First Lines of Wallace Stegner's "Angle of Repose"

 "Now I believe they will leave me alone. Obviously Rodman came up hoping to find evidence of my incompetence--though how an incompetent could have got this place renovated, moved his library up, and got himself transported to it without arousing the suspicion of his watchful children, ought to be a hard one for Rodman to answer. I take some pride in the way I managed all that. And he went away this afternoon without a scrap of what he would call data."

- Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

My second attempt at this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, thanks to Sam buying me a copy. This time, the beauty of Stegner's message of the struggle to grow and survive sunk in; I don't think I was mature enough to hear it the first time.  In addition, his prose is just beautiful. The chapters are all well structured, the dialogue is on point, and I enjoyed reading the whole thing. The themes were moving as well; hard work does not always pay off in happiness or prosperity, and it's this dramatization in the light of the myths of American exceptionalism and moving West to build yourself up that provides a lot of the novel's power.

Bonus Link: a bio of Stegner from LGM. I'm not as harsh on the final chapter of this novel as Loomis, but it certainly was discordant from the rest of the novel - and the reactionary politics are jarring. It's an odd decision but the entire novel is still worth reading.