Walace Stegner
I had tried to read this a year ago and got bogged down in the first half chapter. It is (in my memory) an endless description of a leaf on a tree as viewed from a cottage porch. In fact it is nothing like this, but... This time I persevered and found a story following two couples and their ongoing relationship over the course of several decades starting in the 1920's. Both the men are english professors who worked together for a few years at a midwestern university (one clearly talented, the other interested in poetry which doesn't get you promoted or famous), one woman is a control freak, and the other a peacemaker. Money, politics, family, career, travel, health, life purpose, and anything else you can think of meanders through the relationship of these two couples. Stegner is a master of painting a picture of life and is able to create characters that are sufficiently complex that I was able to identify at different times with each of them (while rolling my eyes at those same characters at other times). It is a story of friendship and true community as not once is there the expression of "Let's just not see them anymore". For me, I was only able to get through this because I was listening to it, the words continued to move (I was not able to put the book down) as the car drove down the road. And the end result was an appreciation of a well written story.
Read
No comments:
Post a Comment