"I've read quite a few of Wallace Stegner's books, and I've always found him kind of a painful fiction writer. His style is awkward, and you can hear the struggling writer in there. He's a writing teacher - he was a writing teacher - and a very good one, according to what I've read. His nonfiction work is so rapid-fire and concise that I thought, well, he should be a good fiction writer; but in my opinion, he wasn't. So I decided to read some of the fiction.
Angle of Repose is a complicated story, but essentially it's a man looking back at his ancestors' lifes to kind of put his own life into perspective. So he dictates some sort of a memoir of his own life and also an examination of I think it's his grandmother's life; and he doesn't understand his own son and thinks his own son doesn't understand him and that people his age - his son's age - don't have any idea what life is really about.
There are a lot of things I liked about this book. I liked the way Stegner drew the characters because he's very sympathetic without having to say very much. This book ends up in Grass Valley, California, which is not far from where I live, and there's a big segment of the story that took place in Almaden Valley, in the San Jose area, also near where I live; and I loved seeing somebody from a way-distant time period roaming around in the areas that I know. I found it really hard to follow a lot of the time. He was experimenting with a time shift, trying to figure out how to tell a story from the 1840's in the 1970's, and some of the techniques he used left me feeling really disconnected. I'd give it a three."
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