Angle of Repose: "Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. (...) Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.”

A few good quotes from a book that could have easily given me more substance, a story to match the quotes' virtuosity: 

"What begins as safety-valve binges and gestures toward social ease ends as habit. I have no reason to be surprised if I have by now picked up a physiological craving that has nothing to do with pain, boredom, reticence, tension, lack of friends, or anything else." 474

“Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything- though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning.” 513

“You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.” 519 

“As for gentleness and love, I think they’re harder to come by than this sheet suggests. I think they can become as coercive a conformity as anything Mr. Hershey or Mr. Hoover ever thought up.” 519 

“Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them (...) Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.” 519

Auteur's library

Wallace Stegner

Angle of Repose

1971

This is the kind of book you'd feel a little proud to claim you love. It has everything a reader hopes for: a large-scale historical subject, themes of life, dramatic characters devoid of pathos, a good "plume", strong quotation material, references to famous authors,... and a Pulitzer Prize.
But to me, all of this was not enough.
It's as if readers and author were contemplating the same painting and seeing very different pictures. You can't help developing a strong resistance to the main character, Susan Ward. The narrator spends so much time including negative turns of luck in her life that he forgets to make her likeable; her best traits are too tamed by the constant return to her flaws. I'm not even sure he still likes her by the end of the book_ perhaps that was Stegner's point. Yet, we are sold that character time and again, and the more we are, the less we buy her. She's snob, elitist, uninteresting, incapable of changing and learning (contrarily to what the narrator claims), incapable of mesuring her efforts to the mesure of her vain ambitions, and constantly nagging her husband for not doing so. How to appreciate her?
Easier to like the 19th-century Agnes and Oliver, and the credibly naïve and silly Shelly, who, ironically, makes the 1970s bits the only moments really worth it.
Past the middle of the book, I started to understand nothing more was ever going to come out of this. That was the book's worst weakness: its incapacity to bring out the potential it constantly claimed to have. As the two stories set a century apart slowly went on, their dramatic peaks came too late to feel dramatic. The wife bits at the end felt like a hair in the soup. You sense these were parts of what the writer was driving at all along, but it's too late now to get to it, you're long past that; too many hundreds of pages have passed to make them actually matter.
Yes, at times, the writing is superb; but, let's face it: the book is boring.

Tags: "saga" familiale, fate, 19th-century hopes and restraints, wild dusty west, human vs. social quest, marriage of souls vs. marital success, vague mention of lesbian love thrown like a bone at the reader, the know-it-all not-so-young white man, slight, easy, unsatisfactory questions of gender, the weight of family, difficult wanderings, critique of hippie society, east vs. west or on being worldly in a wild world