -- I knew them. It was real.
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