Wallace Stegner's 1970 novel "Angle of Repose" tells a story within a story.

After losing his leg, suffering through a debilitating disease, and divorcing his wife, retired history professor Lyman Ward decides to research and write about the life of his grandmother - nineteenth-century author Susan Burling Ward. Mrs. Ward suffered through a difficult marriage and financial issues as she and her husband moved across the frontiers of the western United States and Mexico.

Susan and her husband Oliver are both good people, but Oliver trusts too much, and others take advantage of him. This trait repeatedly leads to financial failures, which strains the couple's relationship.

Stegner alternates between the present-day troubles of author/narrator Lyman and the struggles of the female protagonist about whom he writes. The result is two engaging stories of people trying to maintain control of their lives. Each finds temporary escape in their writing, but it is not enough.

Lyman learns about himself by studying his grandmother.

Stegner based the character of Susan Ward on the real-life Mary Hallock Foote. He included many of Foote's letters in the book, attributing them to Susan.

The title refers to the angle at which dirt and stones settle when they fall down a slope. This may describe the canals on which the engineer Oliver worked. Stegner repeats the phrase multiple times in the book and uses this as a metaphor for the couple's relationship:

"What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them."

Although the story lacks action, it makes up for it with the development of the characters and the parallels between grandmother and grandson nearly a century apart.