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“to call it quits.” But he is a survivor, and as strange as it may seem, he is saved by his training as a research scholar, by his thirst for knowledge. His crisis leads him to the need to find a direction for his shattered life. That direction is provided by finding out about and trying to understand his grandparents, the events that shaped them and the conflict between them; and his curiosity as it pushes ever forward becomes ours. It becomes the medium of suspense, holding us throughout. “What really interests me,” Lyman tells us, “is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reach the angle of repose where I knew them. That is where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.”

Another aspect of Lyman that leads us to empathize with him and holds us to his track of discovery is his vivid imagination. He is not only a historian; he is, in effect, a novelist, bringing his characters and their interactions to life. Joseph Conrad was by Stegner’s testimony a favorite author, one that he learned much from, and it was Conrad who said,

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.

Through the talent of Wallace Stegner, Lyman Ward has the power to make us see. And if there is any one secret to the success of this novel, this is it.

A major pattern of conflict within Lyman and hence the novel can be categorized under the past versus the present, more specifically at times, the old West versus the new. As Lyman thinks about his own situation, implicitly comparing it to that of his grandparents, we wonder how, facing so many obstacles to happiness, they are going to make it through life. As Stegner has put it, “Since [Lyman’s] own marriage has collapsed he’s interested in this one that didn’t, even though it had all the provocations that his had to fall apart.” But we also have a third pair, the contemporary marriage of the two flower children, Shelly and Larry Rasmussen. Altogether, three different kinds of marriage: each in a different time frame, running from the past to the present. “ ‘Progressive decline,’ I would call it,” the author has stated.

Certainly, as Lyman tells us in the novel, this is a book about marriage, and just as certainly it reflects Stegner’s own values in that regard. We might note that he was happily married to the same woman for nearly sixty years. But one might just as well say that this is a book about forgiveness, also reflecting the author’s values. While the marriage of Oliver and Susan remains intact, Oliver apparently never totally forgives his wife, doing so only insofar as he stays with her. Lyman wonders if he can even go that far in his own life and take back his wayward wife, Ellen.

One of the strengths of the novel is the complexity of its characters, the many-sidedness that convinces us of their reality. These characterizations, along with the quoted letters and Stegner’s vivid descriptions, provide a depth of realism seldom found in fiction. It is like turning from the flatness of regular TV to the multidimensional picture of HDTV. After reading and rereading this novel, it is hard not to lapse into the mistake of calling the central character Mary—which may be a point in favor of the Foote family’s objections. Despite the negatives attached to the two major characters, we learn to care about them and follow with concern their progress through the novel. Like our feelings about Lyman, our connection to Susan grows despite a number of flaws—her snobbery, in particular, and her treatment of her husband. But our connection grows as we come to understand her, and it is Stegner’s triumph that we do come to an understanding of this woman, this genteel Victorian lady, so aloof, who would seem on first glance to be so foreign to contemporary taste.

But in so many ways she really is contemporary. Living in an age and a stratum of society in which a woman could