Failed Marriages in Angle of Repose

In Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose, the marriages of three different generations fail. The marriage of the Western pioneer geologist and his writer-illustrator wife fail because, if the wife contributes both the children and the income and the husband doesn’t provide, then what is his role? The husband and the wife are both good people but they run into the unanswerable question of what makes a husband if he can’t provide, organize, protect, and shelter.

The youngest generation of the early 1970s fails for a diametrically opposite reason. Here, it’s the women who can’t find a role for themselves. Once a woman contributes nothing womanly—no children, no comfort, no gentleness—what happens? The young woman in the novel gets passed around sexually by her husband like a bothersome receptacle with no purpose. She consents because she can’t find any other role for herself.

The generation in the middle is that of the narrator. His relationship fails, too, but since he’s part of his own story, he can’t understand why. It’s only by the end of the novel that the narrator and the readers start figuring it out.