This study of the past enlightens us on the struggles and joys of marriage. Lyman struggles to understand marriage, his own and his grandparents’, and in this process, tries to enlighten Shelly about her own relationship. He tells his son, Rodman, “What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them” (211). As Lyman focuses his writing, he discovers that he is writing about a marriage. Lyman, a retired historian, writes a history of his grandparents’ lives after his wife leaves him for his surgeon during his struggle with a debilitating illness. Wallace Stegner’s (1909-1993) masterpiece Angle of Repose (1971 Pulitzer 1972) explores the marriage relationships of Susan and Oliver Ward and Lyman and Ellen Ward and the free-love relationship of Shelly Rasmussen and Larry.
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