The significance of Stegner’s chosen names also applies to the narrator, who is a central character. You might ask whether this is, then, just a melodramatic love triangle. Susan’s ingrained flaws and beauty are suggested by Burling, as in wool or wood burls Oliver is a Ward, that is, a guard who keeps Susan prisoner in their marriage Frank and Sargent combine as the marker of a candid, soldierly lover. Combined with Susan’s being a middle-class lady, this confines the lovers’ relations to mutually charmed frustration, significant eye contact, and two or three clinches that produce tormenting shame and guilt.

Dashing and polished as Oliver cannot be, Frank is also, however, a gentleman and a loyal admirer of Oliver. Until domestic cataclysm strikes in the final section of the book, the marriage is shadowed by Frank Sargent, Oliver’s deputy, whose “incurable disease” it is to love Susan. He repeatedly fails and is an embarrassment and disappointment to his wife. Oliver is a good and intelligent but unpolished and frustratingly silent man who eventually becomes a drinker. The novel is remarkable and poignant in its evocation of the West as it hurtles toward development and inclusion in the United States.Įarly on, the narrator realizes that his project is not what he thought it was he is not writing a biography of Susan, a successful writer and illustrator, but a history of her troubled marriage. She leaves New York’s literary society to join her husband Oliver Ward in the West, where he pursues a faltering career as a mining and irrigation engineer. She is a beautiful and talented Victorian gentlewoman artist.

The narrator is Lyman Ward, a divorced, wheelchair-bound retired professor working on a biography of his grandmother, Susan Burling. The combination makes Angle of Repose a compelling study of character, relations, and contrasting epochs in American life. This complexity creates space for extraordinary levels of nuance and doubt about the narrator's reliability. Yet, at the same time, without being obscure or difficult, the novel’s structure is necessarily complex. Its prose is pitch-perfect, old-fashioned, past tense, refreshingly lucid, and free of voguish artifices that deflect attention from the narrative to the author.

Wallace stegner's angle of repose