Angle of Repose

Beth is always questioning why I don't read anything written more recently than the age of trains... it is a little silly of me to keep reading stories about middle class girls struggling to elevate themselves through love into the upper class. Either the Becky Sharps who do this callously and suffer accoridingly, or the milk maids and governesses whose true loves find them, or the failures of dames like Moll Flanders. I took up reading 18th and 19th century English novels in 2004, on a whim, for the same reason I started to read philosophy at 17. Why read about literature when you can read it. Why settle for analysis when you can take straight from the source. Maybe my opinions of the things I read are less startling than some you may have gotten in college, but I tend to think that an honest opinion; Beth's "Moll Flanders was a whore!" is as clean as anything I'm likely to get from the preface written by some PhD making a name for himself. I quote RT Jones from the recent Wordsworth Edition (bought for a dinar and an half in a Supermarket in Bahrain) "... and in the account of the young Moll's seduction by the power of gold there is a nice contrast between two points of view presented simultaneously: that of the old Moll, who sees in retrospect how she could easily have got a higher price for her favours, and that of the remembered young Moll, for whom the money is valued mainly because it is a thrilling expression of the young man's passion." Surely anybody who read this also had the same thoughts, and laughed at what are very funny moments when the sinners biggest remorse is that she didn't sin well enough.
So tonight I finished Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Everyone can be proud, here's a man who died in recent memory, writing a novel set in 1970. I was shaking in the last chapter when he is being disrobed by an all too nubile young hippie coed and he is shamed. I was crying when I listened to him scold his wife and admit the traumatically cold facts of his families history. I took it on a recommendation from a local public radio program about 8 months ago, as one of the best books ever written. It's a wonderful book for me, a story of moving out west, dragging a lonely wife along to pursue a dream that will scorn you your whole life, and being cheated by people you are forced to work with to get what you need. There is trust, and distrust, and death, and a beautiful and familiar landscape. The cottage where the character is residing is just outside Nevada City. I went there once, to a church where the basement had no walls, and I opened a door to a dirt slope. It's far and near at the same time. Where can you go that doesn't have Subway and Motel 6? Nowhere that has an exit from the freeway. I am completely satisfied by it, and would thrust it into the hands of anyone I thought might read it to the end.
I read a lot, and I wouldn't normally expect anyone to do the same, dragging their heels through the garbage I choose for myself. I think I would buy anyone a copy of Angle of Repose who could genuinely be expected to profit from it. I hope I did.
So I've moved on, my bookmark is making its way now through Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. The use of allegorical names is one of my favorites. I learned about this struggling through Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and had it reenforced as a dramatic device through a composition class in 2002. Now I try and spot as many possible ways this is used, and its an incredibly common trick. I guess my last English teacher was right, the only advantage to being well read is getting all the inside jokes. When your so well read, you call those allusions.
So, maybe a seed will be planted, and grow into a tree, and I will pay someone to have chopped down that tree and stained it with ink, in a series of marks telling a story. Or maybe necessity will plant its own needs, and the terribly gravity of a body like Dickens will pull me in like a candle ensares a moth.