Angle of Repose

Narrator Mark Bramhall adroitly manipulates an array of voices in this 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner. Wheelchair-bound Lyman Ward scours the letters, novels, and illustrations of his grandmother, genteel Susan Burling Ward, to re-create her life with her pioneer husband, Oliver Ward, in the "crude" American West of the 1880s. Bramhall moves effortlessly between Lyman's own troubled life--he incessantly interrupts his characters to ramble about his failed marriage--and his grandmother's poignant writings. Even with this production's hefty length, Bramhall's character interpretations, along with the author's rich, poetic descriptions of the Western frontier, remain fully engaging. K.P. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

February 22, 2010
It is at first disconcerting that the narrator sounds half the age of the author's narrator: Lyman Ward is an elderly, severely crippled historian at odds with his wife and children over his ability to live alone and write. But Mark Bramhall's comparative youth is soon forgotten as he leads us into the saga of intertwined generations. His pacing, his characterizations, and his convincing emotional repertoire embed us in this 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner that is in no way dated. Stegner's heroine is Ward's grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, a 19th-century writer and artist living in the rough mining towns of the West with her idealistic engineer husband. Bramhall's Susan is sometimes too girlish, but this, too, is a small matter; overall, he offers us a fine reading of a superb book. A Penguin Classics paperback.